Number of people on government websites now(analytics.usa.gov) |
Number of people on government websites now(analytics.usa.gov) |
It's very useful, and I've referred to this site many times over the years (probably bc a couple sites I've worked on are in the top 50!).
For those people wanting other awesome and informative govt sites, take a look at https://www.usaspending.gov/, which has all government contracts data easily searchable (and bookmarkable).
https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...
Mostly off-topic, but the GSA is one of those federal agencies that is really under-appreciated.
When I was a reporter in the days before the commercial internet (yes, my tools were pencil, typewriter, and teletype), the GSA would publish lists of what government reports were coming out each month, helping you find all kinds of incredibly useful data. If you needed help, you just picked up a phone and they would point you in the right direction. I always looked forward to getting their big blue envelopes in the mail at work because I knew I could find something meaningful in there that I could localize for my audience. And the information was always presented in a manner that was both professional, and easy to understand.
The GSA is one of those agencies that is best left alone to do its work in obscurity. Every once in a long while, a politician will stick his nose in there, but usually only to get a name put on a building.
See also: The Congressional Budget Office.
If you've ever seen the "question mark vest guy" (Matthew Lesko, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko), who offers book on federal programs available and how to take advantage of them... He's been criticized as a charlatan or misleading people, or encouraging people to "freeload," but here's the thing... He's really quite sincere. He believes the US government bureaucracy has failed in its duty of public information and education and is full of under-utilized programs that, as a result, become tools for the informed to siphon resources from those the programs were intended to help. He thinks that's unfair. The "Free Money Now" book covers and TV advertisements are employed because his target audience is assumed to not be savvy enough to do the research themselves, so he's trying to reach them with noise and spectacle where quiet black-and-white announcements buried in the back pages of local newspapers have already failed (and the fact that he started his work in the era where the easiest way to reach his target audience was still books because the sorts of people who didn't know about benefits programs they were eligible for were strongly correlated with lack of Internet access, not surprisingly).
If you want a fascinating rabbit hole: https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/12/18/a-complete-list-of-gov-domain...
> IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.
> More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.
I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.
Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8 years ago when I had to scrape the USPS: https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra... As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as opposed to the much more common situation where you need to update the status of every tracking number in a database), people still have to scrape their website pretending to be a browser.
My pattern matching experience from real life tells me that this is unlikely....
The following is for people logging into government services, it is a better source for metrics on browsers/OS usage.
I agree that it is skewed in a number of ways. I just wanted to estimate a lower bound.
Thank you for pointing out a better source of data for my use case.
I have a bulky work laptop and a big desktop PC. The niche left over maps to a nice slim, fanless device for casual usage very well in the Chromebook space. Maybe preaching to the choir here, but my keyboard will need to be pried from my cold, dead hands and the tablet + detachable options all seemed way too delicate.
Sign of the times?
NIST? Definitely
LLNL MPI tutorials? Obviously.
But NSF… never?
Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?
Might be some programming exercise. It's a common network programming exercise to build a HTTP client using bare sockets. But they don't look like student email addresses.
Also, India having a large number of English speakers, probably has a significant percent of the population that prefers getting COVID-19 info from the CDC.
By device type:
Mobile 53.7%
Desktop 44.1%
Tablet 1.9%
By browser:
Chrome 48%
Safari 36.2%
Edge 6.4%
Firefox 2.8%
My personal conclusions:
Tablets remain a niche product, Firefox is dead, and Edge will be dead in a few years if it can't eat more market share, which it won't.
iPads don't show themselves to be iPads. They read as full computers.
It's an anti-profiling feature Apple added a few years ago.
And you can see the code and development lifecycle on github: https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov
Pretty lightweight for what it is.
I noticed that San Jose makes the list, as does LA and Seattle right now, but no San Francisco. I suspect that SF traffic goes through San Jose and thus most of the bay area appears as San Jose in their numbers. Not a big leap to imagine this happens in other places too.
Clearly a HN hug!
it would be most amusing to watch the EU commission attempt to enforce its extraterritorial !bad, bad cookies! law against the US federal government on its own website
yes.
Rust was their opportunity to escape that, now they just threw it away and now they are back to where they started.
Firefox is in decline. Nothing has changed.
This is from someone who uses Firefox
The DX for firefox just isn't that great when compared to Chrome.
The undocumented tiny ratelimits and threat of bans for server-side API users (while no such ratelimits applied to the HTML pages) forced pretty much every app to scrape their HTML server side.
