U.S. test of national alerts on Oct. 4 at 2:20pm EDT (1820 UTC)

Wed Oct 4 23:15:11 UTC 2023

----- On Oct 4, 2023, at 1:02 PM, Chris Adams cma at cmadams.net wrote:

> Once upon a time, Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> said:
>> I don't know if today's test is the same thing or not, but I
>> remember in the last X years where there was a presidential test of
>> the EAS and there was supposedly no way to disable it short of
>> turning your device off.
> 
> IIRC it is mandated that the vendors don't allow you to turn off the
> Presidential Alert class.

If this is true, and I will take your word for it, that is outrageous.

My wife is a teacher who works with special needs kids, and her phone
went of twice (the second time 15 minutes after the first). This was
very disruptive as you can imagine. 

Obviously, I made sure all of the emergency notifications were set to
OFF on her phone. If setting this nonsense to OFF is not working, why
even have the menu option?

The government has no right to disrupt the day of 350 million people,
however much the self-appointed emergency communication "professionals"
like to think so.

Furthermore, it's simply unnecessary. It is incredibly easy to add a 
one-bit flag indicating whether or not it's a test to such alerts. This
whole test was a display of poor engineering and disrespect for people's
first amendment rights.

Thanks,

Sabri