Hacker News Reader

Comment by N_A_T_E | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, carrier settings are a small portion and not super impactful part of the phone configuration you see in the settings list. This is actually a somewhat cool feature. Imagine going to another country, jumping on another network and your phone automatically knows what cell bands and towers to connect to.

Carriers can't change regular settings like language, lock screen code or background. Just what cell towers you connect to and a short list of telephony related features. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

View on HN

The part you mention I was aware of and am actually thankful for. This, at least to me, goes much further. Hence the shock. Updated my post w/more details so it makes more sense (hopefully).

I don't know if this happens in The Netherlands, but if they forced your phone to receive NL Alerts it would seem very reasonable to me. Only the government issues those.

I've understood cell broadcasts are also used for advertisements/otherwise spammy stuff in eg. the US? Then I could understand you considering cell broadcast being turned on being unreasonable

The fact the government issues the alerts doesn't mean the government won't get pressured into sending spammy messages.

For example, what politician could turn down the grieving parents of a kidnapped child, when they call for using the emergency alert system for missing children?

But if I work from home, and there aren't any kidnapped children in my home, then waking me up at 5am with a missing child alert just inconveniences for no benefit to anyone.

> inconveniences for no benefit to anyone.

Everyone will be forced to see how much they care which proves how good they are, like it or not!

Stranger than waking people up from sleep for a custody disagreement, is when they'd broadcast those on TV... The purpose of those is not to find the kid, but to send a message to TV viewers, none of whom would be of any assistance in finding the kid.

You see this display of "care" with storm sirens being set off after the storm already passed the area.

You can turn it off. Shouldn’t be too inconvenient if it’s important to you.

This entire thread is about the fact that in some case the carrier can override your decision and turn it back on.

Amber alerts are a well-defined category of messages you can receive. The regulation about what constitutes a legitimate case for an emergency broadcast are very strict and subject to public review, so pretty hard to misuse for unrelated purposes.

Yet, no one is forcing governments to use the system as-designed. In Quebec, on my phone, I can disable quite a few types of cell broadcast alerts like AMBER alerts, Test alerts, etc. The only hidden setting is the one for presidential alerts.

Well guess what? The Quebec government sends every type of alert, even the regular test ones, with the presidential alert severity which makes all of these settings useless and does nothing but irritate the population with spammy messages. Recently, they sent out an AMBER alert that was supposed to be localized in some area and, instead, sent it everywhere in Quebec except for the affected area. This is exactly why people have the right to remain skeptical about alert systems like this one.

> I've understood cell broadcasts are also used for advertisements/otherwise spammy stuff in eg. the US?

Err, no - emergency alerts aren’t used for advertising here.

> Only the government issues those.

Just wait when your neighbor repeats the packet at night, locally and undetected

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts#Se...

> Imagine going to another country, jumping on another network and your phone automatically knows what cell bands and towers to connect to.

They already do that. Or, rather they don't need to "know" anything; a phone with no signal will scan through all the bands it has a radio for, and will find a network to connect to. If a network rejects the connection, it'll move on to another.

This is also something that traditionally has been configurable: you can tell your phone not to do this, if you want, and it will obey your command. But allowing the carrier to change settings on the phone after a connection is established is pretty intrusive, IMO.

How much of the baseband driver do they have access to on your device?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com