Letters to the editor
FirstGov Affirms Availability
The General Services Administration's FirstGov staff and AT&T's
Web hosting and technical staff applaud Federal Computer Week and Keynote
Systems Inc. for the Government 40 Internet Performance Index.
We believe
the index will provide a degree of technical- performance benchmarking
for federal Web sites. We were pleased with the responsiveness of the FirstGov
site as revealed in the inaugural index [Web ticker, FCW, Oct. 29], but
we were puzzled by the statistic that showed the FirstGov site was available
only 70 percent of the time.
Surely, if FirstGov were available only seven out of 10 attempts, we
would have heard loudly and quickly from the millions of citizens and others
who access the site. Fortunately, the 70 percent availability rating was
due to the high level of security that has been put in place to protect
the FirstGov site.
Our investigation of this puzzling performance revealed that Keynote
Systems runs its tests using 58 automated probes from 25 locations across
the country. To FirstGov's security system, these probes appeared to be
denial-of-service attacks. When presented with such anomalous repeated inquiries,
the site defeated those apparent attacks by completely blocking further
queries from 17 Keynote sites. The result was that 30 percent of Key.note's
probes were timing out 100 percent of the time as they tested FirstGov —
not because the site was unavailable to the rest of the world, but because
it was operating exactly as it was designed to do by blocking inquiries
from specific Keynote sites.
Further investigation of Keynote's statistics reveals that if the results
from the 17 sites that consistently timed out are removed from the analysis,
FirstGov's availability rating jumps to an index-leading 99.9 percent.
The FirstGov and AT&T teams continue to work with Keynote, which
will result in a more accurate representation of the site's availability
in future installments of the index in Federal Computer Week.
One of the
great temptations in this age of computers, facts, figures and instant analysis
is to draw conclusions from "irrefutable" statistical samplings in the belief
that they accurately represent the entire population. This is a case where
the numbers were right, but the interpretation was wrong. This should be
a lesson for all of us as we evaluate Web performance and statistics in
the future.
Deborah Diaz
Deputy associate administrator, FirstGov
General Services Administration,
and William Pulsipher Jr.
Director of enterprise integration and FirstGov program manager
AT&T
Collaboration at Work
In response to your Nov. 12, 2001, {/fcw/articles/2001/1112/fcw-edit-11-12-01.asp} editorial calling for more information
sharing and collaboration on projects among federal, state and local public
health agencies, I agree that "the rules must change."
I would like to point you and your readers to an example program in
which many public and private agencies work together to improve the infrastructure
for public health and the access to information for public health professionals.
Please visit the Partnership in Information Access for Public Health
Professionals' Web site at nnlm.gov/partners for more on this initiative.
Marjorie Cahn
Head of the National Information Center on Health Services Research
and Health Care Technology
National Library of Medicine
IT Workers for Homeland Security
After 23 years with U.S. Air Force security operations and serving a
tour in Vietnam in 1968, I have fought for America and I am proud to be
an American.
Regarding the new Office of Homeland Security, I feel all government
or federal employees in the information technology sector should work under
its director, Tom Ridge. Why? We deal with networks, the Internet, firewalls,
etc. Our level of responsibility is very heavy in the security field. This
is especially true in the coming age with computers: Everyone will have
one, for better or for worse. I like to think that the Internet is a tool
that can be harmful or helpful.
Make us all monitors of the Internet system. Place IT professionals
under your department, and we can sound any alarm coming across our communication
lines. This includes in-house or outside the United States.
John De Hoyos
Bureau of Indian Affairs