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> I don’t think 100% news saturation is good for us either.

I agree. In Italy basically all the news are just about the coronavirus and nothing else, plus a lot of sensationalism ("we're all gonna die" style), and the Big Brother style press conference every day with the reports of daily numbers of cases, deaths, and recoveries.

It's so aggravating and anxiety inducing that I only check a news roundup in the morning and I shut myself away from any other news sources. Not ideal, but at this point it's the only way to make sure I'm not consumed by the constant stream of bad news.

Similar situation in Germany with regards to the news, I believe.

I wish we'd talk more about the effects of the media's reporting style on psychological health. Do we really need headlines and reports about individual deaths every day, live tickers, and an unending amount of notifications and newsletters regarding the same?

For people with anxiety disorders it can be total hell right now (talking from experience), and it's much less because of the virus itself than the reporting.

> Great Brother

Curious about this term - is that the back-translated version of "Big Brother" from 1984?

Sorry, I meant Big Brother (and yes, I back translated it from Italian). And I meant the (trash) TV show, rather than 1984.

I've just stopped following COVID-19 news entirely, and leave it to family and friends to unavoidably inform me of the latest stats they feel compelled to share. So I learn enough through osmosis without having to read how 911 is overwhelmed in NYC and see pictures of hospitals flooded with people.

There's a limit to well I can self-isolate, and I'm sure I'm already taking every possible precaution. Being more anxious will accomplish nothing.

Another option might be to read Wikipedia’s “Current events” page for pandemics situation in your country. It’s relatively concise, factual and up to date.

It’s useful also for non-pandemic times.

Guessing this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

It's the perfect case for the news media. Literally every day you can publish breaking news "Cases +X! Deaths +Y!" and it gives you a hit of anxiety so you keep checking and checking.

> It's so aggravating and anxiety inducing that I only check a news roundup in the morning and I shut myself away from any other news sources. Not ideal, but at this point it's the only way to make sure I'm not consumed by the constant stream of bad news.

I have attempted to stay away from news media since around 2018. Around last November, I decided to make a complete cut and stop consuming anything "news related" from secondary sources like podcasts, reddit comment threads etc. I expected that I'd live in ignorance, but I'd gain some peace of mind.

This change has had a far greater impact on me than what I had originally assumed. First surprise is that I still find out everything that's going on in the world that's relevant to me or people I care about. Second, I feel like I turned sober for the first time in years - I've had soo much creativity and mental energy that bloomed out of nowhere within a few days after I stopped punishing my thought process with news from the world.

There are a few things I have discovered in the past few months. First, if you put in effort to find very high quality information about an event that you hear about, you will usually find something from primary sources that are orders of magnitude better than anything that's published on popular media. Second, there really aren't that many new things happening in the world all the time - 30 mins of effort a week is usually sufficient to be on top of everything going on.

There are a ton of people who will convince you that it's your moral duty to follow news as closely as possible. It's totally not worth it.

This. I’ve been doing the same for over 10 years. No news papers, and TV, and it’s been wonderful.

I’ve regressed a bit with news subreddits under 30 minutes a day, and will read links from friends, but I’ve found that it’s mostly propaganda.

> There are a ton of people who will convince you that it's your moral duty to follow news as closely as possible. It's totally not worth it.

Most “news” is either PR or propaganda. So is “your duty” to keep consuming it.

Side note: I buy all the Australian newspapers during the Christmas holiday and force myself to go through it, and it’s always a reminder how it’s all a waste of time.

This has been my mode of operation for the last couple of years, untill the virus started impacting Australia. Now restrictions etc are changing so quickly that you pretty much need to keep up to date. Got to say it's not doing my mental health any favours.

One thing that has suprised me is the lack of any non-virus news that is around. The virus and it's fallout can't be the only thing happening in the world at the moment! The only non-virus related news I've seen over the last couple of weeks is a couple of local court cases and North Korea firing something into the ocean. Oh and we had a local government election here in Queensland which got about an inch of coverage.

This tells me that most of the normal news we get fed is pretty much non-essential filler.

I find it interesting that you lumped Reddit with Indie podcasts. Based on my experience, Reddit is incredibly toxic with a lot of low quality content. You just need a glimpse of /r/worldnews to get a feel for this. That being said, there are some excellent indie podcasts out there though.

> stop consuming anything "news related" from secondary sources like podcasts, reddit comment threads etc

And yet you're commenting here, in a news-related comment thread?

