The Presidential Text Alert Has a Long, Strange History | Hacker News Reader

The Presidential Text Alert Has a Long, Strange History

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33 pointskposehn15 comments

If the system had been called a "National Alert", since most other alerts are typically "Regional Alerts", then I suspect a lot of the sour taste and politics in this would neatly go away. Calling it a "Presidential Alert" suggests it's a direct line of communication with the President, when the system is clearly managed by an agency with the authority to issue these alerts.

Some additional information about PERKI: http://web.archive.org/web/20060401172542/http://www.geociti...

(also, "HFR till end of the world confirmed" is amazing. Must add that sort of thing to a software project sometime)

I don't know why everyone got so angry about this. I don't like Trump in the slightest, but it seems like we should test, at least once, any emergency broadcasting system that we think could be important/useful in the event of a national disaster.

And it's not like this is classified or secret, either. Go into the settings on any smartphone, and you can see that this is implemented.

:shrug: I don't know, just doesn't seem like a big deal

A lot of people think that Trump will be hated for anything he does, no matter what it is. Being relentlessly derided for testing a public safety system seems like a case in point for that.

I know a lot of trump haters and I don’t know a single person that got angry. Lots of jokes have been made is all. Surely because Trump already uses a short messaging system to promote himself.

Edit: I mean he thinks the FBI should be his own loyal personal police force so it’s not a stretch to consider him applying that philosophy elsewhere. I think it’s unlikely but definitely not impossible. I can understand more paranoid people being concerned. If Obama had done it, there would’ve been a similar reaction from the paranoid.

> Go into the settings on any smartphone, and you can see that this is implemented.

Not on iOS. Out of curiosity I'd turned off both "AMBER Alerts" and "Emergency Alerts", and still received the "Presidential Alert" alert. It's a different class of alert.

The Emergency Alert System can’t be turned off on any phones.

Sure it can, just patch it out

Whereas I disabled Amber alerts but not emergency alerts, and I also did not get the alert from the Orange Volcano of Hate.

Dunno.

All my alerts are on. I regularly get amber alerts, but I got nothing as of yet.

This could have been where you were located.

My parents have a nano cell (live in the country out of tower range). And while they were on network, they were not connected to a proper cell tower. The alert wasn't conveyed to nano cells and the like that were wifi connected.

I am not sure how that would affect amber and emergency alerts and if they get them.

I've known about the president alerts as long as I've owned a cell phone and that it can't be disabled has never sat well with me and I've considered rooting just to remove it. I don't approve of unilaterally allowing some external entity to force execution of some procedure on my device without my consent.

What's the bet that Trump will start using this in-place of his Twitter account..

The "Presidential Alert" is not actually managed by the president. And I don't mean that he delegates it or something--the whitehouse doesn't run it.

All of the agencies involved in running the various alerts are part of the executive branch and ultimately report to the WH.

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