Data.gov is down due to a lapse in government funding

[lettergram]

There was a construction company working on the main road in town (Illinois). The last state shutdown had them stop working... even though the road was 100% federally funded AND they were paid upfront for 3 months of work.

I suspect this was done to raise light to the situation (or they wanted time off). Similarly, I suspect running this website is mostly automated and likely being shut down to raise awareness

[ethbro]

High traffic, high risk, high SLA websites typically don't run without support teams and 24/7 pager service.

Just because it can run, for any sort of dynamic site, it'd be stupid and dangerous to keep it exposed to the internet without active monitoring.

Can != Should

[eddietejeda]

I work at 18F and can assure you that if data.gov was brought down, there is a good reason. I don't know the specifics for their team, but there are many factors that would warrant bringing down a site. For example: monthly billing, contract renewals, legal, security and compliance requirements, etc. This is not a side project that you can step away from and assume everything is okay because it's "on the cloud." It doesn't take much imagination to think of why: Let's say the site gets hacked, who would restore it? Would it remain hacked for weeks? months? How about contracts? Do we expect legal dept to just ignore expired contracts?

It doesn't work that way.

The thing about government is that there isn't much wiggle room to improvise on those kinds of issues. You are either following the law or you are not.

Fortunately, the product I lead has not yet been affected, but the possibility of having to bring down sites looms.

[thefounder]

Maybe they need some stuff approved...surely they could take advantage of the shutdown if the contract allows it but usually government contracts, (especially the construction projects)need all kind of permissions/approvals.

[andy_ppp]

How do you know the servers aren't paid for monthly and would have been switched off in an uncontrolled way without this?

[tehlike]

Or most likely it needed government supervision which didnt have funding.

[robmiller]

You'd think TSA would be able to pay their employees at $5.60 per head through their lines. They state that they raked in $4B in 2018 in 911 Security Fees[0]. I'm sure there's entanglement between government departments (payroll elsewhere?) that complicates this, but they do state the fees are paid to TSA, and perhaps not the Treasury.

Has anyone bought an airline ticket since the shutdown? Perhaps they're not charging the fee, since they are unable to provide security or its theatre during this time.

[0] https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/security-fees

[tsumnia]

Just bought a ticket yesterday - no, it's still there.

[philipashlock]

For examples of the risk of unmaintained government websites, just see https://www.zdnet.com/article/government-shutdown-tls-certif...

Also note that Data.gov was participating in a Bug Bounty program through HackerOne which means it was actively encouraging people to find vulnerabilities but is no longer able to respond to them - https://hackerone.com/tts

Here's the official statement:

“As data.gov is not a static site, it requires staff monitoring and maintenance to be online,” a GSA spokesperson told FedScoop in a statement. “Because personnel that monitor and maintain the site are currently furloughed, data.gov redirects to usa.gov. The decision to take data.gov offline is consistent with previous funding lapse practices.”

Via https://www.fedscoop.com/data-gov-open-data-offline-shutdown...

[ckdarby]

Today I learned that the government needs to start operating a bit more like a corporation in the sense of removing paper pushers.

Automation, some of the comments are linking to TLS renewals. It is 2019, how is there still an individual manually doing this kind of work?

[pwg]

You'd be amazed.

One example: Deployment of updated software to 15+ VM's by the method of:

1) Development team creates lengthy MSWord document describing steps, including Bash command lines to perform each step interspersed among narrative paragraphs;

2) Operations team performs deployment by copy-pasting the Bash command lines from MSWord doc. into terminals (repeat copy-paste for the 15+ VM's that are being updated).

[Spacemolte]

My guess is like other people are saying, awareness, and having a short expire time on certificates should also make it less usable if someone gets access to the certificate by them having less time to use it. Same reason why passwords should be rotated often.

[tsumnia]

> Today I learned that the government needs to start operating a bit more like a corporation in the sense of removing paper pushers.

Not to stir the political pot, but this is one of the reasons my father says he voted Trump - an "outsider from corporate lands" would cut the fat of government and start running it like a company. The government is slow because OF the paper pushers, and the often used cliche "you have to really do a bad job to get fired as a government worker".

[thedudeabides5]

I mean, it's kinda cool that they still put the data out there.

As a JSON wrapped in a tar file, it's not exactly accessible to all, but at least it's out there.

https://filestore.data.gov/gsa/catalog/jsonl/dataset.jsonl.g...

[sschueller]

So now would be a good time to use your 0 days as there is no one around to patch the systems...

[StavrosK]

Even your 2-days are good.

[yosefzeev]

I wonder what the expenses are of the site such that the shutdown warranted shuttering the site?

[sbov]

There might be expenses, but I would also be hesitant to let a site run without a human being able to monitor it, respond to any alerts, apply security patches, etc.

[tgtweak]

Kind of pisses me off that the energy star site is offline too. Was shopping for some new windows (all the efficiencies are posted there for certified vendors and models) and every link there lands on a "sorry we're closed during the shutdown" message.

[chabes]

Did you try archive.org?

[ben_jones]

The irony that someone had to take the time to prepare that message instead of, I don't know, doing the bare minimum to keep the site up during the shutdown.

[vpmpaul]

If you can't see this is 100% politically motivated I have little faith in the HN community anymore.

[tlogan]

I do not know why people think this is some "conspiracy" or "politically" motivated. One my customers is also .gov. So the invoice from 1st of Jan 2019 was not paid. Should I cancel their service? And nobody even answers on our emails (saying gov shutdown bla bla).

The shutdown is politically motivated. The fact that certain government operations do not work is the result of the shutdown.

[geofft]

Oh, it's absolutely politically motivated. But so is everything else on HN. Is open source good? Should venture capitalism be a viable career? How should startups be funded? Is technology making the world a better place? Is China trying to hack us all (and who is "us")? How much should programmers be paid, and how do you even formulate the answer to such a question? Is it bad for cell phone companies to sell customer location data? What about net neutrality? Does it matter whether SpaceX is more successful than NASA?

[rukittenme]

So much of this shutdown fight is just ego. We've now lost more money due to the shutdown than would have been saved by depriving Trump his wall. Just give him the money and be done with it. Regardless of its effectiveness just pitch it as a federal jobs program... Just. End. It.

[BEEdwards]

That's the problem, the amount he's asking for will barely start a wall, a wall is a dumb idea any, and if you cave once where does it end?

[chabes]

If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for some milk

[ramphastidae]

History has shown that appeasement is generally a totally ineffective way to deal with aggressors.

[MereInterest]

First, we haven't. We have hit the point where the amount in the current budget request exceeds the economic damage. The estimated total cost of the wall would be somewhere between $15 billion and $70 billion, depending on who you ask[1].

Second, it still doesn't matter. Giving in to Trump on this matter would only show him that he can expand his racist policies again and again by threatening to shut down the government again. "Once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane."

[1] https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/apr/28...

[pytyper2]

This is what I would hope the democrats were capable of performing, a basic cost benefit analysis.