White House says Healthcare.gov fixes made

Summary: The administration has announced that they have met their self-imposed deadline for making the health care marketplace site usable.

A "HealthCare.gov Progress and Performance Report" released by the Center for Mediare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declares that the end-of-month deadline for fixes to the healthcare.gov web site has been met.

The report was released at a press briefing Sunday morning with Jeffrey Zients, the man President Obama tasked to oversee the fixes. Zients announced that:

...the average system response time is under 1 second; the error rate is "consistently well below 1 percent"; the online system is stable — not crashing — more than 90 percent of the time; as many as 50,000 shoppers can use the site at the same time, or up to 800,000 visits a day.

The report concludes:

As the metrics detailed in this report reveal, dramatic progress has been made on improving HealthCare.gov. There is more work to be done to continue to improve and enhance the website and continue to improve the consumer experience in the weeks and months ahead. The new management system and instrumentation have helped improve site stability, lower the error rating below 1%, increase capacity to allow 50,000 concurrent users to simultaneously use the site and will help drive continuous improvement on the site. While we strive to innovate and improve our outreach and systems for reaching consumers, we believe we have met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.

Hat tip to the Washington Post.

Larry Seltzer has long been a recognized expert in technology, with a focus on mobile technology and security in recent years

New DoS attack directed at Healthcare.gov

Summary: Healthcare.gov can't catch a break.

Healthcare.gov has been plagued with problems since launching on October 1, and given how widely reported its vulnerabilities are, it's should come as no surprise that hackers are tapping into them.

Security software provider Arbor Networks pinpointed a new denial-of-service attack on the federal online healthcare exchange site.

But before things get out of control (more so than they already are), it should be immediately noted that Arbor researchers posited in a blog post on Thursday that this particular attack is "unlikely to succeed in affecting the availability of the healthcare.gov site."

Regardless, the report suggests that the DoS attack could be making the site inaccessible to some visitors trying to access "https://www.healthcare.gov" and "https://www.healthcare.gov/contact-us."

Of course, that could also be attributed to the infrastructure of the website to begin with. But Marc Eisenbarth, a research manager for Arbor Security Engineering and Response Team, pointed toward political motivations behind this attack, which is gaining awareness via social media.

ASERT has no information on the active use of this software. ASERT has seen site specific denial of service tools in the past related to topics of social or political interest. This application continues a trend ASERT is seeing with denial of service attacks being used as a means of retaliation against a policy, legal rulings or government actions.

Arbor also noted in its report that it hasn't seen any more "significant" DoS attacks on the federal website yet either.

Screenshot via Arbor Networks

Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Closure of gov ' t of 1 day of United States: sick Healthcare.gov, NASA grounded

Summary: Healthcare.gov is not a great start, but Wall Street and VC partners seem more worried about the pulse of Twitter IPO.

 

The closure of the US Government has caused a disaster everywhere, and technology is one of the vertical bleeding most publicly so far.

Here is a summary quick some of large items entries related technology on day one only:

Healthcare.gov: no doubt this has received the most attention - not only because it is launched today, but also because health is at the heart of the heated debates that led to the current state of affairs. While the new health insurance market is alive and accessible, many visitors are having problems setting up the accounts. Government officials have attributed the failures to heavier traffic than expected waves.Web site stops: the personal essential does not permit for the duration of the closure, some government agency centers will not be updated - or even maintained at all. An example is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health intelligence service warned in a notice posted on its website on Tuesday "the information on this web site is not up to date, transactions submitted via the website can not be processed, and agency may not be able to answer questions until the credits are enacted." Presumably an epidemic across the country would be an exception - or at least one would expect.NASA: let us not forget that it is not only the Americans within the boundaries of all 50 States that should be concerned with the closure. In all seriousness, this affects many people here into outer space. Once again, many government agencies are being forced to furlough employees, and one of the greatest cuts is being at NASA. The space agency's work force is being cut of approximately 18,000 people to less than 600. However, officials have promised to help the crew of the international space station are not hindered.Twitter: work visa applications are not read and much-needed salaries for many Americans are going to be delayed, but analysts on Wall Street and Silicon Valley venture capitalists seems more worried about the pulse of Twitter IPO than anything else. This media frenzy could not have been one of the most predictable question marks the result of the stop, but it is causing concern among some that it is being reported that the social network will make its initial public offering of made public this week. Remember, the San Francisco company finally announced (via Tweet) in September of its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission S-1. However, Twitter declined to reveal its value and proposed initial stock price. Nevertheless, SEC is expected to remain open during the next few weeks. Thus, while closing lasts long, Twitter of the IPO should not go well, unless that advertisement refers.

Once again, there are many, many more agencies, departments and services in all industries affected by the closure of the federal Government. But this is only day one and is difficult to predict how much still at this point the closure will last.

Topics: Government U.S., Legal, Nasa / space, technology, the industry

Rachel King is a writer for San Francisco-based ZDNet.

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