Cellphones Get Government Chips For Disaster Alert

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said the Commercial Mobile Alert System that Congress approved in 2006 will direct messages to cellphones in case of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other serious emergency. There will be at least three levels of messages, ranging from a critical national alert from the president to warnings about impending or occurring national disasters to alerts about missing or abducted children. The alert would show up on the phone's front screen, instead of the traditional text message inbox, and arrive with a distinct ring and probably a vibration. People will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts."

Comments

Re:No Texting While Driving!

[Anonymous Coward]

More seriously, it's kind of annoying that the system for telling you to turn around and run away because of tornadoes or nuclear explosions or big car accidents or whatever requires you to read texts while driving.

That's because these people are obviously not techies, so they're using/mandating overly-specific techs, instead of doing what any programmer would do: an abstract important-message notification interface.

It's none of government's fucking business whether an important message is implemented as a text on a tiny handheld display which happens to sometimes be used as a phone, or voice-synthesizer fed into the car's stereo, or an exclamation mark icon on the HUD where if I stare at it while generating "What's this?" brainwaves, becomes text which is preemptable by anything the car's radar sees as an obstacle which I may be about to collide with.

Just send the damn packets and quit worrying about what I do with them. Yes, that means you won't be able to force me to abstain from spamfiltering the president. So fucking what. If I'm stupid enough to not care where the ICBMs are predicted to land, that's my problem. The very idea that someone in government thinks they have the right to control opt-out settings is outrageous. These are the kinds of assholes that are legitimizing DRM and other fuck-the-user-we-know-what's-best crap.

1984

[Runaway1956]

"People will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts."

And, the officer responds, "You damned well BETTER read/listen to the President's message! Have a good day, Citizen!"

I can't be the only person here who thought "Orwelle" when I read that quoted sentence.