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Japan Considers '911' Calls From Twitter, Social Networks
itwbennett writes "The Japanese national Fire and Disaster Management Agency today hosted the first of 3 panels to discuss allowing emergency calls to be placed through social networks. For the event, Twitter's Japanese blog posted entries on how to use the service during emergencies, one of which advised: 'If your circumstances allow, please add #survived to your tweets. This will help when family and friends that are worried about you search on your welfare.'"
Acting like these proprietary cloud services are a legitimate case for discussion is disgusting. I find it deplorable that we give these organizations so much attention every time somebody has a horrible idea. If a 911 center is to take calls via the Internet, it needs to be done with some sort of standard, and as the Internet was designed, there is no way that this could be reliably implemented. Case Closed.
Joe Sixpack Help! My home is burning down and my kids are trapped inside!
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Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I went to chicago for the weekend #survived..
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
That episode of "The IT Crowd" where there's a fire in the office and Moss sends an email for help to the fire department.
So FriendFace might be used to send emergency calls in the future, eh?
#DeleteChrome
your social behavior is monitored for the severely unlikely event your in a emergency situation 24/7 instead of requesting for help
anyone see an issue with this?
During the earthquake and Tsunami in Tokyo in 2011, the cellular networks were completely jammed, but the internet was coasting along just fine.
I agree, that we're giving too much power to these social networks which are centralized and not distributed, but using the internet for emergency calls isn't a bad idea in and of themselves.
All I can think of is Moss Contacst Fire Department.
Listen Americans, "911" is the AMERICAN emergency number. The rest of the world doesn't use it. In Japan, its "119", as TFA says. In Australia it's "000". In the UK it's "999". If you really think Americans are too dumb to understand that, just write "emergency number" instead of confusing everyone by trying to "translate" a number.
Around 9 or 10 years ago, a guy I knew used ICQ (yes, really) to message a friend of his one night, when he looked in the mirror and saw his whole neck was swollen (his throat was 'a bit sore' but he didn't think it was that bad until he went into the bathroom and saw himself in the mirror). His phone had been disconnected that week (his roommates were cheapskates -- well they were all university students...) and he got picked up and they went to the hospital. Turned out he had acute tonsillitus and if he hadn't gotten to the hospital quickly it could have been 'curtains' that evening. So a 'net-based '911' may occasionally be a good thing!
Blah blah blah. We're not getting off you're lawn, gramps.
Despite the rather large noise-to-signal ratio, overall, Twitter has the potential to help disaster management through crowdsourcing. Don't worry, I hate buzzwords like "crowdsourcing" just as much as the next slashbot. Bear with me.... First responders for big disasters have a big problem: where do you spend your resources? You start by sending out search teams, but big cities like New Orleans are, well, big. You just do not have enough manpower to rapidly triage the whole city to know where you should spend your resources. So you guess, and you put triage teams on the 911 lines to take calls, but again, there are many more callers than 911 operators, and those operators need to manually enter a lot of information. This is where Twitter comes in. Citizens that are hurt, or that come across people that are hurt, make tweets like "Man lying hurt, legs crushed under car near Second and Main". Volunteer crowdsourcers re-tweet these events in a format a computer can easily parse, such as "Man crushed by car #location ". A computer gathers all these tweets and presents them in a nice summary format. Even better, this is already being done:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419368/how-twitter-helps-in-a-disaster/
http://epic.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=11
Could we design something more reliable from scratch? Probably. But that would cost $cash to design and deploy, and then you'd have to convince people to actually use the damn thing. Twitter has a large active user base right now, so it makes perfect sense to exploit the tweets as much as possible. (Note also that TFS says "Japan considers '911' calls from Twitter" not "Japan considers replacing '911' calls from landlines with Twitter".)
p.s. Landline 911 works over proprietary lines owned by AT&T et al. ... you might want to rethink your use of the scare term "proprietary".
Acting like these proprietary cloud services are a legitimate case for discussion is disgusting. I find it deplorable that we give these organizations so much attention every time somebody has a horrible idea. If a 911 center is to take calls via the Internet, it needs to be done with some sort of standard, and as the Internet was designed, there is no way that this could be reliably implemented. Case Closed.
As usual, the slashdot summary left out some key info from TFA:
TFA also disputes your assertion that the Internet is necessarily less reliable than voice 911:
Obviously the internet is often less reliable, but it's just dumb and short-sighted to not consider how to use a resource that is there.
So wait, you mean a company that has it's own internal phone system and exchange can't expect reliable 911 service, and it's disgusting and deplorable to even give such a problem attention?
