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Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

537 points by mbix77 1y ago

I have recently installed this extension on FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/port-authority/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/port-authorit... and yesterday I visited this website: https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ and I got a notification that the website tried to do a port-scan of my private network. Is this a common thing? I have just recently installed the extension, so I am not sure if there are a lot of other websites who do it. Since looking into it, I noticed that uBlock Origin already has the default list "Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN" but it wasn't enabled.

Maxious 1y ago
Perhaps to avoid people using misconfigured open proxies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_proxy Like a less sophisticated Tor/VPN that is easily detected by port scans
galaxy_gas 1y ago
Many sites do it .Included in many standard device fingerprinting / anti anonymity SAAS. Ebay facebook etc all do this ! But it looks this is first party to prevent the adblocking of them 1MB of obfuscated fingerprinting + portscan + Webgl . But oddity this one is trying to find burp suite specific route's.
- meitham 1y ago
  Madness! How do I harden my network against that?
  - ale42 1y ago
    You should actually harden your browser or PC... to block any unwanted requests. Apparently some browser extensions can do that.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Chrome is already in the process of killing it https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access
    - ahdanggit 1y ago
      The company I work for has a legitimate service that runs on the loopback (it provides our web apps APIs for some device integration) hopefully its just as simple as the user accepting the prompt else we'll be drowning in support. We had to go the path of the local service because they killed NPAPI. I've been thinking about using web serial as an alternative but Firefox doesn't support it. That being said, I think this is an overall win, hopefully Firefox implements it in a consistent manner as well.
      - ayewo 1y ago
        How is your company's service started on the loopback interface? You bundle a web server that is installed alongside a native app?
        ahdanggit 1y ago
        Roughly, yes. Customers (or more often, their IT department) runs our installer which installs the server as a windows service.
        galaxy_gas 1y ago
        This how many of them work for transporting vs traditional old way of registering url scheme and requiring user interacts --- Discord, Blizzard net, Riot Client ... all localhost listener's that can interact
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    Enable "Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN" filter list in uBlock Origin.
    - meitham 1y ago
      Thank you!
  - bmacho 1y ago
    It would be the job of the operating system to give or take away the ability of your browser to access your local network. But you can run your browser in a container/vm and disable localhost. (And use a separate browser for localhost only if you need it.)
- ahdanggit 1y ago
  my bank did this on the site they sent me to in order to activate my new card.
kolla 1y ago
My biggest grief with that site is that it's like something from the 90s.
- bhaney 1y ago
  As something from the 90s myself, I find this rude.
  - SnuffBox 1y ago
    It's also inaccurate, as this style of page (relating to layout and specific graphic style) didn't appear until 2006ish.
- danw1979 1y ago
  The 1990s web was actually good
- thrown-0825 1y ago
  Yeah it should have a fixed header and footer along with a pop-up consent drawer so you can only see 10% of the actual site content. So much better. Modern web design is a joke.
  - davsti4 1y ago
    t-shirt worthy quote - "modern web design is a joke" ;)
- yard2010 1y ago
  I think you are confusing something from the 90 with something from the gov
- jansper39 1y ago
  These guys need to look at Gov.uk, this site is a total horror show.
  - SnuffBox 1y ago
asimovDev 1y ago
Embarrassed to say that I wasn't aware of this practice. Are there malicious uses for this beyond fingerprinting?
- asimovDev 1y ago
  https://files.catbox.moe/g1bejn.png https://files.catbox.moe/g1bejn.png When I visit the site from Safari on macOS I see this in the console. Are there any particular services that use port 8888 for the website to do this?
  - jadamson 1y ago
