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benced · a year ago
The new tech stuff the government has been putting out is legitimately fantastic. login.gov is probably my favorite sign-in experience, maybe slightly behind Google's (and considerably ahead of Apple or Microsoft's).
vasco · a year ago
It's funny we expect governments stuff to be so bad that when they do something at the level of a regular SaaS our minds are blown.
adgjlsfhk1 · a year ago
it's the virtuous cycle of Republicans running on the meme that the government is inherently bad, then using their power to make it worse
benced · a year ago
To be clear, I like login.gov considerably more than random SaaS logins.
Mistletoe · a year ago
I remember on some radio show many years back a program where tech people were going back to government to make the tech better. They interviewed the guy that started it and it was really inspiring. I wish I could remember more details. These are true patriots.
metalang · a year ago
You might be thinking of the US Digital Service (https://www.usds.gov/)
joquarky · a year ago
SteveGerencser · a year ago
People like Matt Cutts left Google to do exactly this. Much happier than when he was the head of the Google Search Spam team.
xalebf · a year ago
There’s a ton of interesting stuff at https://www.web.dma.mil/WEB-NextGen/

Just look at the significant links section

jmartrican · a year ago
reminds me of Snow Crash, where the US federal government is reduced to a software entity.
blackeyeblitzar · a year ago
Do they still force you to share your biometrics with a third party private service (Id.me)?
paulirish · a year ago
Login.gov doesn't.. but plenty of federal sites (like IRS) are still using that id.me poppycock. Here's to hoping they prioritize a migration soon.
mrmetanoia · a year ago
Yeah it's cool. Lately just feels like they're doing work, not all home runs, but they're out there swinging.
kylebenzle · a year ago
I've noticed this too, night and day from the Trump years.

Here in Ohio we have the Intel plant going up just east of me, goverment spending is great when it works and thats what the Dems have become all about. But the flip side is our courts have been sold off to the highest bidder and our juvinile and family court systems are run like for porfit orphanages with the legal right to seperate children from their families [1]. Big government is great when it works but terrifying when it overreaches as is happening now.

I'm glad everyone is making money but, in more ways than one, we are simply incurring a debt that will have to be paid back by our children.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Injustice-Inc-Americas-Commodifies-Ch...

aragonite · a year ago
https://data.gov is also worth mentioning
caprock · a year ago
xalebf · a year ago
That’s so cool, I didn’t know the government had an open GitHub acct!
llimllib · a year ago
Check out https://code.gov/agencies, there are many more
neilv · a year ago
Why would a .gov Web site like this have dependencies on, and information leaks to, googletagmanager.com and crazyegg.com?
darby_nine · a year ago
Maybe I'm dense but why would you expect a government service to not use common tooling available to them?
n_plus_1_acc · a year ago
I think access to government services is an impoetant part of democracy. Because you have no alternative, they should be Held to higher Standards of privacy. Google doesn't need to know everything.
mindslight · a year ago
Third party services that remain involved aren't "tooling". They're part of the final site, dragging in all of that terrible behavior of the surveillance industry. So yes it's reasonable to ask why one should have to suffer that to access a public service and/or by government requirement. If we had a US GDPR and some societal expectation of privacy letting us be reasonably sure those vendors were prohibited from creating surveillance dossiers on us it would be more reasonable, but US "governance" is actually skewed the exact opposite way.
Zigurd · a year ago
If you click through to sign up, there is a notice that it is for official use only (FOUO).
yesbut · a year ago
The search results aren't very good

https://tinyurl.com/seargovresults

ulrischa · a year ago
A cool thing. In Germany this would not be possible. EVB-IT Cloud contracts, DSGVO and other legal stuff slow down everything and costs are exploding. No inhouse ressources available double the trouble
leononame · a year ago
I have s feeling GDPR is often used as an excuse in these cases while there is little evidence that it's actually slowing anything down. Especially for government: they do have the data alread and the GDPR applies to the dat itself, not whether you put a fancy frontend on it or not.

Government departments tend to be slow to adopt - again, based on feeling more than hard evidence - especially emin Germany. They'll just try to find some scapegoat for why they're failing, and GDPR is perfect. I've seen the same in businesses as well, where I've seen told numerous times they're behind schedule because of GDPR or they can't do this because of GDPR and it's just not true most of the time. People just like to hide their incompetence

I don't know anything about EVB-IT, so I'll shut up about that part

ulrischa · a year ago
I know about EVB-IT and GDPR. And it is actually slowing down a lot. While each of these things can be managed the combination is a productive killer. You will understand this if you ever worked as a it-project manager in the German goverment. There is a representative for everything and he is just doing his part and blocking everything not in his work field. It is not something like GDPR alone but the combination and the handling of these aspects. And law aspects always get the highest proirority.
ChrisArchitect · a year ago
Not new, 2010 maybe? But even more ingrained as part of government's 2023 Delivering A Digital-First Public Experience guidance to all agencies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2023/09/22/fact...
georgeplusplus · a year ago
The gov usually contracts out its coding. Waa this made contractors under the federal gov or actual gov employees?
britta · a year ago
The team is a mix of employees and contractors. They also offer customers (government agencies who use their service) the option to use Bing results or their in-house Elasticsearch results: https://search.gov/admin-center/content/content-overview.htm...

They do good work, and it’s an important service. I believe it saves a ton of money for the federal government by reducing reinvention of the wheel. As a former federal employee and current federal contractor, it’s been very helpful to be able to use their no-cost-to-customer search services on multiple projects. On my current project we eventually shifted to doing our own search (using Postgres full text search) so we could customize the indexing and ranking, but Search.gov was a useful interim solution.

georgeplusplus · a year ago
It's good too see I wish gov would make more in house solutions instead of contacting it out.

At my department that's all we do. Farm it out to 365 or beltway defense companies