Emergency service should be available by whatever means people are going to have to connect to it. It would seem to me that if you can connect to twitter or facebook or the like you have some other connection mechanism, but not every country is the same and technology plods along. If you only have a device with 3g data service and no voice and no texting (who needs texting if you can do it in app) then you should probably have 911 service available through that. If people are going to use twitter to ask for help in an emergency, as stupid as it sounds today, you might want to plan ahead to be able to figure out how to support that.
When I was a kid we didn't have 911 (or 999) service, and were supposed to keep the number for Police, Ambulance and Fire next to the phone, 911 service existed, just not in my area. So why the push to get 911 everywhere when it seemed really straightforward to just print the fire/police/ambulance numbers on a card that sat under the phone handset? Because in an emergency people don't think straight and programming people to be mindless little zombies that can call 911 from the age of 4 is a much better plan than trying to get them to read off a number. Please don't take this statement as belly aching on my part here, but my grandfather died in a retirement home trying to use the phone back in 2008. To dial 911 he needed to dial an extra 9 (9 for an outside line) - and the emergency number for the nurse on the main floor was printed on his phone. No one knows what number he was trying to call (it could have been his estranged wife and not 911 for example), but I'd like to think if he was trying to dial 911 that 911 should have, in all circumstances worked. No extra '9' for an outside line shit - that is far too confusing for someone in an emergency situation, he had trouble with '9 for an outside line' to call US in no stress situations. Every even microscopic thing costs time, confusion and potentially lives.
Especially as we look to the future, emergency service operators have to figure out how they're going to cope with communications being potentially handled by a handful of different companies than the phone and cable companies they're used to. Without voice or texting plans (or devices) we may end up in a world were 'texting' is just some app that uses the phone service like an IM program, voice calls might be handled through any number of services rather than through the phone company directly, and you need to build both a legal and technical framework *before* that becomes a problem. 10 years ago people really needed to think about the problem of 911 service on cell phones so that they could build the technology and rules for cell phones of today, back then there were payphones and landlines everywhere, it seemed silly to even try and get accurate location data for cell phones (they only know what tower they're connected to not where they are right? Oh right...). This might be preparing for nothing. It might be something we all have to deal with, and in the case of Japan they are the forefront of disaster planning because pretty much every type of disaster you can think of afflicts them, so they have the ability to try out a hundred different ideas for the rest of us.
In a disaster 'reliability' (to the extent it exists) is often related to redundancy and parallelism. Having additional methods for people to use isn't going to hurt that.
If emergency services are swamped (either at the call center or in terms of feet on the floor) then tweeting #119 or whatever just might attract the attention of someone else nearby who can help.
ts;dr "Instead of assuming our systems will never ever fail, we will fall back to unregulated foreign services if they do"
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
In Japan, 911 isn't used! (It's 119)
Also, last I checked, email isn't even accepted (Except on a certain British IT comedy show), and it seems like working on accepting messages by email (including phone email, the Japanese equivalent of SMS) should be a higher priority than Social Networks (which means: Mixi, in Japan) or Twitter...
How is twitter any better than texting in this situation? Texts will go through even if your phone connects for a fraction of a second, twitter will NOT. Texts can be sent from almost any cell phone made in the last 10 years, tweets can not. Texts can be redirected to local receiver stations if the upstream data link dies, Twitter cannot. EVERY cellphone has a texting number, only some have twitter accounts.
Twitter may be a little cheaper, but if it's not going to cover most users, but texting will. So it sounds like you'll need to implement texting anyways, so why spend extra money and confuse people by having 2 systems?
how about local cb radios and a react group?
all of what you say can also be used for nefarious purposes and then using DHS / FBI / State Secrets hide the vampiric oath breaking feeding. Stocking someone on twitter, and other social networks for a pattern, opens the possibilities of assassination, exploitation, and blackmail.
Fuck everything, get that in your head.
It seems to me that even in the worst disasters, most people survive. So using the hashtag #survived will create huge amounts of clutter, as the billions of survivors helpfully declare their status and clog the tubes.
