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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

The problem seems to be a misunderstanding of scale - This system was designed for natural disasters, nuclear wars, and large-scale public address. Mass dissemination of mundane information is quite frankly unwarranted; Even if everyone should receive this alert, they should simply get a buzz and notification, not a full warning and reading of text.

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Which system are you talking about? The AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, named after a specific child abduction case that I remember watching the news reports of with my parents while in high school) Alert system is specificaly designed for child abduction.

I actually am not certain if there is a similar large-scale system for "natural disasters [or] nuclear wars". In Santa Barbara (a specific county) we have a way to sign up for that kind of alert run by the "County Office of Emergency Management", but AMBER operates over a much larger arena. Sure, war might sound important, but think of the children!

> The AMBER Alert™ Program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases. The goal of an AMBER Alert is to instantly galvanize the entire community to assist in the search for and the safe recovery of the child.

I think he means the regional emergency message system thing on cellphones. That system(s ?) is currently meant to be used by several things (most commonly dangerous weather I think. I recall getting "flash flood" warnings with it before in Philly.), and was presumably not initially created for AMBER Alerts.

Stuff this sort of system would really be useful for is things like Tsunami warnings. I assume it is use for that where applicable.

If that's what he means, he's wrong. At least on iPhones, there is a specific setting for AMBER Alerts, separate from Emergency Alerts.

I strongly suspect the same systems are used to deliver all alert types, and the phone can just select which type of message from that single system to display. This probably depends on the carrier, but I don't see any good reason to implement them separately.

Interesting; I looked more into this system, and it does sound like the weather service is supposed to use it for things, although even though there were many hours of aftershock on a recent earthquake here, there was no mention of it (but maybe earthquake aftershocks are considered "obvious" ;p).

I still take issue with the implication my the original comment that it is being misused for this purpose due to some "misunderstanding of scale": people demanded tons of things after Amber, and they got them. Even the sex offender registry was caused as a reaction to Amber (with initial designs for it being parts of bills named after her). The general "zeitgeist" considers "think of the children" much more important than war.

So, this new EAS was being conceived of only a couple years before AMBER, was only really documented a few years ago, and had an implementation deadline of last year. All the FCC's documents on it currently list "such as AMBER Alerts" as either a primary use or an example. The protocol was even modified in 2002 to add an AMBER-specific event code (but if not implemented they use "civil emergency".

> What alerts will WEA deliver?

> Alerts from WEA cover only critical emergency situations. Consumers will receive only three types of alerts:

> Alerts issued by the President > Alerts involving imminent threats to safety or life > Amber Alerts

> Participating carriers may allow subscribers to block all but Presidential alerts.

There's the Emergency Alert System [1] which has been around much longer, in various forms back to the 60s. It's mostly used for sever weather alerts from NOAA, it's the crawl you see on the bottom of broadcast TV some times. It can be activated nationally though.

While I'm not sure of your phone's implementation, all I received was indeed a buzz and notification, not some "full warning and reading of text" or an absurd "complement of a 10-second spurt of high-pitched noise and buzzing."

Does iOS have some ridiculous implementation? Because for Android and SMS users to get horribly inconvenienced by the sound of a text message at 10PM with information about a child abduction sounds quite insensitive. At best.

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