Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Nothing to do with SSL, but a fair amount of US government websites are hard down, on purpose, due to the funding dilemma.

Like: https://www.data.gov

"Due to a lapse in government funding all Data.gov websites will be unavailable until further notice."

Which is pretty odd, because putting up these blocker pages probably costs more than just letting the sites run unattended.

View on HN

Government departments are legally required to budget for the possibility of a shutdown, which means they have to keep the money around that they will use to shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act

Yes, but this coupled with the fact they shut down things that don't otherwise really require a human to actively working proves that it's all just a political ploy.

> .. proves that it's all just a political ploy.

Security maintenance, keeping databases up, monitoring the various systems, risk of DDoS, answering to users' inquires, bandwidth... - it requires real money to keep any production site live.

Given that these folks are basically working without pay, I don't blame them for wanting to put a cover page saying "Sorry, we're down", and call it a day.

Many are not legally allowed to work for free or be ask people to work (I forget which). The range of people allowed to work (even for free) is pretty limited to dealing with loss of life or property.

Some bits no doubt require some human intervention, and if it wasn't updated, would cause confusion.

The census site seems to be a decent middle ground. Banner at the top says "NOTICE: Due to a lapse in federal funding portions of this website are not being updated." Still functional, but if something's not updated, you know why.

I don’t dispute that shutdowns are political ploys, but I don’t think that the actual implementations of shutting down are necessarily part of that ploy. Whether a human is required to run something is not the relevant factor. What’s relevant is the cost.

Bandwidth costs money. It's likely technically cheaper to serve a 404 than to serve the data. Besides that, it's not what costs less, it's what LOOKS like it costs less.

If saving money is the game, it's cheaper still to turn off the servers.

Well, bandwidth isn't free... Replacing a larger site for large data downloads with a simple 404 will certainly bring down costs.

Web sites are not maintenance free nor cost free. Sudden traffic spikes, hardware failures or new vulnerabilities can easily make web sites down. It need manual human intervention to restore. If that human intervention is not possible due to the law, It's best to just shutdown.

Maybe the worry is letting them run unattended when no one is allowed to do maintenance/security work in the event of a problem?

I guess, but it's likely the seldom used blocker page code has security and/or maintenance issues too.

Serving a static HTML page has security or maintenance issues? This is reaching IMO, short of the web server having a vuln, this shouldn't take much to create/maintain.

I have seen many real world bad "maintenance mode" implementations. Including things like "oops, we are now serving up scripts/configuration/etc as plain text".

Also in the above thread, were a few government workers. One explained it was policy to powerdown all servers, except the one hosting that error page, though they weren't aware of the reason for such a policy.

It's not just salaries, though, they technically have no budget. So there's no money to run the servers.

The blocker page is served from S3, which isn't free :)

Maybe they all put their loose change in a pot. Should last for a year or so!

isn't there a free micro instance option? or it was only free for a year?

micro (750 hours/mo) is part of the first 12 months free.

Maybe. I know nothing about the offerings of these sites but they may be replacing interactive sites where you can access services with a static page.

The page seems to be coming from S3, I see "Server: AmazonS3" in the headers, and some other typical Amazon headers. Also has Google Analytics, which is interesting for a Government website.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com