Texas DPS mistakenly sends out Amber Alert for Chucky doll | Hacker News Reader

Texas DPS mistakenly sends out Amber Alert for Chucky doll

kens5.com

15 pointsbredren13 comments

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they should be grateful it is a properly designed test that can't be mistaken for real data

At least it's not a ballistic missile inbound alert for a Chucky doll

Looks like some test data made it into production.

One of the better “oops, this was production?” mistakes:

https://time.com/5763472/nuclear-warning-ontario-canada/

If anyone else was interested in Amber Alert statistics: https://amberalert.ojp.gov/statistics

sigh, and there go another bunch of people disabling amber alerts on their phones.

Maybe they shouldn’t make Amber Alerts preempt Do Not Disturb then fewer people would disable them.

It’s unlikely anyone woken up by an Amber Alert would be useful in that moment. At least defer it until they turn off Do Not Disturb.

so I have do not disturb set up all the time because I'm too dumb to figure something out: I need to hear phone calls at night in case I get paged, but I want all notifications to vibrate.

on Android the same slider is used for notification volume and ring volume. switching the phone to vibrate mode makes both vibrate. the only thing I've been able to figure out is 24/7 Do Not Disturb, with notifications muted but calls allowed to ring.

is there some obvious workaround I'm missing? this seems like the most common way to use a phone, so I feel like a ditz.

We use pagerduty, and it's pretty handy that I can use DND because their mobile app will turn it off if it needs to. I think it also creates a phone contact so that incoming calls bypass DND.

That sigh may be unnecessary. The only non-governmental study I've ever found carried out on amber alerts' effectiveness showed them to be largely ineffective, if not counter-productive. The study is available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242221179_A_prelimi...

From the article, it's not clear this ever went out as a wireless AMBER alert, just to people subscribed to an email alert system. The wireless alerts and highway signage are part of the secondary distribution system, so might not have actually been triggered.

It’s really not obvious what I’m supposed to do about vague government alerts; watch out for black car of this model with suspicious male... okay...

And to imagine that the extreme supermajority of amber alerts are regional or statewide.

I would like to receive Amber Alerts without the obnoxious noise. If there was just a middle-ground option of just having the pop-up and no noise, then I would leave it enabled.

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