US Weather Service Internet Systems Are Crumbling
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I gave up even trying to get a response when their entire @noaa.gov email system went down due to the solar winds hack and them proxying all their mail through fireeye.gov. This caused all spf checks to fail for any mail coming from anywhere except within google's email empire.
Being forced into the cloud is what killed NOAA. They could've upgraded from their 2005 setup to something a bit more modern but instead they migrated to the cloud and it ruined everything.
Here's an oldie but a goodie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Dutie...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8
* https://time.com/5699545/john-oliver-weather-last-week-tonig...
* https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/oct/14/john-oliver-...
No.
You can and should ask as 1) it is at the basis of check and balances 2) it is not an connection that can not be severed if needed.
If you are not willing to look at the dynamic of the relationship, you may help a country commit tyranny: if your country is not willing to help you because of your race / religion / anything else, maybe you should do nothing in return except get the fuck out and grab a bag of popcorn while watching the country go sour.
I say that as I love China, but I understand and support my Gay friends who have decided to never return.
The American government - like, I suspect, the Chinese government - has a vested interest in trying to paint itself as "the country" and thus demand said country's people to serve that government unconditionally, but that couldn't be further from the truth; governments come and go (as they have here in what we now call the US, and as they have in China) but the the people - themselves being the country - remain.
That is: countries do not commit tyranny. Their governments do. And when those governments commit tyranny, or otherwise fail to serve the people, it is the right and duty of the country - i.e. the people - to bring that government to heel, or else establish a new government obedient to the will of the people (or, better yet, learn to govern themselves instead of insisting on some government to do so). Driving out the people of a country in order to appease the wishes of some government is arguably the worst-case scenario in terms of that country's identity; a country which allows a government to dictate that identity only weakens as a result - as we can see quite plainly in both the US and China.
So, when it comes to weather reporting or anything else, if the government can't or won't do it, then it's on us - the people - to do it, for the sake of all of the rest of us. If any community or demographic or what have you is marginalized in our country, then it is on us - we being the country - to correct that, and to extend a hand in friendship and mutual aid. This is how patriotism is supposed to work: a commitment to one's fellow human, not to some arbitrary state.
If you do indeed love China (and I'm assuming here that you're a resident of it), you might want to reflect on what you can do to improve it for all of your fellow countrymen - including those who currently feel excluded from it. If more people did the same in our respective countries, said countries - and given their global influence, the world - would be much better places than they are now.
No, there is no such duty. If we look at the Soviet dissidents, plenty of them neither wanted to support the Soviet regime nor challenge it, so instead they retreated into their own private world, and that was a totally legitimate choice.
Also, you suggest that the people naturally want a free country ruled by the people. Yet support among Americans for the 18th-century Lockean ideals that informed the Founding Fathers (radically free speech, division of powers, decisionmaking by the popular will instead of some recognized experts, etc.) seems to be falling on both sides of the political spectrum. In many countries, those ideals were never there in the first place.
So two things:
1. You seem to be conflating the country with the government here. The Soviet regime was not the country. It was one government asserting control over a country (and also some other countries, on that note). That country existed before the Soviet regime, and continues to exist after it.
2. "retreat[ing] into their own private world" is itself a means of challenging the power of a government. It demonstrates one way - indeed, the simplest way - in which the people of a country can abolish a government: by ignoring it entirely.
> Also, you suggest that the people naturally want a free country ruled by the people.
No, I suggest that the people - and the country existing as an abstraction of them - are distinct from whatever rulership is currently in place. The power of that rulership is contingent on its recognition by the people. This is pretty inherent to whether a government is actually functional; if the people refuse to listen to the government, then what power does the government have?
The form of whatever government the people do fashion for themselves (if they fashion one for themselves at all) is an entirely separate question. Doesn't matter if it's a direct democracy or a dictator for life; if it has power, it is because the people of a country enable it to have power.
