>Sending out a screeching alert to 30million+ people over 250 million square miles in the middle of the night should only be used in the absolute DIREST OF CIRCUMSTANCES… circumstances like “Texas is under threat from hurricane/chemical leak/nuclear weapons, seek shelter now!” It should never be used for something that’s utterly irrelevant to 99.99% of people.
Emergency, emergency little Deborah Smith was kidnapped by her mom Sue Smith!
I’m sure there’s usually more to the story, but half of them sound like custody disputes.
I’m not sure public officials understand how fragile public trust and support is. Stop chipping away at it please.
For children reported missing: Over 1/4 of are abducted by a family member, about 8% are kidnapped by a non-family member. You'll note that this leaves nearly 2/3 of missing children as not being classified as abducted.
> I’m sure there’s usually more to the story, but half of them sound like custody disputes.
I mean if you classify forcing a minor to live as a fugitive while telling them that their other parent doesn't want them and will hurt them as a "custody dispute" then yeah.
Regardless of how you want to label it, that doesn't sound like a case that merits use of a public emergency broadcast system.
While my heart goes out to anyone hurt in the line of duty, I'm in total agreement that this is a extreme over-reaction to the public.
Source: I live in Texas.
I had a buddy who worked as a lifeguard at a local swimming hole. If there was a major accident (person needs immediate medical attention), they'd call an ambulance "code three", i.e. lights and sirens and run over any pedestrians in the way, or something like that. If the situation was less dire, they'd call it as code two, getting a less risky intervention.
So of course at some point, someone in a minor accident got taken in on a code two call and developed some complications that might have been avoided with slightly less delay. IDK if there was a lawsuit or what, but from then on, even minor incidents had to be called as code 3. This is why we can't have nice things.
"Why didn't this incident get Code Three?"
"Because it didn't meet the criteria."
You'll still get complaints, but at least it's in writing.
And if you can't be sued for following the policy, that's guaranteed release from liability, and the public haaaaates that. Vaccine companies have release from liability, for example, because otherwise nobody would make a product which is more-or-less mandatory and guarantees at least some complications over a large enough sample size, and this has spawned an entire culture of angry conspiracy theories.
There's no mechanistic way around this problem other than user education.
like sending too many blue alerts, the vaccination theatrics, regulatory capture, and conspiracy theories have now done true damage to actual vaccines that confer lasting immunity.
Or is your point that the vaccine just gave a temporary respite that ultimately saved few lives relative to the cost?
The people who died with covid didn't necessarily die of covid, but public health officials followed policies of lumping them together, and govts incented them to do it: "more money for covid". Old and infirm people, the morbidly obese, respiratory illnesses, etc. suffered the worst, as they do from the flu. Young people were hardly affected, though young people seem to have suffered more from the vaccine side effects and the socialization developmental deficit.
The conferred immunity from catching covid protects you from reinfection far longer than the so-called vaccines, because these mRNA vaccines don't work as traditional vaccines do, that's why (along with the profit motive) we were all told to start getting boosters essentially right away.
When an event like this causes excess deaths, it is followed by a period with a death deficit, simply because many of people "who were going to die soon anyway" died early, and they aren't around to die later, it's accepted science. That has to have happened with covid because they told us those people were dying, but try to get your hands on the statistics. I'm not saying people didn't get sick from covid or that it wasn't serious, But the coverups and stonewalling stop us from getting to the truth about what happened.
but it is not because of vaccinations that we don't worry about covid today, and the vaccinations we got had more side effects (in no small part because they were not tested).
I knew I would get downvoted for this because there is a political class that is, in HN terms, not comfortable with people "being curious" about it, they'd rather censor. But since GP engaged in gratuitous soapboxing and propagandizing I thought I'd spend some karma to speak up.
The problem comes when you present an experimental vaccine that hasn't gone through ordinary trials and requires you to sign a liability waiver before you can take it, but then superciliously impose penalties and restrictions on people who choose to decline. That is how you destroy public trust and foment conspiracy theories.
What I really hate is when the weather alert system is abused to communicate other information. Weather is relevant to my life. All these other alerts are irrelevant to me because the probability of a homebody in a big city spotting a person or car based on a generic description is exceedingly low. I should be able to elect to receive only alerts I am interested in.
