Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

Obamacare, Day 7. Any doctors or hospitals had to call Washington DC for instructions on a course of treatment yet?
 
Checkmite said:
Obamacare, Day 7. Any doctors or hospitals had to call Washington DC for instructions on a course of treatment yet?
Click to expand...

No. All the nurses were fired, all the doctors quit, and all the hospitals closed.
 
It is a freaking slow website. Reminds me of the myspace days when people would make their backgrounds a collage of photos. Those peoples pages would take for ever to load.
 
Blue Mountain said:
An explanation for the password length restriction is they're storing the passwords in plain text in the database. That is a plateful of wrong served up with a side order of wrong. The proper way to do it is to hash the passwords with a strong hashing algorithm (e.g. SHA-128) and a long salt, and store the hash and the salt in the database.
Click to expand...

A gaming video card can try millions to billions of hashes per second, so even just hashing it once isn't nearly enough to protect the passwords if the database gets stolen and are dictionary attacked or brute forced. The recent LinkedIn compromise had the passwords SHA-1 hashed (though not salted, but that just means that you get some for free).

An even better strategy is to use an algorithm that is more expensive resource wise. Use SHA-2 or something but do it many thousands of times so that it takes half a second to run. Half a second means nothing to a user, but if that means bringing down the guess rate of a hacker from billions per second to hundreds per second, then they're back to having to run for thousands of years to crack a password.

There are even algorithms that can scale up as computers get faster. Bcrypt, Scrypt, and PBKDF2 are the common ones I know of.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Yup, and as feedback from various code-monkeys rolls in, I have no doubt that the system will be improved. In fact, this weekend I peeked in on healthcare.gov, and I saw that they were doing maintenance. Translation: they are fixing/upgrading the system already.
Click to expand...
Still not working for me.
 
Biscuit said:
Me either. My impatience is growing but I am sure they will sort it out.

The website is just a vehicle for information and not the service we will be buying.
Click to expand...

As a software professional for 30 years, here's a dirty little secret: Most software sucks. Software done for the government is often especially bad because they either hire the wrong people, over and over, or they do it in-house with nowhere near the resources required to do it correctly.
 
ravdin said:
Oddly enough, sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Google regularly handle crushing loads. I have yet to hear one of those sites going down and then blaming user traffic.
Click to expand...
Ever tried playing an online videogame the first week of launch?
 
ravdin said:
No, but it's not particularly relevant. There is a huge difference between a website and an online video game.
Click to expand...

Yes, online video games usually have a lot more money and resources behind them than a governmental website.
 
Spindrift said:
Yes, online video games usually have a lot more money and resources behind them than a governmental website.
Click to expand...
They're also far more complex. This is a simple registration procedure that is failing.
 
For anyone dealing with delay/glitch issues, here's a helpful article:

http://news.yahoo.com/health-law-glitches-fatal-fleeting-190807859--politics.html
... Technology experts say the problems are probably due to a combination of factors: unexpectedly high demand, as well as possible software flaws and shortcomings in design. Sometimes a high volume of users can expose software problems that went undetected in testing, they said. ...

... Problems caused by website overload should ease as more equipment is added. Software and design flaws are trickier to fix, meaning more overnight repairs. ...

... Now a health policy expert with the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, McClellan says the message for consumers is, "take a deep breath. If you are interested in this program, you do not need to make a decision this week, or even this month. You should make a decision by November. ...
Click to expand...

Keep calm and carry on.
 
Last edited:
WildCat said:
They're also far more complex. This is a simple registration procedure that is failing.
Click to expand...

You don't think that sort of thing can break with popular video games too? Websites break from too much traffic too. I remember an online game that had a webpage that reports server status; the servers were all full but it was hard to tell because the page was reporting that it was full.
 
Last edited:
Spindrift said:
As a software professional for 30 years, here's a dirty little secret: Most software sucks. Software done for the government is often especially bad because they either hire the wrong people, over and over, or they do it in-house with nowhere near the resources required to do it correctly.
Click to expand...

Low bid. Contracts over a certain amount are required to go to bid, and generally it is the lowest bidder that gets the deal, with certain exceptions. If the Contracting Officer doing the choosing is not familiar with the needs of the contract, this can cause issues.
 
WildCat said:
They're also far more complex. This is a simple registration procedure that is failing.
Click to expand...
Can you explain the logical and physical data flow of this specific registration process and what leads you to decide the registration should be faster?

Please be specific, site your sources along with and available data.

Please note, your gut doesn't qualify as any of those.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom