DV lottery magic show

Everyone loves a magic show and US Department of State are performing a really incredible magic  trick right now. More on that later…

So – 24 hours on from my post last night where I explained why I thought the people with session timed out were possibly winners. After these 24 hours I am MORE confident that is the case. Why?

  1. We have seen no winners at all. Anywhere. None. That is not possible.
  2. The session timed out cases continue to be 100% consistent (and if you have a not selected case also you can alternate between working and session timed out). This rules out PC issues, browser issues, network, server load or any other random glitch. C O N S I S T E N T. In IT a consistent bug is the easiest type to identify and track down.
  3. There are some organizations who check cases on behalf of hundreds or thousands of people. They are seeing about 1 in 100 cases with the consistent  session timed out behavior. And guess what your average chance of being selected is… go on guess! Well it is about 1 in 100. Really.
  4. We have two behaviors possible (not selected or selected) and apart from people hitting server load times we have two distinct behaviors identified. Not selected cases and session timed out. So – if the not selected are the not selected once… what could the other ones be??
  5. As I mentioned in an update to my post from yesterday there is an obvious logic to what they would do with the programming. This fits beautifully into that logic.

So as time goes on I am more and more convinced. Really – I am very cautious about giving false hope, but this just seems so obvious!

 

Ok so what is the magic show?

Well being a government organization US DoS are slow to react and well, sometimes just slow. So they eventually posted this in their FB site.

usdos

Basically they are saying they can see that 12000 selectees have logged in and seen they are winners. So US DoS then performed a superb bit of magic and made those 12000 selectees all vanish. Gone. Because no one has produced a single winner. Not one. Nice trick US DoS!

 

Obviously hundreds of people are posting information about the session timed out – and this was my reply to them hoping this would be passed to their IT team.

usdos2

 

So – all we can do is wait. Hopefully someone working for USDoS will be a little smart and read some of the comments – and when they do – we should get a fix.

 

This does not need a re-draw – just a fix to the notification aspect of their system.

Fingers crossed for a fix tomorrow.

Oh and if US DoS IT gurus are reading this – call me – I can explain your screwup to you…