- Texas, unlike other states, seems to blast all of their emergency alerts statewide (and it's a big state)
- Unlike other alerts, this was sent as a public safety emergency alert (not amber alert, which most Texans turn off due to the aforementioned point) and sent at 4am, meaning it woke up almost the entire state
it's the proverbial wolf-crying boy kind of thing. how did it not occur to the people in charge of that alarm system is beyond me.
There’s no downside for cops to do this, they get free publicity and these are federal programs to lean on.
Apparently there’s little oversight accountability or basic constraints as well.
Oh well!
The tornado sirens here get tested at noon on Saturdays.
"So that people in the area quickly learn to ignore sirens, regardless of how long ago they moved in."
And if having twice as many for redundancy were a viable option financially, they'd already be installed. Doubling the density would be a good thing, but this shit is expensive.
One county near me in Ohio does weekly tests, and conducts hands-on PM checks every spring and every fall for every siren.
(Background: I have been personally involved with these PM checks, the sale and commissioning of new sirens, and implementing the back-end controls for these sirens.
I think I've personally done everything with them but plant the poles in the ground.)
Switzerland does annual testing. The media mention the date a few days in advance (it's also something semi-static like "the first Wednesday of month X"), everyone knows when the test is coming, and I'm pretty sure people would pay attention if the sirens went off on any other day.
Other places test much more frequently, which feels like harmfull overkill, but an annual test seems very sensible.
Germany reintroduced annual testing after doing no testing for a long time and found out what you would expect (the system didn't work). It went so badly that they cancelled next year's test to be able to fix their system. A flood decided to test the system for real, the main difference in outcome being that this time the failure came with a high body count.
After that, they overhauled their doomed-to-fail custom app bullshit and started using cell broadcast (like e.g. the US) and a few annual tests later, they seem to be in a somewhat better shape now.
The audid linked two posts above is titled "Feuerwehralarm" = fire brigade alarm.
You also want to make sure that people know what the sirens sound like (no, they don't sound the same everywhere), and a national test day is a great opportunity to remind people how they should act if the sirens go off for real. Having them go off once a year at a pre-announced time also isn't particularly disruptive.
The proper way to test this would be to also make sure that e.g. the radio stations are informed of a test scenario and broadcast it (sirens means "turn on the radio and check for what is happening", which means the sirens alone are useless without that part of the alerting working). This would also help if someone lives under a rock and knows how to act but forgot that testing is happening.
Since this part is not being tested, I think there's a high risk that the announcement in the radio won't work in an actual emergency, and an announcement on the Internet is extremely likely to be unreachable due to overload.
I think it would be ideal to actually run large scale emergency response tests (pick a small town, pick a disaster, and actually run the whole scenario, either asking people to volunteer, compensating them, or making it mandatory under a draft-like law). Yes, this would be extremely disruptive (hence a small town), but from having run emergency responses (to IT incidents, not life-or-death incidents), my experience is that any procedure that isn't regularly practiced won't work when needed, and running exercises and fixing what you find will improve this a lot.
Which is sort of the issue - if you don't have disasters often to keep everyone glad of the emergency alerting system, they become annoyed by it instead. Maybe a climate-change-induced uptick in natural disasters will remind everyone why they exist...
> Just after 11 p.m. Thursday, investigators say Plant and another officer were serving an arrest warrant for burglary when Altman opened fire and ran away.
> Investigators report Altman ran out the back door, shot Chief Plant and fled the scene. Chief Plant was transported to a hospital here in Lubbock, where he is stable.
https://www.kcbd.com/2024/10/04/texas-police-chief-brought-l...
From leaked emails:
Hey folks, We have a situation on Westside neighborhoods (specifically CPD 11th District) where folks between the ages of 16-25 are congregating outside in groups and not heeding the shelter in place message. Mayor would like to know if we can do a targeted texting in that geography to spread the following messages:
[...]
