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Comment by rishirishi | Hacker News Reader

Pickering area -- 40 km away from Toronto. Nonetheless, training exercise that erroneously issued a provide-wide alert.

The Pickering plant is only about 3 km from the city of Toronto's border. While it was selected in the 60s as a relatively remote site, it's now a heavily urbanized area considered part of Greater Toronto.

It's strange that this article says "Toronto area" - it was sent to the entire province of Ontario.

I'm in Gatineau, Québec and we got it too, so it even got broadcast to neighbouring provinces.

I was wondering about this today. How granular are the 'zones' used for these alerts? Is it just by political boundary? For something like Pickering, it would be useful to have a more geographical zone -- including parts of the US. Could the alert be sent out and limited to cell towers within a selected zone? Is the current system using tower location?

They have the ability to geotarget them, but fail at it regularly.

From what I understood from spectrum auctions, Gatineau Quebec is a part of the Ottawa area, so they're probably a part of Ontario side when it comes to cell system back-end.

I posted the news link to HN with this title. I now agree it's not accurate but didn't realize the scale of the alert at the time.

Pickering is considered part of the GTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Toronto_Area

What kind of alert boundaries are there? Presumably radiation doesn't follow political boundaries.

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