Questions Congress should ask Sibelius.

  • Context: News 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Vic Sandler
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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around the issues surrounding the launch of the Affordable Care Act's website, including the timeline of knowledge regarding its problems, the communication between President Obama and Secretary Sibelius, and the technical failures experienced by users. Participants raise questions about the effectiveness of the website, the handling of user data, and the implications of these issues for the ACA's rollout.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested
  • Technical explanation
  • Conceptual clarification

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants question how many days it took for President Obama to learn about the website's problems after its launch.
  • Others inquire about the timeline of testers' knowledge regarding the issues prior to the launch.
  • There are concerns about whether President Obama regularly communicated with Sibelius about the website's status and what information was shared during those discussions.
  • Participants mention reports of lost passwords for early users and issues with data being garbled or incomplete when sent to insurance companies.
  • Some express skepticism about the reported number of successful applications, questioning how that figure was determined.
  • One participant shares a personal experience of successfully navigating the website, while also criticizing its initial failures and usability issues.
  • There are claims that the website's design decisions, such as requiring account creation before browsing, contributed to early problems.
  • Some participants express doubts about Sibelius's technical knowledge regarding the website's operations.
  • There are accusations of the discussion being a political witch hunt rather than a genuine inquiry into the website's failures.
  • A participant highlights the need for due diligence in understanding the context of the discussion, specifically regarding the gender of Sibelius.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express multiple competing views regarding the nature of the issues with the website, the adequacy of communication between key figures, and the motivations behind the inquiries. The discussion remains unresolved with no consensus on these points.

Contextual Notes

Limitations include the lack of citations for some claims, the dependence on anecdotal evidence regarding user experiences, and unresolved questions about the technical aspects of the website's functionality.

  • #151
russ_watters said:
Why hasn't he pulled down the website to get it out of the media while it is being fixed?
Aside from the negative media exposure, there is another practical reason to shut down the site. Those 834's are coming out wrong. It must be a heavy burden on the insurance companies to have to call each of 27000 customers and verify the information it contains. If the logjam breaks and a flood of applications comes through, it will become prohibitively expensive to verify. They should shut down the site until at least that part of the program starts to work.

russ_watters said:
Does he need Vic to troubleshoot the website for him?
Technically speaking, I'm more like a beta-tester than a troubleshooter. If I were a real beta tester, I would have a contact to report the bugs to. They would expect me to provide a recipe for reproducing the bug and any error messages that appear. The result would be a bug ticket that would be assigned to a programmer. As far as I know, there is no place for end users to submit that kind of information.
 
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  • #152
Vic Sandler said:
I went to the site and entered my username. Then I entered the wrong password. Of course, I did not get in. It redrew the login page blanking out the username and password fields. I reentered my username and used a different wrong password. I did this 5 times with different wrong passwords, none of them similar to the correct one nor to each other. It never revoked permission for me to try again. The 6th time, I entered the correct password and got in. Does Pay Pal work like that too?

You only get three tries with Pay Pal. Even this forum limits the number of times you can try to log in with an incorrect password in a given amount of time.

You used different wrong passwords five times?? What exactly was your logic in doing that?
 
  • #153
edward said:
If you try to bounce in and out of Pay Pal , changing user names and passwords, you only get three tries, then they block you out entirely until you fax proof of your identification.
As I said in post #148, I don't understand what you mean by this. I wish you would enlighten me.

edward said:
You used different wrong passwords five times?? What exactly was your logic in doing that?
I thought maybe you meant that if you try to bounce in and out of Pay Pal, using the same user name and changing passwords, you only get three tries. That is not uncommon in websites and as you pointed out, Physics Forums works that way. So I tried that. That is exactly my logic. Is that not what you meant in post #146?
 
  • #154
Vic Sandler said:
As I said in post #148, I don't understand what you mean by this. I wish you would enlighten me.


I thought maybe you meant that if you try to bounce in and out of Pay Pal, using the same user name and changing passwords, you only get three tries. That is not uncommon in websites and as you pointed out, Physics Forums works that way. So I tried that. That is exactly my logic. Is that not what you meant in post #146?

No you tried to log in five times using wrong passwords. Many websites will see that as a Brute force log in attack. After I read that five times with bogus passwords bit it really doesn't matter what PayPal and other websites do.

Is there anything left of your foot after shooting it that many times? Don't bother to ask me what I mean by that. You might consider giving it a break for a while before they come looking for you.
 
  • #155
Thread closed.
 
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