3. CPD will do a verbal warning but if you repeatedly disregard the warning, CPD will issue citations and/or arrest.
4. By not following these directives, you are putting yourself at risk but also your family members, particularly those who live with you who are elderly or sick. Not sure who is in charge but I think I have included all relevant people here. If not, please add. Can you tell me if such a geo-coded texting is possible and when we might be able to put it out? We probably need to do it on a regular basis for the message to sink in. Let everyone on this chain know.
I'm sorry, but WEA is not intended for that type of usage. It is supposed to be used in dire emergencies only. People have the ability to opt out of messages at any time. If we inundate them with messages they do not find useful, they will opt out and won't be alerted the next time we have an Active Shooter Incident, Tornado Warning, Ordered Evacuation, Amber Alert, or some other extreme situation.
Anna and I spoke. CPD believes Saturday at 5 pm would be a good time to send out the next one. Perhaps once a week but we will monitor the dispersal orders to see if this is a continued need. Thank you for flexibility.
And if you don't block them they send emails every day with something dismissive like: "If you cannot make the decision, redirect to someone in your company that can", or "I guess you are too busy now but...".
With AI, the emails are becoming even worse, someone mentioned the college I attended and tried to get a fun fact "I saw you attended X, did you enjoy the winter festival?". We never had that.
I just got one of these for the first time today:
> Saw on LinkedIn that you attended <my university>. Did you ever experience the Sustainability Festival?
This is my corp email as well, and the spam filter only catches maybe ~80% of these types of spam. Very frustrating.
I've lived in 2 other decently large states including California and left Amber Alerts enabled because they were infrequent and caused me no trouble - and they were infrequent because you only got alerts for your immediate area. As soon as I moved to Texas I had to disable them because they're all statewide, so your phone just gets blown up with them if you disable them.
Alerting a 5 mile radius about a killer on the loose is reasonable. A 600+ mile radius is not.
I probably get about one amber alert per quarter, and severe weather alerts a few times a year. I’ve never gotten a “blue” alert in my life.
I used to live in NJ and they sent these types of alerts all the time. AMBER alerts in the middle of the night, "Flash Flood" alerts after two drops of rain. It made no sense and I turned them all of off.
I live in IL now and I turned them back on because tornados are actually a thing here but also I haven't received any other irrelevant alert.
A crowded channel grows noisier, but there's no feedback.
Can a gamed metric become valuable again, or does it likewise expire?
"Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback."
“This app would like to send you push notifications!” -> Deny. “It’s just for (legitimate reason)!” Fine. “And marketing!” -> Uninstall app. “Are you sure?” - I’ve never been more sure in my life.
There’s a setting in chrome & Firefox to block websites from even being able to ask for the ability to send notifications. It’s one of the first things I set when I setup a new computer.
The chatbot popped out an ad. What do people think, we’re on Netflix?
After about three weeks, students blocked all texts from the institution's numbers.
We can't have nice things because there are so many of us to ruin them. Ever read the Consul's Tale in Hyperion?
Nope, it was an elderly person who had wandered off from a rest home, in some far part of LA.
Scared the shit out of me.
I've had 6 SMS messages from the Police in the last 12 months, all for missing persons, every singe one of which is in my suburb or an adjacent one.
But cops are gonna cop. I'd bet if they were chasing someone who'd shot a cop they'd SMS blast the entire country, because fuck you civilians!
ACAB
Of course, over here they do Amber Alerts on the main emergency channel for things the next state over instead…
Once I was awaked by an ungodly alarm noise that I didn't know my smartphone could make, and which should only be used for something apocalyptic like a tsunami warning (e.g., you have 3 minutes to get to the top of the hill, or you will probably die). Some kind of Amber Alert, to the greater metro area of millions of people. So I disabled it.
And, on a local emergency alert thing, someone used it to announce a city street cleaning or routine snow removal. I then went some trouble to opt-out of the alerts, more than it took to opt-in, like they wanted me to waive liability.
(Speaking of street cleaning, if only I could get the city to stop routinely driving a truck up and down the street in early morning, blaring numerous times over loudspeakers that there's a street cleaning sometime in the next couple hours, and any cars should be moved before they are towed. Rolling through the streets, making stern announcements on loudspeakers, to be heard inside homes, is what you do to announce that you have invaded the city with tanks, and anyone caught outside will be shot. Not to repeatedly wake up a neighborhood of sleep-deprived students and researchers and hospital workers, who mostly don't even own cars.)