    https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000138794 https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000138794 It seems to be part of some "bot defense" product by these F5 people, to "test the different browser capabilities". I doubt it's intended to hit a real endpoint on any system.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  Routers with vulnerable URLs. You can search for: "router" "authentication bypass".
  - causal 1y ago
    Isn't CORS supposed to prevent this?
    - layer8 1y ago
      CORS doesn’t prevent requests (i.e. GET requests from IMG tags, or XHR preflight requests), it only prevents web apps from processing the response if the responding server doesn’t agree. And a simple GET or even OPTIONS request can be enough to exploit vulnerabilities in routers and other local devices.
- inferiorhuman 1y ago
  Mostly it's great for tracking although I'm sure it could also be used to exfiltrate data (e.g. if the user is running something sensitive on localhost). https://www.digitalsamba.com/blog/metas-localhost-spyware-how-webrtc-was-abused-and-how-to-stay-safe https://www.digitalsamba.com/blog/metas-localhost-spyware-ho...
vaylian 1y ago
> Blocks malicious websites from port-scanning your computer/network How does that work? A browser extension can't influence how your router and other machines in your network react to incoming requests.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Judging just from the screenshots, it seems it blocks websites from accessing 127.0.0.1 get requests. Not a port scan to the outside, more of what do you have running on the local machine inside your network.
- est 1y ago
  but it can hook javascript methods before that scan can happen.
- ale42 1y ago
  As far as I understand it, it is supposed to be a scan done by the browser on the user's computer, not an external scan, which a browser extension wouldn't be able to detect.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Hopefully should soon be a thing of the past with https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access
  - vaylian 1y ago
    I see. So the website would try to access private IP adresses (RFC 1918) by having elements like <iframe src="http://10.0.0.1 http://10.0.0.1"> in the web site and then the web site would check if the iframe was loaded successfully?
    - Delk 1y ago
      It could also just try making the request with javascript. Or try a websocket connection.
edarchis 1y ago
Visa application is riddled with scams. From the simple website that charges you twice the price to websites that will tell you that you were rejected and then fake your documents to get in with your name. So they're probably trying to see that you're not one of those web servers, a proxy for them or detect some known C2 channels.
- jaimehrubiks 1y ago
  This is a very clever answer.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- testdelacc1 1y ago
  Another data point - 5he Indian visa system is similar. The official website ending in .gov.in, which is hard to find, offers a visa for $10 and minimal hassle. The scam websites, with better SEO sell the same shit for $80. They’re just proxying your application to the real website and pocketing the difference. It would be good if the Indian government could block the scammers but I guess it’s a lower priority for the moment.
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    [dead]
  - sumedh 1y ago
    The scam websites are probably owned by someone who works in the Indian govt.
    - p3rls 1y ago
      Almost certainly, entire industries have been given over to indian scammers and their government allies.
      - cyanydeez 1y ago
M95D 1y ago
I'm using uMatrix and it blocks by default all connections outside the requested site and parent domains. For example, if I request https://mail.yahoo.com https://mail.yahoo.com, connections to yimg.com are blocked. I need to manually allow each CDN for each website, so this attack/profiling won't work. Using uMatrix was very annoying at first, most websites are broken without their CDNs, but after a few months or so, the whitelist grew and it contains 90% of websites I visit. On my system https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ tries to connect to captcha.com, google-analytics, googletagmanager, 127.0.0.1 and "burp" (a local hostname that doesn't exist in my network). Interestigly, the browser console doesn't list connection attempts to localhost or burp. If I allow 127.0.0.1 and "tcpdump -i lo", I see connections to port 8888, which isn't open.
- samsonradu 1y ago
  How does it manage to hide the requests to 127.0.0.1 from the network tab?
