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Failures Mark First National Test of Emergency Alert System
An anonymous reader writes "The first full-scale test of the National Emergency Alert System failed on Tuesday at 2 PM. Some radio and television networks did not air any alert, while the performance of others was inconsistent. 'Some DirectTV customers reported hearing Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" play during the test. Some Comcast subscribers saw their cable boxes turn to QVC before the alert, while Time Warner Cable customers in New York did not see any alert at all.'" If you were tuned to any American broadcaster at the time, did the alert system reach you?
Tests are supposed to fine failures. That's what they are for.
National Journal's Marc Ambinder tweets: FEMA official concedes "glitch"; says that it appears (maybe) to be related to how satellite and cable providers prepped their equipment.
If your emergency broadcast system requires all cable and satellite providers to "prep" their equipment beforehand, you are doing something fundamentally wrong.
I do have a cell phone on me all the time, and received no alerts on it.
I can tell you from experience however, that if it were an Amber Alert, I would have been aware of it immediately.
CONCLUSION: EAS is another complete misguided federal program.
Each failure is an opportunity to learn and improve.
The real failure would be to not identify failures and not improve - then we'd have to be blasted about it by the sensationalist media, trumpeting how inept government is.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We should leave emergency notifications to the free markets! You want to know about disasters and what to do? Well, just subscribe to a disaster notification service. I'm AT&T or your cable companies will provide that service as part of a package of some sort. And we all know what superior service cable companies have over pathetic government!
Probably because 9/11 in all actuality was only a threat to a ludicrously, miniscule number of people compared to say... the rest of the country. I wouldn't be surprised if 98% of the country wasn't even slightly, remotely affected by it (ignoring the after side-effects of the shredding of the constitution and soforth).
ICBM attack
Seriously: If that happens, you're better off not knowing anyway. At least you won't spend your last few minutes of life scared out of your mind because you know you're going to die in a nuclear firestorm.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
1. Millions heard it.
2. Using all communication methods to broadcast a message of national urgency is hardly misguided. It's a common sense idea.
3. They'll add other methods soon enough.
Fool! Without that alert, how on earth are you going to talk the closest girl to you into impending disaster sex?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Those words never go together. I am shocked.
Yeah... except it was the private broadcast companies that failed to properly show the alert not the goverment.
I was at my computer, with several browser windows and a couple of email clients open. My cell phone was right next to me. When the time came, my Outlook reminder popped up and told me it was time for lunch.
Too bad these notifications don't reach those of us who don't rely on antiquated broadcast media.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I have to say, I think an actual failure would be if it were during an emergency.
As I say at work, this is why we test. Debugging finds bugs. That's kinda what it's for.
You know what the word "Test" means, right?
^ This
Testing for something and finding that the test didn't pass is NOT a failure of a system. It's exactly what it said - a test. Now they know where the faults are they can work on fixing them.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
All I keep thinking is what's next to build fear amongst your own citizens. So now the alert will be triggered every now and them and everyone in the hole country will be afraid of dying and ask the president to invade another country. Is it so hard to see that no other country in the whole world has so many security issues? None else in earth is so afraid of bad things that may happen to them. You never wondered how come? Never thought of what is that you did to get into this situation? Just change what you are doing that provokes other to be so angry at you, and you will never need to be afraid again. But instead of that you just accept to get paranoid and keep fucking the rest of the world.
Err, Human failure....
I'm never sure why people like to pile on the government. Like any social organization, and Soylent Green, it's made of people. Just like Citibank screwed itself, Enron self destructed, Goldman Sachs enabled Greece to self-destruct, all governments and companies are made of people.
One additional thing to add, government employees rarely get high pay (remember that those $600 toilet seats were paid to private contractors). So, you're blaming fallible humans, a group made more likely to be fallible by the fact you don't want to pay (taxes) to hire the best.
Testing for something and finding that the test didn't pass is NOT a failure of a system. It's exactly what it said - a test.
And when the test fails, it is, indeed, a failure of the system as a whole. What was the intended outcome? (A nationwide alert.) Was the outcome achieved? (No.) This is almost a "by definition" kind of concept, you know. You test something and it doesn't work, that means IT FAILED.
The only way this test didn't fail "because it was a test" is if you think the important operational criterion is the ability to test, not the ability to notify people in an emergency. Or maybe you are confused by the use of the word "test", and are thinking of how when a student takes a test and doesn't pass it doesn't mean the system failed. Well, in this case, the test wasn't applied to students, it was a direct test of the system as a whole and yes, it did, really, overall, fail miserably.
Now they know where the faults are they can work on fixing them.
Now they know where some of the faults are and can work on fixing them. If you don't get a successful test of the entire system, then the parts that didn't get tested may still have faults that weren't detected. If a major switch somewhere failed, you can spend a lot of money fixing it and then feel safe, without realizing that every leaf node that it fed would have failed had it gotten the alert.
There is no question that we are going to need another test, after a significant period of time. And then another. And another. Soon we will be getting tired of the testing and it will take place at 3AM like the regular regional tests already do.
The important, unasked question is just why do we still need a national alert system? Is there someone out there ready to plop 100 nukes into all our major cities all at once? Unlikely. Would notifying all those people all at once really have much positive effect? We already have localized alerting systems that are tested on a regular basis, and we have better means of distribution -- NOAA weather radio. Do we need to fix this system, or should we just pull the national plug and let the regional ops continue?
As for the original article mentioning that Comcast switched to QVC before the test message, yeah, so what? That's how the system is designed. It is much easier for a cable system to send the "everyone change to channel X" command downstream instead of trying to insert the alert message into every digital stream. Or insert the alert into one digital stream and then copy it to all the other streams. Of course, the ANALOG channels need to have individual alerts for those people who use analog TVs, but all the digital subs who have digital cable boxes can get by with one channel for the alert.
I was listening to local AM radio -- not a peep. The news story leading the 11AM (2PM EST) report? "If you can hear me now, the test failed."
Hey, you do know the difference between DEVELOPMENT testing and ACCEPTANCE testing, right?
The national alert system is a product in development. This was a test to determine what is working and what is not working. You can simulate and test individual pieces all you want, but until you get the opportunity to test the entire system, you have no idea what links in the chain are broken.
This country is full of fucking idiots that have no clue how engineering is performed. Just keep your misinformation to yourself and stop trying to make those around you dumber.
the could have different warning tiers. for the Platinum level, you get a full 30 minutes warning. For the common folk, we have bronze with 30 seconds.