Same in France. I do not usually watch news but now my family insists on doing so, as if there were any surprising news.

Today I refused to switch on the tv and somehow nothing spectacular happened. I hope we are done with this news nonsense.

Radio is a bit better.

All the best for Italy, we were supposed to be in a week on vacation near Genua :(

We are closely watching you and hope your downtrend is real. All the best, ciao!

> We are closely watching you and hope your downtrend is real. All the best, ciao!

Thanks for the kind words. I actually did not even hear about a down trend ...

One point I want to add to what I wrote before: this stream of news can also be detrimental to interpersonal relationships during a long quarantine.

Long-term confinement can already strain some relationships, the news can make things even worse. Another point to avoid talking about it among family members.

I am actually surprised at how well this quarantine is going on for us.

The children are teenagers and they have enough work from school to keep them busy. They also have me handy, so we talk about their work quite often.

They also help with the house more than usual.

If it was not for the food which is a pain in the bottom to get, and the fact that one cannot do sport outside (biking for instance) it would not be bad at all for us (I am talking about our specific case)

It is true that we do not discuss the pandemy itself too much (as there is not much to discuss)

Your description reminded me of the British WW1 postcards [1] where, if you were admitted to hospital the messages allowed were "hope to be discharged soon" and "am going on well".

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BRITISH_FIELD_SERVIC...

Well, you were allowed to cross that out.

> there’s nothing about this pandemic that’s remotely useful to you

I've been a little overloaded by metric in tech for the past several years to the point that I sometimes call out metrics getting added as unactionable. There's a cult of metric collection because we can, not because there's anything meaningful there.

> there’s nothing about this pandemic that’s remotely useful to you

Surely it's a planning consideration for the commanders? I think they get world news so that they can inform their decision if they need to decide for example where they go if they can't contact London.

The article notes that the commanders are likely aware.

How? The ULW comms network was decommissioned years ago! How would they know?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines

Radio and satellite comms on the periscopes, among other things.

Satellites, and surfacing to periscope depth (or enough to otherwise deploy an antenna) at predetermined, randomized and secret intervals?

Risky - home base would have to know, and you know what The Hell's Angels say about secrets...

The satellites don't have to know when the subs are going to come to antenna depth to receive messages. They just broadcast them continuously, and subs receive them when they decide to.

An always broadcasting satellite may give away position.

Of the satellite, not the sub, and that's not an issue.

People know where satellites are anyway - you can literally see them in the sky. You can't hide them!

Obviously tracking an individual satellite would not provide you with any information, so I'm not sure why anyone would expect my comment to mean that.

The major countries all have thousands of merchant vessels traveling in every major shipping lane all over the world. My thinking is navies would be worried about these ships being equipped with sensors that analyze satellite signals looking for what could be intended for submarine communication. Eaves droppers wouldn't even need to break the encryption of the signal, they'd only need to be aware of a signal is being broadcast to only a specific region of the the ocean and that bears other attributes associated with military communication.

Simple solution: Don't broadcast to a specific region of the ocean. (HQ may not even know exactly where the sub is, so this is probably necessary anyways.)

Or simplest solution: don't broadcast to them at all. Which was the point I was making as to the likely reason they don't do it.

Broadcasting over a larger area reduces the ability of an adversary to infer location from the signal, but increases the likelihood of intercept. That alone might not be terribly useful, but it can be combined with other bits of information and form a more complete picture. For example, if you know when and where the sub was last docked, fleet movements, regional events that are of military interest, and you have a signal with a message you suspect was intended for them, then that's enough bits of information to be useful.

There are trade-offs. If you're required to minimize the the likelihood of discovery at all costs, then it makes sense to never even attempt communication while underway.

It's common knowledge that we communicate with submarines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines

The article confirms this:

> Salles said the situation now will be toughest for any crews that leave harbor in the weeks ahead, because they’ll know they are leaving loved ones in the midst of the pandemic and, possibly, still living in lockdown. The French government has already extended its stay-home orders once, to April 15, and said it could do so again.

> Salles said he believes those crews will get regular coronavirus updates, but won’t be told of any family deaths until they are returning to the l’Ile Longue submarine base, near Brest in Brittany.

> you have a signal with a message you suspect was intended for them

That would require you to be able to decrypt the encrypted signal that the satellite is broadcasting. Which you can't.

