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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are:

Extreme Threats

Severe Threats

AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts)

Public Safety Messages

State and Local Tests

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I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem!

Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote parts of Texas, so people who were over 700 miles / 1.1 megameter / 12 hour drive away all got the notification at 4AM.

The only option Texans had would have been to disable all alerts entirely, because this was an "EXTREME" level alert.

https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notificat...

What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.

I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.

In Texas, that’s just Tuesday.

I live in DFW Texas, use to be when you heard the tornado sirens you hit the deck. Now they go off, not kidding, for pingpong ball hail and “high winds”. That’s basically 1 out of every 4-5 spring/summer thunderstorms.

Completely unrelated to the actual content of your post, but:

> megameter

Completely valid SI way to represent distance, but I have never seen anyone use this in my entire life! Out of curiosity, do you live in some location or work in some industry where this is used? If so, where?

I did some intercontinental work and found it easier to say (mostly in my own head) that I was “eleven megameters” from home, rather than “seven thousand miles”. I blame my nerdiness and willingness to be slightly weird.

But I do enjoy the unit very much now and I think its time might be coming!

I like it. Might start using it myself!

I use mm, cm, m, km every day, so why not Mm! Definitely an appropriate unit for international-scale measurement, so it's weird we default to just using thousands of kilometres now that I'm thinking about it.

Was it straight line or orthodromic distance?

the latter. (great circle distance)

The Earth is spherical. What do you mean by “straight line” here? The direct line through the Earth?

Yes. Perfectly unconventional, like megameters!

It was also somewhat popularized by the navigator in the Star Blazers / Yamato series. Anime nerds FTW.

I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we had an even more (in my opinion) egregious case about two months ago that I'm still fuming about.

Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones:

"WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]"

What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start walking around my town to see if she's somehow walked all this way? I felt bad for the lady, but this isn't a "wake everybody up in the middle of the night" scenario, just get the cops involved and look around the area where she went missing.

Fiiiiinally just about get back to sleep (took a while because I was fucking furious), must have been about 4:30 and it starts going off again.

"FOUND: MISSING WOMAN IN [town] HAS BEEN LOCATED AND IS SAFE"

Found. They woke me up to let me know there was no emergency. Do not even get me started on the absurdity of it, I'm genuinely still absolutely pissed. Best part is? We can't shut off our emergency alerts. The CRTC mandates that there must not be a way to opt out of them.

Sorry for the rant, your story reminded me of this bullshit and got me all fired up.

Also in Canada. Ontario would blast the province for technically “abducted” children that were typically joint custody disputes.

There was one exception case where children were actively harmed, but already murdered by the time the alert went out. I suspect police couldn’t kick down the door where they were murdered because they didn’t have a warrant/sufficient cause yet: right to peace and privacy in your home but not on your phones!

The alerts are 4G/5G only, so for a while I had a shortcut that would downgrade me to 3G at night.

Despite everyone questioning the system being labelled as “with the child abductors”, there are far fewer of these alerts. Either abductions are way down, or they’ve tightened up the criteria to blast the province.

That's really egregious to do in Nova Scotia out of all places. Where there was a mass murderer on a 13-hour rampage, they just tweeted about it. This is what they use the emergency alert system for?

I think that's why they abuse the alert system now. People were outraged that he was running loose (very close to where I lived at the time) and nobody was notified, so now they notify us about every tiny little thing.

I mean, that happened one time and made national news. It's not nearly the same problem in terms of frequency.

There are granular controls also in SK, but the messages themselves are not granular. The grades seem to be somewhat the same as in the US, so this might be set either at the GSM standard level or the device (Silent, Extreme, Sever, issing person, Public safety, test), but the senders do not care or have no control... A translation of my last EXTREME level warning from SK (before switching everything off as most citizens do): "A tropical night advisory is currently in effect. Please take precautions for safety, such as lowering indoor temperatures, staying well-hydrated before going to sleep, and calling the elderly to check on their well being." [Daejeon Metropolitan City] It was hot during the day (33C), but not THAT hot...

There are more granular controls, but the details are OS/phone specific and the selected threat level is ultimately at the discretion of the government bureaucrat pressing the SPAM button.

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