  - M95D 1y ago
    I have no ideea. Possibly that's a limitation of Chrome+Firefox developer tools (I get the feeling it's the same code)? But I found what "burp" is: https://portswigger.net/burp/communitydownload https://portswigger.net/burp/communitydownload
    - culturestate 1y ago
      It seems like they only make the localhost requests on your first visit. If you open devtools in incognito mode (or just clear the cookies) before accessing https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ you should see those 127.0.0.1 attempts as ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED in the network tab. Somewhat more worryingly, Little Snitch doesn't report them at all, though that might just be because they were already blocked at the browser.
    - inferiorhuman 1y ago
      This is what I see. https://i.imgur.com/lvjg2YQ.png https://i.imgur.com/lvjg2YQ.png
trod1234 1y ago
Capturing forensic artifacts of the local network allows a building a bridge strategy for identifying fraudulent networks without requiring knowledge of the path taken from destination to recipient. Other local devices do this and send the network map during a phone home, allowing comparison to a source of truth that is tied almost directly to the person, or group of people. There is also a lot of fingerprintable material within such a port scan from clock skew, TCP ISN, and a few other areas. You can sieve this quite easily with this available, thanks to Roku's, Phone's, and other things doing this while just sitting locally in a shared collision domain (a digital soldier quartered in every home). The metadata node graph of devices locally acts as a unique fingerprint once in RFC1918 space, technically not unique but close enough.
slyall 1y ago
Be careful your security tool isn't producing false positives. I remember years back when people would run these firewalls and we'd get complaints from home users about normal traffic. Thinks like complaints our mail servers was scanning them on port 25 when they sent email.
LoadingXD 1y ago
[flagged]
gethly 1y ago
Just a little side note - in this context, it makes sense if the website tries to connect to a local port because you might be running a card reader(ie. terminal). This is how it works with some(all?) EU countries that have a chip in their ID cards, or even vehicle registration cards, which you can use to access sensitive information or perform certain administrative tasks on government websites. Although, from personal experience, it used to require java and it worked only on internet explorer and since it has been retired and replaced with chromium, i am not sure what is the way to make it work nowadays, as i have not been able to figure out to use it when i needed the last time.
- cjrp 1y ago
  I've had it before where it asked me to use an iPhone/Android app which can read the passport's NFC chip. I guess that's the modern replacement for IE/Java.
- layer8 1y ago
  It requires installing a local service that bridges between the browser and the smartcard driver (what Java applets did in earlier years). The web app then communicates with the service via requests on localhost. The card-specific driver and bridge service are often bundled together for installation.
dns_snek 1y ago
The "port scan" just seems to be a local connection to 127.0.0.1:8888. I don't know what purpose it serves on this page, but our government websites often use this technique to communicate with native software for digitally signing documents. Are you seeing connection attempts to other IPs?
- junon 1y ago
  Might also be card readers, debug servers, etc. Could also be incompetence :D until I fixed it, deploying from my local machine rather than CD resulted in one of the baked in URLs being localhost rather than the public host on the project I'm working on now. Their local development server might just be at port 8888. Wouldn't surprise me.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    I looked at the website again and noticed that the request paths looked odd, one of them being `/400_random_url_with_numbers_403`. I googled that and it looks like it's part of a client-side bot detection script that's testing something, the explanation isn't very informative. https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000138794 https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000138794 > These requests are caused by the bot profile to test the different browser capabilities. > 'http://127.0.0.1:xxxx http://127.0.0.1:xxxx' request is a call to the localhost/client machine, which is normal when trying to protect assets like end-server using ant-bot defense. It does not have any impact regarding application page load.