No, not entirely. The USSR and Eastern European dissidents' approach was often to publicly acquiesce to the demands of the regime, perform the rituals expected of them, while in private revealing to one another their true opinions and tastes in art, music, literature, etc.
You stated above that people have a duty to "bring the government to heel, or else establish a new government obedient to the will of the people", but clearly people have often not been willing to take action like that, and that is perfectly alright.
That is:
> You stated above that people have a duty to "bring the government to heel, or else establish a new government obedient to the will of the people"
Chopping off the parenthetical immediately following that quotation changes the meaning from what I wrote entirely. As noted in that parenthetical, a perfectly valid way of fulfilling that duty is to promote and exercise self-governance - which is exactly what those dissidents did in private.
And further, that promotion and exercise of self-governance is itself a way to bring an errant government to heel - namely, by introducing an alternative to it and prompting it to seek a more "diplomatic" outcome.
In the Soviet Union, for example, change in systems of government by and large happened not because of ideas or dissidence but because a large part of the elite decided it would be in their interest to implement and oligarchy instead, against the overall wish of the population.
In the end, the ideas mattered a lot less than relationships of power.
Even in the American revolution the ideas of classical liberalism only struck because there was a class of rich landowners for which these ideas prompted the exercise of their power in a way that was conducive to their interest - increasing their power and reducing taxes, and enabling them to warmonger to their content.
That's not to say this necessarily only benefits and elite - many révolutions were prompted by ideas that allowed the common man to actualize their freedom and collective interest, but until now the inability to coordinate collectively always gave rise to an elite that seized effective power.
But never has any real political change been brought by anything but power and interest. Ideas serve to communicate the interests and possibilities and to coordinate groups to organize a society.
I never said they were. What I did say is that expressing and communicating those ideas is (one aspect - and a critical one, IMO) of self-governance, and that when there exists a government that forbids said expression and communication, engaging in said expression and communication anyway is a pretty unambiguous rejection of that government's power.
That is:
> Ideas serve to communicate the interests and possibilities and to coordinate groups to organize a society.
Exactly correct.
...but this all now drifting further and further from the original point of my original comment: that we Americans (like the people of any other country) have a collective interest in accurate, timely, and publicly accessible weather reporting, and that if the government ain't up to the task for whatever reason, then we arguably should be considering an alternative mechanism for said reporting - and that it's arguably our civic duty to help with that replacement, for the mutual benefit of ourselves, our communities, and our nation as a whole.
And then, after a couple minutes of moving around the map, I can no longer access the site.
Is this the "data limiting" the article mentions??
> Access Denied
> You don't have permission to access "http://radar.weather.gov/" on this server.
> Reference #18.95fa3b17.1617393226.1c0a631b
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/21/nws-new-ra...
The animated loop for a radar station would load in ¼ second.
(this is the radar lite that they could have left up without flash)
Try out this https://s.w-x.co/staticmaps/wu/wu/wxtype1200_cur/conus/anima... It's the best simple animated CONUS weather radar gif I could find with a static URL.
Sure, they need bespoke computation services for their modeling functions and so forth. But when it comes to the dissemination of information, it seems like that's very much a commodity these days, and can be provided at such an enormous scale at such low prices that it should scarcely be a concern.
I suspect, with no evidence whatsoever, that the NWS is holding this hostage for better funding overall, because it's the visible piece that causes pain to the public. There are other areas where they believe they really need better funding, but haven't been able to convince the budgetmakers of that. In order to force their hand, they're starving the public-facing stuff.
For better or worse, in the 00s self-hosting a chat service might have been the least bad option to achieve all the requirements they had. However, it also probably suffered (as I mentioned in another comment) from the fact that many gov't agencies don't really have proper IT staffing and don't treat it as something to continually invest in and maintain/sustain.
But it's more than just NWS Chat:
In December, because of an escalating bandwidth shortage, the Weather Service proposed limiting users to 60 connections per minute on a large number of its websites.