I'd think we're incapable of handling any real emergency, except I spent awhile listening in on local emergency services radio (police, fire, ambulance), and it's really impressive how on the ball in an emergency some can be. I wish some others -- who don't seem to have that training, experience, and discipline -- wouldn't grab the emergency alerts ball, and drop it.
If the ability to disable all alerts outright wasn't a thing, I would very seriously entertain the idea of going back to a dumbphone.
If given the means to change it to my normal notification sound, or heck, even my regular alarm... then sure, why not keep the alerts enabled.
Assuming you are in fact talking about Cambridge, MA, good luck with that. I've written to the city repeatedly over the past 10 or 12 years with no result except getting nonconsensually added to a mailing list about noise from airplanes, which I don't care about.
It is technically possible to find the messages after dismissing them, but you have to dig through a bunch of menus, they don't show up in any default messaging app (at least on stock Pixel Android)
But there is no feedback. I never get a notification that an alert has been canceled. No statistics about effectiveness. Did the alert generate tips, help solve the case? Was it something other than a custody dispute?
In January 2024, the Taiwan government issued an erroneous "presidential alert" to the entire country of 23 million people, warning of a "missile" from China. Occurring just days before a presidential election, some allege that sending the alert was politically motivated.
Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/world/asia/taiwan-alert-c...
Until I realized that the "severe flooding" warning would have been indistinguishable from the one that goes off whenever there's a nontrivial amount of rain (which is quite often during hurricane season.)
Luckily, it ended up not mattering for me. At best, it would have just explained why my trash cans had wandered into the neighbor's yard.
Seoul being close to the border with North-Korea, I first suspected that they were about missile tests. When I got an app to translate the messages, they were all about lost elders.
Seoul is a city of 10 million people.
Like, if I saw them, I would totally not do a thing to interfere with their lives, so fuck off with the alert, you know?
That's not an emergency; that's Jerry Springer material.
By law, presidential alerts cannot be disabled - but users can still turn the whole feature off. I'd assume that within the US, only the president or a high-ranking delegate is authorized to send these alerts, preserving the ability for these to actually work even if local authorities decide to flood people with bullshit on the lower levels.
Canada, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that it really wants people to not turn off Amber alerts (frequently sent in the middle of the night), so of course they use the code for presidential alerts to send them...
Part of the reason for the bad UX of these alerts is that they're legally regulated, and the laws are, or at least were overly specific, often preventing better solutions like letting the users configure the alarm behavior (i.e. you have to turn amber alerts off if you don't want to be woken up by them, rather than turning them into a regular notification). And since it's a regulated topic, even the improvements that would be possible would require legal review, i.e. once the feature is "good enough", few developers want to touch it and subject themselves to bureaucracy hell.
This system is based on cell broadcast - cell towers can send a message that will be received by all phones, without having to send it to each phone individually. The messages have channel numbers, and a set of channels are reserved for this use and most modern phones will display messages sent with those channels as alerts. That's also why e.g. Canada can seamlessly use (and abuse) the system originally designed for the US.
I think severity levels are the saving grace of any overused alerting system. Swiss severe weather alerts also have severity levels, and while the default in some of the alerting apps is excessively sensitive (notifying for rain or wind that does not pose meaningful risk unless you're out hiking), it's very clear that you can just raise the threshold rather than opt out.
In Germany we get a yearly test and that’s about it. I have been here 9 years and I think it’s the first year the test worked on my device.
In Romania you sometimes got bear alerts per SMS, even with a foreign number. It was less intrusive and kind of cool.
It feels like we need something similar for "emergency" alerts. Tornado is an emergency. Invasion is an emergency. Nuclear launch detected is an emergency. A shooting 400 miles away is a tragedy, but not a cause to immediately seek shelter.
On iOS, I believe you can get banned from the app store if you use notifications irresponsibly. Maybe Apple should have a word with Texas.
Chavez became a dictator, among other things, by _abusing the emergency alert system_ to broadcast his speeches on socialism.