Hacker News Reader

Comment by vgf | Hacker News Reader

I'm visiting Taipei at the moment. Received these alerts on the phone a few minutes before the earthquake woke me up around midnight:

https://i.imgur.com/v08yD9l.png

View on HN

I wonder why it is called a "presidential alert" while it has nothing to do with one.

Its an alert setting. basically you can turn off the other alert types, but not the presidential one.

It is a US phone on a non-US network. The cell broadcast messages may have been flagged the same as a "presidential alert" in the US but it would have a different meaning locally (e.g. "government alert", "emergency alert"). I believe the message type is just a "spare" numeric identifier that isn't defined consistently between the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

Great. So like numerics in the IRC protocol, everyone does their own, and if you’re lucky some overlap.

More specifically, as to the US category it got lumped in, Presidential alerts are the highest priority in the Wireless Emergency Alert system, followed by alerts for extreme then several imminent danger to life, followed by AMBER Alerts.

So, its not surprising that a top-priority message would show as a Presidential Alert in a US phone if the same basic technology and rough semantics are used.

probably because taiwaneses like to poke the PRC goverment and remind them all the time that they have a president?

Here's a Google translation:

https://i.imgur.com/TWZLwVY.png

Are they from a specific service, or it's a national/governmental system?

It’s from Taiwan’s earthquake early warning system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_warning_system

An annoying detail with the iOS implementation is the lack of a "copy message text" function - I wanted to paste the text into Google Translate...

The first one you received (the one is the bottom) said there is an earthquake in progress expecting certain areas to feel the shocks with level 4.

The next one is the earthquake information after it happens.

As a workaround: Google Translate, at least on Android, has a camera button on the bottom left of the text box, there you can do live translation of what's on the camera (AR style above the original text), or simply upload an existing image from your device. You can upload that screenshot and see the translation.

I think if you took a screenshot you could then submit the image to Google translate.

how strong was it in Taipei?

It felt like relatively high-amplitude lateral movements, but at the same time they weren't violent. No shaking - it was more like the building was moving around on a giant waterbed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com