- tifkap 1y ago
  This is most likely an attempt to connect to a webserver on your own device to collect data and/or do tracking. Remember back in June when Facebook/meta got caught tracking users trough a webserver on Android phone thought Messenger and Instagram? Same thing. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940
  - darkwater 1y ago
tmdetect 1y ago
Very interesting. Having looked at NoScript it seems like you can disable LAN as a default value under the allow tab.
- tmdetect 1y ago
  Looking further * uBlock Origin and Lite have it as an option under Filter List > Privacy > Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN * Brave prevents it, tested with Aggressively block Trackers and Ads.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    Why do you need a heavyweight extension to block sites from scanning your local network? Ridiculous. Also I wonder if this protection is available only with old extension manifest version or new network request hooks API also supports it.
karel-3d 1y ago
It's coming from a F5 script, which is a company that sells anti-bot protection amid other things. (It's coming from obfuscated script at /TSPD, which is a F5 thing.) https://www.f5.com/ https://www.f5.com/
- karel-3d 1y ago
  TS seems to be short for TrafficShield (a product of some company F5 acquired in early 2000s) and PD seems to be Proactive Defense (?)
- jpeggtulsa 1y ago
  Isn't F5 the company that makes nginx?
  - karel-3d 1y ago
    I didn't know that! But apparently yes
  - wlonkly 1y ago
    That bought nginx, but yes!
vkardco 1y ago
this is awesome
reneberlin 1y ago
[flagged]
jas- 1y ago
[dead]
lordofgibbons 1y ago
How and why do browsers allow this? Why wouldn't the browser ask for permission in the same way that it does for Microphone access? It's insane to allow any random website to port scan my LAN. If this wasn't a "feature", I would have considered this a high severity vulnerability
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- JJJollyjim 1y ago
  Chrome doesn't allow it - local network services have to opt-in to being fetchable from public sites (https://github.com/WICG/private-network-access https://github.com/WICG/private-network-access), although they're replacing it with a user-permission-based approach (https://github.com/WICG/local-network-access https://github.com/WICG/local-network-access). (There is some language online suggesting PNA has not actually shipped, but I experienced it myself in stable Chrome several years ago, so I am unsure of the current state). Firefox doesn't implement either approach -- I assume this is indicative of their lack of development resources.
  - adithyassekhar 1y ago
    > Firefox doesn't implement either approach -- I assume this is indicative of their lack of development resources. Since ublock had this as a feature for a long time, I'm sure they are aware of it. Unlike other non funded oss projects, Firefox can't and shouldn't shield themselves with this lack of development resource excuse. They have millions.
    - johncolanduoni 1y ago
      A trillion dollar company (that loves huge vanity projects) gave up on maintaining a browser because it was too much work and just ship a Chrome fork now. I won’t defend Mozilla’s allocation of their resources, but even if they put it all into the “right” Firefox features the web platform is too complex and too much of a moving target for a company with mere centi-million revenues.
b3lvedere 1y ago
"Since looking into it, I noticed that uBlock Origin already has the default list "Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN" but it wasn't enabled." Never knew that this existed. Thank you!
- dd_xplore 1y ago
  Is that available in lite version too? Now that the origin js being phased out
  - nicce 1y ago
    You can't change browser? Or is there something bigger happening?
    - surajrmal 1y ago
      Not everyone wants to change browsers.
      - LarMachinarum 1y ago
        then again, if the makers of one big browser (and via there also the derived browsers) start force-shoving spyware upon you (by restricting blockers), it comes down to a decision of how you set your priorities. Personally, It's a clear cut red line, but you do you.
  - daveidol 1y ago
    It’s only being phased out on Chrome, by Google.
    - ddlsmurf 1y ago
      Yes, to make us safer, now you enable developer mode and disable signature checking to install it locally, thanks Google
      - 1y ago
e40 1y ago
