NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study

Sun Jan 3 08:52:05 UTC 2021

Mark Foster wrote:

> On 3/01/2021 2:41 am, Masataka Ohta wrote:
>> Sean Donelan wrote:
>>
>>> the Commission shall complete an
>>> inquiry to examine the feasibility of updating the Emergency
>>> Alert System to enable or improve alerts to consumers provided
>>> through the internet, including through streaming services.
>>
>> It is trivially easy to have a dedicated UDP port to receive
>> broadcast packets for such purposes, as "through streaming
>> services" is not the requirement.
> 
> but "including" is...

It's not feasible. The alert should be given by not services but
devices running various services including streaming ones.

> And I don't see that opening up a UDP port on every end-user device to 
> receive some sort of broadcast (unicast?) is going to be great security. 
> Someone will find away to exploit it.

It should be the responsibility of local ISPs to generate such
packets and not to relay such packets generated by others.

> I think you're overthinking this.
> 
> In my mind it's simple.  The streaming companies need to have a channel 
> within their streaming system

You have successfully made the simple problem complex enough to be
unsolvable.

 > Local Authorities can feed emergency broadcast information to the
 > streaming companies tagged with a geolocation

Local authorities?

You can't expect such locality for companies offering streaming
or similar services over the Internet.

Moreover, there is no reason to give precise definition of
"streaming services" and not to give alert to users of
similar services.

						Masataka Ohta