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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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