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Comment by ivyirwin | Hacker News Reader

I was in Dallas when this happened. I can attest to the eeriness of sirens going off all over town with no idea what they mean. In Texas we're accustomed to tornado sirens, but when the skies are clear and they are going off, makes you wonder what might be happening - especially when it lasts for over an hour.

But what really struck me was how much we expect instant information these days. Took over 30 minutes to figure out what was happening. No coverage on local news, no "reverse 911" alerts indicating a problem (or lack thereof). Google eventually surfaced a tweet by the Dallas Morning News indicating it was a false alarm and they were asking city hall for answers.

Not sure what the protocol is for alerting people not to mind the blaring alarms, but seems like something should have happened given that 311 and 911 were overwhelmed with inquiries.

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Tbh it might be best to not have protocols for ignoring sirens.

I think it's less "ignoring sirens" and more "communicating about emergency alerts". Even if the siren legitimately went off during clear skies, people would be confused and you'd want a way to communicate why the sirens are going off. In most places around the US, they use the Emergency Alert System for that, pushing the message to TVs, radios, and cell phones. Already the EAS is set up with a protocol to let you know it's safe to ignore this alert, they test the alerts and say "this is only a test". And they already set off sirens that they expect you to ignore, in my area it's every Friday at noon.

I had the same thought. IF hackers can get into the sirens themselves, what would stop someone from telling people to ignore sirens in an actual emergency.

It was pretty eerie walking outside past midnight to clear skies and sirens all around

but it only took about 2 minutes for me to find a tweet about what was happening

Part of me suspects that there might be something in this related to current events. If I were to spitball ideas about motives and modus operandi, it feels like the kind of thing a state actor would tamper with, and in terms of style I'd gravitate toward looking in North Korea's direction, since it feels like their style.

Why do it? Raising noise with false alarms, desensitizes the intended signal of an alarm, ruining signal-to-noise, as people slack off about responding to alerts. It also serves as a probe to see what an actual outcome would look like. There's no profit (no money), and no incentive to whip emergency responders up into a confused state, for most non-state actors.

Even SWATTING is usually more targeted, with the prank being played on a specific person. Sometimes SWATTING serves to distract the target from something under their control. That doesn't seem to be present here.

North Korea's hacks usually come across as sort of impish in a lot of ways. They seem to like the attention of getting into the news. Messing with something reminiscent of air raid warnings seems to fit the personality of their general profile, given their ballistic missile ambitions. Other state actors in the news lately, probably wouldn't be as interested in domestic civil defense systems in the U.S.

They (whomsoever is responsible) might be motivated to do something like this (if it were a North Korean team) given some of the sabre rattling going around this season. It rings of something that would score points with Dear Leader.

But then again, yeah, maybe this is just the typical sort of "because it's there" hack, and some script kiddie found his way into another cookie jar.

I was going to joke that I'm surprised this wasn't posed as "Russian hackers set of sirens" considering that the US currently tries to pin everything on them but it seems you beat me to it -- and with Poe's law in full effect, too.

I don't know, I think Americans are right to be concerned about and sensitive to Russian cyberattacks:

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

I can almost guarantee this was just a kid messing around. There's no real motive for anyone else.

I'm not saying that I agree that it was a foreign power that did this, but there are motives. If you can turn the sirens on and keep them on for a while, you can probably turn them off and keep them off for a while. That could be bad in a situation where they really, really needed to be turned on.

The nation state actor who cried "BWOOOOOOOOOO"? That is, if you turn on the sirens often enough, maybe they'll be ignored in an emergency.

That might be more plausible when it starts happening repeatedly. It's hard to compare it to the boy who cried wolf when we only have a single occurrence.

While I agree this is the most obvious suspect, the crippling effect it had on emergency services like 911 probably got the attention of more nefarious players.

>I can almost guarantee this was just a kid messing around.

Or someone pushed the wrong button. Remember, this is the same city that threw T-Mobile under the bus a month ago saying their callers were 'ghost calling' their 911 system with a bug causing the lines to clog.

In that case, it turned out to be actual callers trying to get through and the calls weren't being answered because a quarter of the already understaffed call center called out. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/dallas-city-hall/2017/03/20/...

So yeah, I'm not betting on hackers for this one. I'm betting on incompetence.

The above comment is a ghostly gray right now. Why? cyanotic is merely stating a conjecture out loud. There's nothing rude in the comment, it's not attacking your favorite company/paradigm/X and he even concedes to the "default"/"correct" opinion at the end.

Why downvote that? Are we Reddit now?

No, hence the downvotes. His comments belong among the conspiracy theorists over at reddit, always ready with a few tea-leaves to read.

So we're punishing thinking?

> conspiracy theorists ... always ready with a few tea-leaves to read.

That's how you see it. I didn't see that comment as a "conspiracy theory." It wasn't a rambling rant. I'd say you're always ready to see everyone as a conspiracy theorist if they don't parrot the default explanation.

In any case, remember that people voicing concerns about widespread government snooping were shut down and derided as "conspiracy theorists" barely 10 years ago.

Honestly, more than 50% of the downvoted comments I see on HN do not deserve to be downvoted. Less than half of them are rule-breaking, rude, useless, etc.

Frankly, downvoting here has become just as bad as on Reddit: it happens because people don't like the comment for any reason, including, e.g. that what they had for lunch is giving them indigestion at the moment they lay eyes on it (but mostly it's because they simply disagree, which is shameful).

This particular comment is full of speculation, but it's not unreasonable speculation, and the linked article gives no details to contradict it. I wish we could have an interesting discussion about what might be, rather than mindlessly censor it by downvoting so that we can only have approved conversations.

This just reinforces my conclusion that the only kind of voting should be upvoting. If a comment breaks a rule, flag it, otherwise leave it alone, and concentrate on upvoting good comments. This shaming-by-graying is becoming very tiresome. It's ridiculous that it only takes a few random downvoters to turn a comment gray, because it's not an indication of what the community as a whole thinks, only those who happened to downvote it (after which the likelihood of it being upvoted by people who do like it diminishes, because it being downvoted decreases the likelihood of anyone seeing it).

TLDR: Voting on HN is badly broken. It only takes a few selfish, childish people to kill comments and prevent the community from even having a chance to correct the downvotes.

You can see [dead] comments if you enable the show-dead flag in your profile. Also, you can vouch a [dead] comment to revive it. (You need to have a minimal amount of karma for this.)

And if you see something egregious, you can send an email to the mods hn@ycombinator.com

I've had show-dead on for a long time, and I use custom CSS [1] which even makes dead posts stand out more.

The downvote abuse here is ubiquitous. The mods don't care, I supposed because 'pg decreed long ago that downvoting for disagreement is acceptable. The finger-wagging of the invisible hand is working as intended.

That doesn't make it right.

1: https://github.com/alphapapa/solarized-everything-css/blob/m...

@alphapapa: 'Honestly, more than 50% of the downvoted comments I see on HN do not deserve to be downvoted'..

They've even downvoted that comment :)

As expected.

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