Re: NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study

[Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>]

On 1/3/21 10:01 AM, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 03, 2021 at 03:26:07AM -0500, Valdis Kl??tnieks wrote:
> > Meanwhile, this causes yet another problem - if Hulu has to be able to
> > know what alerts should be piped down to my device, this now means that
> > every single police and public safety agency has to be able to send the
> > alerts to Hulu (and every other streaming company) - and do this securely.
> And then there's another problem (that I'm going to bet you've already
> thought of, given what you've written here): Hulu and every other
> streaming company need to be able to authenticate the alerts from
> all those different agencies.  Those agencies also need to secure
> their sending infrastructure...and good luck with that.
>
> And then there's another problem, which is that once all those different
> agencies have this facility, they're going to (ab)use it as they see fit.
> I've noticed that over the last decade or so that weather alerts I've
> received are covering increasingly-less-severe events, e.g., we've
> slowly gone from "there's a tornado on the ground" to "there's going
> to be a thunderstorm".  And at this particular point in history, I can
> think of one person who would be using this every five minutes simply
> because it's there.
>
> ---rsk

One of the things that makes this challenging is that not all alerts are 
created equal. I just checked and the California earthquake alert system 
is now live. For that you have maybe 10 seconds so it needs to be hella 
fast at relaying the information. Other alerts are less strict, but 
still have a real time components like the tornado alerts. And then 
there are things that effectively have no real time component like Amber 
alerts.

I'm curious how they built this:

https://earthquake.ca.gov/

Mike