That extension has "Access your data for all websites" ... I really don't get how anyone can give that permission to anyone that isn't well known (a company with a lot on the line) or a person famous for their work (the uBO dev) who has stated he will never sell to anyone or do bad things. "Hacks and Hops" doesn't even have a valid home page. The extension links to https://g666gle.me/ https://g666gle.me/ which does not exist. The domain name itself does not want to make me give access to all my data for all websites to them. As nice as this extension seems, I would ever in a million years install it.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Unfortunately this level of incoherence is almost universal on HN and similar forums. You'd have to be completely out of your mind to install this extension, but people for some reason believe they can install privacy. They got whipped into fearing nebulous online actors so much that they'll download FSB rootkits dressed as VPNs. The minimal set of actions a rational person would take after realizing they've been tricked into installing this extension is setting their entire PC on fire and then running it over with their car, while moving all of their bank accounts to new accounts, in person, and changing all of their passwords using a brand new device.
jmclnx 1y ago
If would be interesting to see what happens on OpenBSD. With pledge(2) and unveil(2) in Firefox, I wonder what it would see. I expect it would see nothing. I will give it a try and see what happens and if I see anything I will add it here.
- jmclnx 1y ago
  I saw nothing of note on OpenBSD. I added the plugin and it prompted me an attempt was made to scan the network, it said it blocked the scan SO, I guess that is going to be used on all my firefox runs.
  - uticus 1y ago
    Pushing the burden of network permissions management outside the browser, to the OS? Heresy! To be serious, this has introduced me to sandboxing on BSD via pledge [0] and comparisons against Linux seccomp [1] - thank you! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289654 [1] https://kristaps.bsd.lv/devsecflops/ https://kristaps.bsd.lv/devsecflops/ (submission by same poster at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264021)
jhoechtl 1y ago
Checking if you are sharing torrents, run a tor node, mine coins?
- 77pt77 1y ago
  It's most likely smartcard authentication code.
trollbridge 1y ago
For another example, studentaid.gov doesn’t work in private browsing.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Isn't it sort of contradictory to try to use private browsing with a service that requires your identity?
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    Not contradictory at all. These days private browsing for most people just means (1) don't save the browsing history and (2) log me out of all websites temporarily.
    - jeffbee 1y ago
      But as the other post notes, it goes further (than, for example, Chrome Incognito) in ways that can break sites. Incognito means exactly what you said, while Safari Private Browsing means more.
  - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
    Not necessarily. I might create a login for a porn site so that I can have some favorite videos bookmarked and it can figure out the type of material I like. That doesn't mean I want my history saved locally.
- davsti4 1y ago
  I just tried opening it in a private window and the page loaded and rendered. What part doesn't work?
- jimt1234 1y ago
  I can one better (worse): A state-run website that my sister frequents for her job requires Internet Explorer. Seriously. I installed a Chrome extension that modifies her user-agent header to IE, and it works fine. Easy work-around, but totally lame.
AtNightWeCode 1y ago
Most likely some "antivirus" bs. Probably harmless. Fun fact. Most browsers allow by default GET access to web resources on localhost and LAN. Been used for exploits since last century.
blablabla123 1y ago
Have you double-checked whether the IP isn't shared among multiple website domains? That's quite a classic with IP based filtering with hosters like GCP...
tzury 1y ago
Data my friend, data. Ports scanning? Well, tell us about the hosts and the port numbers. Add some logs if you got. If you did not go into the details, chances are that when you will, this will turned out to be a false positive case. If you did, where are the evidence?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gepeto42 1y ago
They’d likely block you if they detected something like RDP open, cause that would likely indicate you’re hiding your real IP address.
Wowhappyfun 1y ago
[flagged]
soursopfarm 1y ago
[dead]

