Re: U.S. test of national alerts on Oct. 4 at 2:20pm EDT (1820 UTC)

[Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

On 10/4/23 6:15 PM, Sabri Berisha wrote:
> If this is true, and I will take your word for it, that is outrageous.

Why is this outrageous?

> My wife is a teacher who works with special needs kids, and her phone 
> went of twice (the second time 15 minutes after the first). This was 
> very disruptive as you can imagine.

I can understand and appreciate the situation.

> Obviously, I made sure all of the emergency notifications were set 
> to OFF on her phone. If setting this nonsense to OFF is not working, 
> why even have the menu option?

Because the menu options apply to -- let's go with -- lesser priority / 
lower authority alerts.

> The government has no right to disrupt the day of 350 million people, 
> however much the self-appointed emergency communication "professionals" 
> like to think so.

I can't speak to the government's right to do something or not.

But I can see why governments would want the ability for one person, or 
their proxies, to have the technical capability to send an alert to all 
devices in their territory.

I think this is a case of where four nines of alerts can be suppressed 
in software, but the fifth nine deliberately can't be suppressed.

> Furthermore, it's simply unnecessary. It is incredibly easy to add a 
> one-bit flag indicating whether or not it's a test to such alerts.

There is a test flag.

My phone shows an option to ignore tests.

My phone does ignore weekly tests without any problem.

It seems to be that the powers that be decided to send this test without 
the test bit set.  --  Or perhaps the presidential indicator is mutually 
exclusive to the test bit.

> This whole test was a display of poor engineering and disrespect for 
> people's first amendment rights.

I disagree.  But I digress.

> Thanks,

:-)



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die