All these third party observers see is a bunch of digital noise continuously being broadcast by the satellites. They have no way of telling digital noise destined for a particular sub from the rest of the digital noise. So the signals convey no useful information to them.

The rather quaint processes used by the Royal Navy apparently include checking whether BBC Radio 4 is transmitting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

I guess keeping broadcasting Radio 4 no matter what has very significant priority in Her Majesty's Government's crisis plans. You can use Radio 4 to reach the whole country if needed, with I guess just a few generators.

Just for anyone wondering why Radio 4 in particular - it’s the only BBC station we have on Longwave (198? kHz), so you get over-the-horizon service from a single tower. (which is why carries the shipping forecast, and why it’s of particular interest to submarines in the Atlantic too).

So using it as a “sign of civilization” (one of multiple) sounds quaint, but with a perfectly logical reason behind it.

The funny thing is that The Archers is extremely likely to go off the air in the very near future (they can't record any at the moment and they only have a couple of weeks in the can). Since the availability of The Archers is the key sign of life for the UK we better all pray that the Boomer on duty changes shift soon! (or this whole radio 4 thing is utter bollocks)

Why aren't they recording at home? My understanding was the many of the characters record individually anyway. At least the child actors definitely did, so it must be possible to act and edit together this way. I think cartoons all record individually.

You only need a half-decent microphone.

You could do it on a bad microphone if you wanted!

The Archers is a timeless part of the background noise in many family kitchens in the UK. Seems a shame not to fight through this little piece of calm for normal families in this time of crisis.

They're building out home recording capacity right now, and will be recording from home (on a slightly reduced schedule) shortly: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52084510

"amongst other checks"

If BBC4 goes down, but you're still able to call London on a satellite phone, you don't go nuking Russia. If you have a half dozen different signs of nuclear war and BBC4 is down, it's a point in the "well shit" direction.

That's it - they don't depend on the BBC. It's more a troubleshooting step. If the light in the kitchen doesn't work, but the one in the living room does, there's something wrong with the kitchen light. If everything's off, there's something wrong with your electricity.

So if Northwood goes silent, but the cricket is uninterupted, there's probably something wrong with Northwood. If everything's gone, there's probably something wrong with your radio. But if Northwood's gone, the BBC's gone, but VOA is still up .. you start wondering if something's wrong with the UK.

(For example. I'm not privy to anything the rest of us aren't. But it's clear that it's an item on a checklist that happens to have some novelty value, rather than being our "systema perimetr".)

Are BBC Radio 4 transmissions cryptographically signed? How do you know whether it's the real BBC radio 4 and not something that the enemy's spoofing?

They could be cryptographically signed as the BBC Radio 4 LW carrier is phase modulated with a datastream that can be used for remotely controlling electrical equipment [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch

You can't spoof Radio 4. There are too many tells. The news readers are rarely changed and you know their voices. Those voices are also very English and you can't take English schooling and BBC training overnight. Plus the airwaves. To take out 198 longwave and substitute something else is not so easy.

I am sure deepfakes for radio is even easier to achieve than other media. Not only is it audio-only, but it is also low fidelity audio.

Except that the British succeeded in doing such spoofing in WWII.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspidistra_(transmitter)

That's talking about spoofing someone reading out numbers. You just need a German speaker for that.

The person you're replying to is talking about the impossibility of faking a day of idiomatic BBC Radio 4 broadcasting, and I'm inclined to agree that the individual personalities and programmes are so incredibly ingrained in most British minds and the details are so subtle that you'd have no chance of being convincing.

Sefton Delmer, who was behind that, went much further. Listen to this old BBC radio show about it. [1] Start at 30:55 for the intrusion operation. They did replace German radio stations in-place as they shut down due to air raid warnings.

[1] https://ia800108.us.archive.org/9/items/OperationAspidistra/...

For no particular reason, I'm imagining a secret code one could use to conceal news that would normally get filtered. Something more subtle than "There's totally NOT a global pandemic right now. Grandma is totally NOT dead. Wink wink."

I’d guess people wouldn’t want this news. At least in the abstract, the policy isn’t absurd.

The test for Huntington’s (a genetic disease that is 100% fatal and usually starts in your 30s or 40s) might be a good analogue. You’d think everyone would want to know (50% chance if one your parents has it). But IIRC, less than 50% get the test.

Surely not allowing any bad news would backfire? If I knew that all bad news was being redacted it'd make me worry about whether or not there was bad news I just wasn't being told about constantly.

You could always turn off the TV.