NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study

Sun Jan 3 08:26:07 UTC 2021

On Sun, 03 Jan 2021 18:59:37 +1300, Mark Foster said:

> In my mind it's simple.  The streaming companies need to have a channel 
> within their streaming system to get a message to a 'currently active 
> customer' (emergency popup notification that appears when their app is 
> open or their website is active with an authenticated user).  The 

Oh geez. Just on my PS4, there's streaming apps for Disney+, Netflix, Hulu,
Prime, Playstation Store, Peacock, Tubi, ESPN+, AppleTV, YouTube (less than
half of which I actually subscribe to, but I haven't found a big enough crowbar
to remove the others, they keep returning) - and that's probably not a complete
list.

And we get to watch them all do it in subtly different ways, often buggy. Egads.

Bonus points for figuring out how to keep two streaming apps from stepping on
each other's toes, as often these apps stay semi-alive in the background, which
may be enough to cause an alert to be sent to the app. Now you need to avoid a
"thundering herd" problem if there's 18 different streaming apps on the device,
all of which just got woken up.  On resource constrained systems, that's often
the start of a death spiral as the system either runs totally out of memory or
goes into thrashing mode.

And the alternative is just saying "only the streaming app in the foreground
gets to handle the alert", but that isn't correct either - I might not *have* a
streaming app running in the foreground on the device at the time the alert
goes out. (You hit another problem as well - now all the apps have to notify
upstream

So having every single "streaming" app have to include duplicate code and
*still* not get the alert to the user doesn't seem the right direction to go...

> streaming company will also know the location of their customer (billing 
> information) so will know what geographic locations are relevant to that 
> customer.

Billing info may be good enough for stuff that stays at home. It doesn't tell
you what zip code a portable device is actually in at the moment - and getting
the *right* localized info to the portable device is one of the tricky parts of this.
If you're out and about town while visiting your in-laws 3 time zones away from
where you live, you want alerts for the town your in-laws live, not for the address
the streaming company sends the bill to.

And that's assuming that a streaming company even *has* the info in their
billing information - I just checked, and Hulu doesn't have a street address for me.
So they're going to end up having to do IP based geolocation.

Meanwhile, this causes yet another problem - if Hulu has to be able to know
what alerts should be piped down to my device, this now means that every single
police and public safety agency has to be able to send the alerts to Hulu (and every
other streaming company) - and do this securely.  That's a *lot* bigger problem than
"The Blacksburg VA police department only has to set up agreements with network
access providers that might be providing access to devices in Blacksburg".

Seriously guys - having the streaming companies do this is at the entirely wrong level.

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