From my README which quotes their old docs: “Note: The United States Postal Service expressly prohibits the use of Web Tools "scripting" without prior approval. Web Tools scripting can be defined as a technique to generate large volumes of Web Tools XML request transactions that are database- or batch-driven under program control, instead of being driven by individual user requests from a web site or a client software package. The USPS reserves the right to suspend server access without notification by any offending party that does not have prior approval for Web Tools scripting. Registered Web Tools customers that believe they have a legitimate requirement for Web Tools scripting should contact the ICCC to request approval.”
What an asinine process.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29916054/change-user-age...
I run into it ALL the time and no matter how you write instructions, at least 1/3 of people won't read them but just skim to what they think they need and then copy/paste. Ugh.
Americans have a philosophy of the freedom of speech grounded in the principles of the First Amendment. Those principles are not universally shared, and indeed, even amongst the liberal nations the American take on the topic is pretty liberal (contrast the way, say, speech overtly supporting fascism is treated in Germany vs. the relatively new and controversial hate speech laws in the US, or the principles of affirmative defense for defamation in the US not shared by the UK, or the Refused Classification category for videogames in Australia, or the fact that the law of against "publication or utterance of blasphemous matter" was repealed in Ireland in 2020).
As the average internet user grows to resemble more the average human than the average American human, regression to the international mean on freedom of information is to be anticipated.
This was always a pipe dream (preventing data exfiltration). The best any company do is to prevent accidental exfiltration of data. Like when someone attaches a spreadsheet with social security/credit card numbers to an email going out over the Internet. There's tools to detect that sort of thing (and stop it) but they don't work when the data is encrypted.
There currently exists no technology that can stop the human problem of data exfiltration. Here's a quick quiz to see if anyone in your company can exfiltrate whatever TF they want: Can employees play sounds on their desktop (as in, it emits sound)? Then they can exfiltrate any file they have read access to pretty damned quickly. Even huge, multi-gigabyte files!
Current data exfiltration methods can take advantage of a tiny corner of a monitor, the sound output (direct connect to line out or optical is ideal!), power lines (yes, this works! https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/04/13/data-exfiltration...), various USB tricks (even if entire categories of "storage" devices are blocked via software), and many, many more. Most of them are basically undetectable as well and can be executed with JavaScript in any browser that gives the user access to the developer console.
Obviously, if end users have access to PowerShell or Python that's even faster/better at exfiltrating the data.
My favorite one though has got to be the sound output... You can write a simple script that converts bits into inaudible sounds that can be picked up by a cell phone in your pocket! It's not nearly as fast as a direct connection to the line out jack but it is so cool! haha
Second place has to be data exfiltration, "by blinking the numlock LED"
But it doesn't mean that the overall fraction of visitors from outside the US is that high.
It's intentional. In addition to the lack of advertising, making people fill out needless/confusing forms, etc. also filters out people who are legitimately entitled to government benefits. It's a special type of cruelty to dangle a benefit behind so much red tape in front of people who don't have the time or know-how to deal with it!
The US COVID test program, seems good at first blush. On the one hand, it was a breath of fresh air that all you have to do is go to one website and fill out one very short form. On the other, the parameters of the program were 4 tests per address. USPS already knows every address, so why did I even have to bother filling out the form? Why aren't they just sending out the tests?! There are going to be people who want/need the tests but won't get them because of the bureaucracy.
The government generally has a responsibility to avoid waste, fraud and abuse. If they send something to everyone who qualifies then sooner or later it will be abused or inefficient, and those will be the stories that make the news.
That's the problem, when you make it so hard for people who need benefits to get them, when you trap them in a constant web of confusing paperwork and means testing (and don't forget, all this bureaucracy, developing and reviewing paperwork, ain't cheap, either), it's easy to find fraud based on technicality, by filling out a form incorrectly, even if you're really entitled to something. It's also easy to make someone give up because they don't have the time or access to resources required to sign up.
In addition, with a lot of overhead, it makes it easier for states to abuse the system [0] as well. I get that this is a big mental block to overcome, but saying the government has to avoid waste and fraud in this way is a bit of a cop out.
0 - https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2021/07/14/florida-to-pay-...
He makes it easier to find since he actively advertised on TV, but still probably isn't worth the fee for that convenience.
I have relatives who have Lesko's book and just browse through it in the bathroom. It's comforting to them not only how comprehensive it is, but that in some sense it has a beginning and an end; when they finish the book, they have some kind of confidence that the percentage of programs they're aware of is now large. That might be a false confidence, but the sense it's possible keeps them reading. Hard to do that with a searchable index.