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Comment by GJim | Hacker News Reader

> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me

It most certainly was NOT OK.

By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving).

By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed.

The net result of this is, like most people I know, ALL such alerts are now switched off on my phone. Thus, if Putin does decide to push the button, I'll probably find out about it a little later then you.

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An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that.

You'd need to get the mobile operators involved to build the list of recipients and then to do the actual work of pushing the message out. Normal SMS is point to point, so a message needs to be sent to each subscriber individually which is a huge job at population-level scale.

It makes more sense to use the existing cell broadcast alert infrastructure which has been planned for exactly this type of use case and has been thoroughly tested.

A more reasonable complaint might be that it wasn't geofenced to only the drought-hit areas, but that would only have excluded something like a quarter of the population.

I think it's reasonable to complain that the system doesn't have an "important but not urgent" message category (which might e.g. have the same "window pops up that you have to dismiss" UI but trigger whatever your usual text-message notification sound/vibration is rather than the VERY LOUD siren).

And given that the system does not have that "important but not urgent" category it's also reasonable to complain when the government uses the "urgent" notification system for something that is not urgent.

It caused me to turn off "severe" alerts (leaving "emergency" enabled).

In this case, I think the problem was that it was urgent (multiple fire services were on the verge of being overwhelmed, and that was considered to pose an immediate threat to critical infrastructure) and it was the severity that was arguable.

But, to be honest, it doesn't seem to be too far out of line with the past alerts listed on https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts

(I also only have the extreme alerts enabled - I've been disabling severe ones since the system was introduced. If there's a storm I'm likely to be staying inside anyway!)

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