mrtksn 1y ago

That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no. It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway. Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process. Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications. I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.

paganel 1y ago
The hard truth of it all is that both the US and (partially) the EU don’t want to make this easier because seeing as wanting “outside” people is now a political liability. You may want to adjust your expectations around that.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Turkish tourist are desired, Turks love spending money on restaurants and activities especially since the prices in Turkey have become more expensive than most of the EU. Greeks even introduced special non-Schengen on-arrival visa valid on the Greek islands especially for the Turks. Besides that, EU has "green passport" exception for the Turkish nationals, where they can travel visa-free on this kind of passport that is provided to individuals that meet certain criteria and millions of such passports were issued. The rejection rates are also not bad and EU has a "return agreement" with Turkey, which is designed to keep the middle eastern refugees in Turkey(essentially, if you come from Turkey EU can send you back to Turkey right away ). Crime rates for Turks show up among the lowest ones, unlike others from the region. So I don't think that EU is trying to reduce visas for Turks.
  - rat9988 1y ago
    You are looking at it from Turkish perspective unfortunately.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      I am EU citizen, I happen to know the Turkish perspective only because spent some years in Turkey and in fact it is the Turkish perspective that that EU doesn't want them and intentionally makes things harder but the moment you look at what's actually going on you see that this is not the case, just a Turkish fantasy about the "evil West and snobby Europeans". Considering that last year 50K Turks applied for asylum in EU and another 100K overstayed their visa, IMHO EU can be considered pretty generous actually with only 15% rejection rate since Turkey is the 2nd country with most applications after China. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-reach-117-million-eu-and-schengen-associated-countries-2025-05-20_en https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/visa-applications-rea... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Asylum_applications_-_annual_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
      - jimz 1y ago
        B-visa rejection rate for Turkey in FY24, as per the US State Department, was 19.78%, btw. https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Immigrant-Statistics/RefusalRates/FY24.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Im...
      - peterfirefly 1y ago
        [flagged]
        mrtksn 1y ago
        >I'm Danish and we have lots of Turks. They are generally much nicer than the Danes but almost all of them are dunces That's rich coming from someone who doesn't understand what the Schengen visa is about. FYI it's not about settling in Denmark, it's for up to 90 days stays in 180 periods for tourism and business purposes. But hey, the inventors of of the mRNA vaccine are both Turkish immigrants to Germany and there are plenty of other quite successful Turkish immigrants in all kind of industries and the academia. Maybe the problem isn't Turks but you? Thank god your racism isn't shared by that many Europeans.
- teknopaul 1y ago
  [flagged]
- eviks 1y ago
  That doesn't explain the same poor operational quality before it became a liability
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rwmj 1y ago
You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
- cromka 1y ago
  You use the same system for Business visas. Hard to imagine US wouldn’t want those as easy as possible.
  - nkoren 1y ago
    Hard to imagine that the US wouldn't be as paranoid, self-sabotaging, and bureaucratically inept as possible? </sarcasm>
  - jimz 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - cogogo 1y ago
      My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Spouses always get better treatment as there is a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.
        cogogo 1y ago
        I would love to see data that backs this up. While definitely plausible the pathway she followed to naturalization was based on time in country and not our marriage. I didn’t need to push but I’ve generally found my congressman (who is also almost our neighbor) to be pretty unresponsive on any other issue. My understanding - which may not be correct - is the length of the process primarily depends on your country of origin and secondarily on how you are eligible. Very interested in any source showing that a relatively normal process has pushed out from months to years.
karel-3d 1y ago
As I wrote elsewhere; they subcontract the bot protection to F5, an external company that I see for some reason a lot on old/horrible banking websites.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  F5 is huge in enterprise and academia for firewall/VPN/load-balancer services
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
The VISA appointment scheduling site rate limits to a ridiculous degree these days. As in refresh your page within 10seconds and get a 429 error. That's probably because of the fact that the appointments are near impossible to get, they only allow booking a few months out and it's always completely booked. So everyone was refreshing (or if clever botting) to get an appointment slot.
supportengineer 1y ago
>> the system just kick her out The "waterfall model" is a toxic way of thinking that pervades corporate management. Simplistic minds can't fathom any states other than "done" or "not done". Corporations are determined to crush the human soul. That is why it's not a progressive series of forms, saving your progress all along.
- smithkl42 1y ago
  More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired in any real-world corporation that wants to survive, and it's precisely the fact that you can't get fired by the federal government that allows this sort of thing to continue.
dansimco 1y ago
I had this problem too last year. I found, at the time, it was the website was poorly managing the session in some browsers causing the timeout countdown to not be reset on activity. I had to find a windows computer and use microsoft edge I think (maybe it was chrome). But no browser on my mac would not have that issue.
sharno 1y ago
Whenever I'm filling a long form on an official website, I feel like I'm racing against an invisible clock because of this session time out thing that happened to me countless times.
gmueckl 1y ago
I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login. These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way. Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting. I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city. Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun. With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update. Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that? I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections. Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...
svnee 1y ago
Hey, this is actually something I have a keen interest in as I'm fighting my government (as an MP) to drop those scammers where possible. Do you have any media links to send me about them selling the "good hours" on the black market? Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. So that is part of my mission as an MP and tech-entrepreneur. Any help and pointers is welcome.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Hi, about the Schengen visa situation in Turkey you can find articles like these that describe how the appointments are on the black market(In Turkish but I'm sure AI will do good job translating): https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikti-randevular-karaborsaya-dustu/ https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikt... On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially. In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice. Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error. She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.
dent9 1y ago
> In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no. No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go > According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants. > It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry. > Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years. > Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.

