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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

This will be fun for my wife who's in the hospital right now. And everyone else in hospitals trying to rest.

Also, will this go off on cellular watches? I'm sure schoolteachers are going to LOVE this... :-/

>This will be fun for my wife who's in the hospital right now. And everyone else in hospitals trying to rest.

That this will be happening today has been publicly communicated for at least a few weeks (as far as I've noticed) now. If that's not enough time for people to realize that, if they want rest, or silence, or whatever, they'll need to turn their phones off around this time, then I don't know what to tell ya.

>Also, will this go off on cellular watches? I'm sure schoolteachers are going to LOVE this... :-/

Same sentiment as above. This isn't just happening to kid's devices, it's happening to teacher's/administrator's phones, too. It'd be no different than a timed emergency drill that folk in schools are anticipating; everyone knows it's coming, there'll be a few minutes of mild commotion, things will die back down.

> That this will be happening today has been publicly communicated for at least a few weeks (as far as I've noticed) now.

This is the first I (and many others, see further up) have heard of it.

> they’ll need to turn off their phones

Apparently if you turn off your phone, the alert will play when you turn it back on. So if everyone in a hospital wing turned off their phone, the alert would “happen” multiple times as people turned their phones on later.

The idea in my post is that you know it's coming when you turn it back on. Someone who wants to sleep can turn their phone off, sleep, and then turn their phone on when they wake up and are expecting it, in the privacy of their own room.

Edit: Not entirely true - it won't receive the emergency signal so long as you keep it off during the 30 minute window[1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37766253

The thing I'm worried about is people in crowded, quiet areas like hospitals who have conditions that trigger on sudden noises or surprises. Many people in the hospital aren't up to speed on the news. Because, you know, they're half-awake and feeling terrible. So when the nurses' and patient's phones all start blaring while they're treating a patient who then has some sort of cardiac or nervous system response to the scary-sounding alarm...

I dunno. Maybe there's no precedent for my worry. But it feels real.

In that fairly contrived situation I would think and hope they already have precautions against noise anyway?

I mean, if you accept that we should have a warning system where the government can communicate with everyone quickly, it does need to be tested. And early Wednesday afternoon is a better time than most. What would you rather them do?

Why do we think there needs to be such a system? I don't. I'd rather delete the capability. The likelihood of bad uses overwhelms the slender possible benefits.

Incidentally, in the UK the test messages could be opted out of, and a lot of people did. Presumably this doesn't stop the government from cranking the level up to unignorable if they wanted to, unless the big phone OS cos sensibly didn't give them that access level.

What are the bad uses of a text message alert?

Alert that can't be skipped? Un-ignorable hectoring about whatever they want you thinking about today, perhaps for political ends. Makes it even easier to turn warnings into mandates, and it's already too easy. Over-application, so everybody gets told to worry when actually it should have been more targeted. Mistakes, causing needless fear. The risk of triggering largescale panic... or creeping up the use from "only dire emergency" to "often enough that people learn to ignore it". Potential for it to be subverted to malicious ends by third parties.

What are the good uses of a nationwide, rather than local and targeted, alert?

A good use of a nationwide alert is to send out a test alert for the nationwide alert system. Obviously /s

Allow users to choose how the alert is handled. I would leave these on if I could make them silent, but I can't. It's either world-ending screeching, or entirely off. So off it is. For folks who don't know to turn it off, they're going to have their day rudely interrupted to no benefit due to the godawful alert implementation.

My understanding is this test will be a Presidental Alert, which cannot be disabled. I guess we'll all find out soon enough.

> This will be fun for my wife who's in the hospital right now. And everyone else in hospitals trying to rest.

Hospitals are full of noise, one narrow time slice with an extra vurst isn't going to meaningfully change that.

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