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

Fri Oct 6 05:50:49 UTC 2023

While I agree with the thrust of what Sabri is saying, let's not delude ourselves - this is not a freedom of speech/"1st amdt." issue. The freedom of the press does not mean the government is obligated not to favour given presses (to include its own). That one's religion - freedom of religion means the government cannot (dis)favour any religion to be practiced by any given person (except, in many European countries, the King).

This is primarily a disability rights or equal protection issue (a disabled person should be able to choose some aspects of an emergency alert e.g. strobing their lights rather than firing a siren, or doing neither if their response to the startle response would train them to hit dismiss w/o reading, by which point the alert isn't saved as a notification). Disability rights frankly are not widely recognized by governments, even where laws exist.

There's also the risk that this could create false alarm over non-alarming circumstances used spuriously by parties with alerting access.

Le 5 octobre 2023 15:31:00 UTC, Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> a écrit :
>On 10/4/23 6:15 PM, Sabri Berisha wrote:
>> If this is true, and I will take your word for it, that is outrageous.
>
>Why is this 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.
>
>I can understand and appreciate the situation.
>
>> 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?
>
>Because the menu options apply to -- let's go with -- lesser priority / lower authority alerts.
>
>> 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.
>
>I can't speak to the government's right to do something or not.
>
>But I can see why governments would want the ability for one person, or their proxies, to have the technical capability to send an alert to all devices in their territory.
>
>I think this is a case of where four nines of alerts can be suppressed in software, but the fifth nine deliberately can't be suppressed.
>
>> 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.
>
>There is a test flag.
>
>My phone shows an option to ignore tests.
>
>My phone does ignore weekly tests without any problem.
>
>It seems to be that the powers that be decided to send this test without the test bit set.  --  Or perhaps the presidential indicator is mutually exclusive to the test bit.
>
>> This whole test was a display of poor engineering and disrespect for people's first amendment rights.
>
>I disagree.  But I digress.
>
>> Thanks,
>
>:-)
>
>
>
>-- 
>Grant. . . .
>unix || die
>

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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