filoleg 1y ago

This is patently false for one reason - once someone has a U.S. green card and has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship, the application form and process are the same for everyone, regardless of how they got their green card (through work, marriage, asylum, investment, etc.). Once you are eligible to apply, the whole process is basically form N400->biometrics->interview (just doublechecking your name and other paper info, takes 5 minutes)->civics test->ceremony. However, the timelines and process for getting the green card itself is different depending on the nature of your visa, and they will indeed try to check for scam marriages before you get your green card (if you were applying for it through the marriage visa).

bluGill 1y ago
I stand corrected.
klipt 1y ago
Not exactly, if you're married to a citizen the residence requirement is 3 years not 5, and the form clearly distinguishes the 3 and 5 year options (3 years requires extra evidence of marriage and spouse's US citizenship)
- filoleg 1y ago
  Yes, I am aware, which is why my grandparent comment said “[…] once someone […] has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship.” The amount of time one has to wait before meeting the residency requirement (aka before they can apply for the US citizenship) depends on other circumstances. With the default being 5 years (technically 4 years and 9 months, because by the time process finishes and you get your citizenship, you will hit the required 5y mark, so they officially let people apply at 4y9mo mark; there is even a first-party "early filing calculator" tool[0]), and the number going down depending on whether it was through marriage, whether you served in the US military and applied for the expedited process, etc. However, my post explicitly mentioned that I was talking about the time one has to wait after they apply for the US citizenship, to which this has zero relevance. 0. https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-early-filing-calculator https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-early-filing-calculator

giantg2 1y ago

I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.

speakfreely 1y ago
It's not new. Rabid ideologues on the other side blamed Obama for things that pre-dated his administration, as well. Some people just can't be rational when it comes to politicians they don't like.
reaperducer 1y ago
I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense. Many federal web sites were very quickly altered or replaced by the new administration. This is common. Work begins on some web sites immediately after the election. For example, when a new president is sworn in, the White House web site flips immediately. More to the parent poster's point, it has been widely reported in the legitimate media repeatedly that many federal web sites have been replaced or significantly altered by the current administration. There's an entire pseudo-department for it that also makes headlines for its greater transgressions. Add to that severe and sudden budget and staffing cuts, and like all government functions -- you get what you pay for.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  So you claim the visa website was also changed by this administration?
zzzeek 1y ago
Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded). All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  Is your claim that they found zero people fraudulently collecting social security through a dead relative?
  - zzzeek 1y ago
    no, this is an entirely bad faith representation of my words as written he most certainly did not understand that the vast majority of what he perceived as "dead people getting benefits" were completely legitimate cases where beneficiaries were receiving those benefits and/or the data was encoded without a real birth/death date since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind, here's mainstream media reporting of the claims made by Trump and Musk (we can assume Trump was advised by Musk) and their extreme inaccuracy: https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased-false-claims-doge-ed2885f5769f368853ac3615b4852cf7 https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...
    - monkeyelite 1y ago
      > since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind, No but I am glad he took action to fix it. The Cobol 150 year thing is also incorrect and was widely criticized in tech circles: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/did-missing-corrupt-dates-in-cobol-default-to-1875-05-20 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/did...
      - zzzeek 1y ago
        Musk wasn't criticizing COBOL he was criticizing a specific thing he misunderstood in social security code which people in that thread said as much. I think you're trying to see something you want to see there.
wat10000 1y ago
Indeed, the real problem is a pervasive attitude that the USA is the best country in the world by far and everyone is clamoring to get in. We don't really care if foreigners come or not, and they'll come anyway, so why bother making the process friendly?
shazbotter 1y ago
People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.
- ThrowMeAway1618 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - shazbotter 1y ago
    I hadn't even considered that some right wing folks would be bothered by that statistic, as if deportations were good, actually. But no, I'm sure it does bother some folks in the right.

throw10920 1y ago

Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only. It's bad enough that in some cases I believe the designers should be threatened with legal penalties.

