----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com> -----
From: Dave Farber <farber@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:47:44 +0900
Subject: [IP] Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data
The National Weather Service is proposing to place limits on accessing its
life-saving weather data in a bid to fix Internet outages.
By Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman
This seems like a problem that this group could solve rather rapidly with minimal
incremental expense. It also seems like one that's very much worth solving.
Not bizarre at all. NWS directly competes with AccuWeather. AccuWeather has plenty of lobbyists and bipartisan political support. Anything that harms NWS helps AccuWeather.
This is why a former CEO of AccuWeather almost became the head of the NWS for the specific purpose of ensuring it a ceased to be a threat to AccuWeather.
Simply get rid of the gigabytes of JavaScript and stupidly designed crap
and hire someone who knows what they are doing and a bandwidth DOWNGRADE
will be in order. The root cause is incompetence and it can be fixed by
getting rid of all the children and hiring someone who knows what they
are doing.
Their design is to run everything from one datacenter? I am enjoying the level of irony that the rest of us consider catastrophic weather events in our datacenter planning, but the NWS does not.
I’m sure like most things with technology and government it’s less about desire and more about politics of proper funding.
If the only problem was bandwidth it would be easy to solve.
I miss weather underground before it became slow as molasses with openstreetmap and other things. Then again, it used to be a local telephone call and typing UM-WEATHER at the which host? prompt
High resolution images, lots of users, lots of reps per minute - sounds like a budgetary problem to me. Yup, limiting refreshes doesn’t seem unreasonable - pending some serious redesign of their content delivery network. Meanwhile, remember that these folks are seeing serious political efforts to limit things like climate modeling - so some of this might be information suppression through resource starvation. Miles Fidelman
If I had to venture a guess, it's not a network problem it's a web
server problem. It's far too easy to design a web server where each
request consumes 10 to 100 times the processing that it absolutely
needs to, often with database bottlenecks that further constrain
scalability. Put such a system under broad load and of course it
collapses.
This is either some kind of bizarre political maneuver, or bureaucrats at NWS need to be seriously fired and replaced with competent
people who‘s tech jobs have been waylaid by Covid.
Not bizarre at all. NWS directly competes with AccuWeather. AccuWeather has plenty of lobbyists and bipartisan political support. Anything
that harms NWS helps AccuWeather.
It's more complicated than that. Accuweather like every commerical
weather forecaster gets most of its data from the NWS, then uses its
own methods to make their forecasts. So they want to cripple the front
end of the NWS but not the data gathering back end.
But I do agree that this problem sounds like one that could be solved
with a couple of phone calls to Cloudflare or Akamai and very little
money.
As do I, and the demise of uswx.com took away one of the alternatives.
I spent some time earlier this year unsuccessfully trying to contact
the people behind uswx.com in the hopes of restarting it as a very
lightweight site that could be read in a text-only web browser *and*
scripted -- since I think it would be handy to be have a weather
site that could easily be scraped for custom uses such as "cron job that
sends me a brief 3-day forecast for locations X Y Z every day at 6 AM".