Constituents complained about the quota and, earlier this month, the Weather Service announced it would instead impose a data limit of 120 requests per minute and only on servers hosting model data, beginning April 20.
This is, or should be, bread and butter stuff. The rest of the world has figured out how to do this cheaply and with high availability. And their overseers even recognize this:
Neil Jacobs, former acting head of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the Weather Service, said many of the agency’s Internet infrastructure problems are tied to the fact they run on internal hardware rather than through cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud.
“I’ve demanded in writing that NWS transition these applications … to our Cloud partners. It’s part of an internal strategy I’ve laid out,” Jacobs, a Trump administration appointee, told the Capital Weather Gang in an email before he left office.
So why are they not making that architectural change?
Because IT is secondary to their primary mission and they don't have a proper dedicated IT team of sufficient size to enable this or a smooth transition if they tried. This is a repeated problem in the federal government. IT is not their mission, and each entity acts like a small-to-medium sized business, even if they're part of a larger scale organization. The US DOD doesn't even have one email system for all services. Each service has its own, and at least until the early 2010s many (most? all?) military bases had their own email servers with military members (and civilians) having to get new email accounts at each new base they worked at (this isn't the case of having a distributed but mutually coordinated system, it was just that each base literally had their own MS Exchange servers running and each maintained them themselves). And that's pretty much the single largest entity in the executive. Now imagine if it was a struggle for them despite a clear mission benefit how much more challenging this is when the smaller agencies are asked to do the same without being provided sufficient personnel and finances to do it, and no leadership (no real leadership) stepping up to create or establish a cross-service solution.
Then NMCI got sold out via contracts that underbid and incrementally removed functionality. Now you can’t recover an account you previously had because they aren’t required to save the account data for more than 90 days (cost cutting) and they don’t recycle addresses due to spillage. Finding anyone without a number attached to their email address has become pretty rare due to that.
Now you have two primary systems in the Navy (OneNet for overseas and NMCI for otherwise) and the USMC has basically broken their network off from the Navy.
Further, each ship has to have its own email servers for fairly obvious reasons.
Kind of rambling, but I’ve worked with that system for a long time now. It’s been interesting going from the legacy military systems, to what was an excellent system, then watching it decay into what it is today.
But when I checked it a week ago, it was much less shaky. Good to see the NWS trying new ideas.
Those are way more important for an information service than trying new things.
And if you want to try new things, you can leave the old one around while you do it.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/weatherspark-weather-data-v...
https://kk.org/cooltools/weatherspark/
As I understand it, they didn't have the money to migrate from Flash to HTML5 and the current site is a shadow of it's former self.
I use the NWS API's in my personal weather app and they work fairly well.
It's not all doom and gloom, but they could be better. The NDBC went down for about 7 days last month due to a "catastrophic outage," and that was very unfortunate. But, the deliberately and with warning took the BOX radar offline for maintenance for the first time in decades. A mixed bag.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/weather-ser...
The US government needs to get better at distributing IT knowledge, capabilities, and services across its numerous agencies instead of having them each (and their subcomponents) act like their own small businesses with little effort on cross-cutting support and capabilities.
The ironic/annoying part is that some agencies have figured out how to do it correctly, but they never share with other agencies. Either out of selfishness (fiefdoms, it's mine and I get the accolades for having it, if I shared then it would be ours and I'd have to share those accolades, screw you) or lack of communication (silos, they don't know what anyone else is doing and may not have any good channels of communication to find out). This same thing gets played out over and over again over the years, and it's not just with the government. It's any group that views what's actually their critical infrastructure as a cost center to minimize spending on and, ideally, cut; and any organization that creates overly siloed groups and forces communication up and down a hierarchy rather than direct communication between peer groups.
> When will they distribute observation data through some swarmable system like IPFS? Yet even the rogue Alabama office recommended siloed Slack rather than something open.
I think I'd also be comfortable making a multi-hundred dollar wager that they've heard of Slack and never heard of IPFS or similar approaches.
Not just every other government agency, but every other non-tech organization.