Our_Benefactors 1y ago
This. The website for buying treasury products is straight out of the year 2002. The login is so bad I would never consider buying them there - the service fee charged by brokerages is absolutely worth it in this case.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Which brokerages charge fees for purchasing US Treasuries? Schwab definitely doesn't. Really the only reason you need TreasuryDirect is for buying Series I bonds (and maybe a few other niche Treasury products), which are not available through brokerages.
  - aianus 1y ago
    Schwab folds their fees into their bid/ask spread, they're not doing it for free.
- teiferer 1y ago
  Makes it obvious which lobby has a hand in this, doesn't it?
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Back when interest rates peaked around that period I bought a huge number of I bonds which were a great investment —- got fired by my broker because I interrupted a sales presentation with “why don’t I just buy I bonds?” Back then I thought Treasury Direct was great.
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
> user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites I discovered this when it was late at night and I was procrastinating going to bed and I was curious what my estimated Social Security benefit would be at retirement so I tried to log into mySSA and it said the website is closed from like 11 PM to 5 AM or something like that. I couldn't believe it. I could understand a weekly several-hour maintenance/batch processing window, but DAILY?
PaulHoule 1y ago
That e-filing web site for taxes has never worked for my son because he can’t complete the id.me process, it might be as simple as you are an unperson if you use an android phone or maybe because he’s just started in the workforce he does not have a long history of tax filing and credit history to match up with. Two years in a row we’ve been able to fill out a 1040 and the NY state equivalent and make a paper submission in less time than it takes to reach an operator on hold. These identity verification services look like a scam to me. LinkedIn incessantly hassles me to verify with CLEAR and it always fails without a clear error message, either “it just doesn’t work” or my hair has grown too much since I got my driver’s license or it is making me take my glasses off and comparing to a driver’s license photo where I am wearing glasses.
- smithkl42 1y ago
  The id.me process is absolutely horrific.
  - IT4MD 1y ago
    I'm not sure the word horrific is up to carrying the weight of just how bad id.me is. Still, a great effort.
- jofla_net 1y ago
  >These identity verification services look like a scam to me. Even if their intent is to run an 'honest' business, the method of bouncing a user around to god knows how many domains during the process becomes effectively indistinguishable from a compromised service, and the alternative of having each site host their own id verification system screams, HACK US. I can see users becoming increasingly accustomed to getting out their cards several times during a sign-up and not having the foggiest idea of where their information went to.
xenadu02 1y ago
Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules. Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent. As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.
- anticensor 1y ago
  Digital Service didn't shut down, it just temporarily got retasked to DOGE.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    It wasn't temporarily retasked, it was reorganized and permanently repurposed and renamed the US DOGE Service, and then within that reorganized service, a subordinate temporary organization was created called the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization that was scheduled to sunset not later than July 4, 2026. (All but 65 of USDS's pre-reorg employees were also fired as part of the reorg, and 21 of those remaining 65 employees did a mass resignation.) If you visit their website, you will notice that except for historical documents, there is no full name branding at all; mostly only the logo and the occasional "USDS", when prior to the reorg (as can be seen on the Wayback machine) the original full name was prominent.
crote 1y ago
It starts to make a lot more sense when you realise there is a huge group in the US actively trying to make the government fail. It's pretty hard to make a good and user-friendly website when every few years some high-level people try to kneecap you. These aren't unsolvable problems. The UK, for example, had invested a lot of time and effort into making their websites user-friendly. In most countries filing taxes online is something you can do during your lunch break - without paying the Turbotax maffia. Driver's license? You can order that online, and make an appointment for a 15-minute window to pick it up. If interacting with the government is painful, it is almost always because someone benefits from it being painful.