I would propose reversing the system and using the hashtag #didntmakeit. People should be taught to post with the #didntmakeit hashtag only if they have been killed in a disaster. For example, if you were crushed by rubble during an earthquake, making a simple tweet like "Afraid I #didntmakeit, sorry everyone" will inform emergency crews to call off their search for you and allow your friends and family to begin moving on from their sad loss. This way, the tubes won't be clogged and everything will run much more smoothly.
trust mechanism, regardless of emission. FUCK THE FCC
Texts will go through even if your phone connects for a fraction of a second,
Yes. There are strong arguments for emergency calls via text. They are a more robust form of delivery than voice calls and can work on a very overloaded network or one with reception which is too poor to take voice calls. The only problem is that you can't be sure if the text got through.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Seems the japanese hashtag Twitter is indicating to use to confirm survival actually is "seizon" or "seizonn" depending on how you want to romanize it. Unfortunately, since slashdot still doesn't support UTF8, I can't actually show it, so here's a google translate link to show it.
http://translate.google.com/?langpair=ja|en#ja/en/%23%E7%94%9F%E5%AD%98
I imagine part of the reason is to make it easier to link up to things like Google People Finder, and disaster news crowdsourcing aggregation platforms like Ushadi
http://ushahidi.com/
As opposed to, you know, just tweeting that you survived because your friends already know your Twitter handle? Hell, if you're in a position to use Twitter, you could just drop them an email. The real challenge is to reconnect family with those survivors who haven't wound up somewhere with online access, or who don't use social networks in the first place.
How is "It might have gone through" better than "it can't even connect"?
I am still wondering if there would be any case where #survived is not redundant for a message written in past tense...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBfxjSFAxQ
"So why the push to get 911 everywhere when it seemed really straightforward to just print the fire/police/ambulance numbers on a card that sat under the phone handset?"
This is not Detective Rockford.
We don't have such a phone anymore.
> Texts can be sent from almost any cell phone made in the last 10 years
The article refers to Japan. A surprising number of Japanese phones don't support text messages.
After the 2011 earthquake it wasn't possible to make phone calls, but the internet connection was still rock solid.
This fascination about social media is justified (with our experience in dealing with calamities happening in our country which is a lot, am from Philippines) because they do really help in disaster response efforts, BIG TIME!
It might just work in Japan. They have very high levels of social cohesion, and creating false IDs and false calls would literally be unthinkable to most Japanese. If you tried the same thing in Europe or the USA however they would be overwhelmed by fake calls.
How is "It might have gone through" better than "it can't even connect"?
I would assume that "it might have gone through" is better than "can't connect" on the goounds that in the former case you might get help, whereas in the latter case you certainly won't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This. My phone informs me with a series of messages: "Sending SMS", "Message sent" or "Sending Failed". Seems to be a binary condition. Whether or not it went to the right number, however...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Yes, text messaging in Japan is fragmented. Its often impossible to text between carriers and my Japanese carrier offered no capability to send or receive texts overseas.
When the earthquake hit power and phone service became largely unusable pretty quickly (somewhere between Tokyo and the quake). However, I was able to send a facebook post from my Japanese style smartphone that hit a fair number of my friends and family telling them we were OK before everything went down. I rarely used it for day to day stuff since it wasn't all that useable, but for this application is was perfect.
Actually Japanese phones skipped over texts and went directly to email. SMS with Japanese characters cuts the message length in half (each character is two bytes). Some of their networks don't even support 2G any more, so if your phone doesn't have a 3G signal then it has no signal and no messaging or calling capability.
Twitter is just one of many systems being used in Japan for emergency support. They took the sensible decision not to rely on one system and instead make use of a wide variety of different ones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What's not proprietary about the current 911 system?
I will die before I use Twitter or Facebook to ask for help. I don't want to live in such a world. No thanks. Death please.
"Dear Sir / Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out at the premises of..."
No, that's too formal.
"Dear Sir / Madam. Fire! Fire! Help me! 123 Carrendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. All the best, Maurice Moss."
Ok, let's assume for a second that a natural disaster happens and you survive. Furthermore, let's assume that you decide to spread word of this via a generic tweet instead of calling friends and family. The advice was to "add #survived to your tweets. This will help when family and friends that are worried about you search on your welfare." Wouldn't friends and family be following your Twitter feed? Wouldn't they see that you tweeted "I'm all right" by going to your Twitter page? Why would they search on "#survived" and scroll through the (hopefully) long list of survivors just to find your entry? A hash tag to aggregate these "I survived" tweets isn't a bad idea, but it's not going to help friends and family see your message.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You can tweet via SMS. I know this and I hate twitter.
False. Texts are unreliable as all heck. First, it's "best effort" delivery, similar to e-mail. While 99% of all e-mail and texts probably make it through the network in a timely fashion, there's still a significant portion that doesn't (usually only delayed a few minutes), but there's no guarantee.
Sending a text is like sending a UDP packet. The other end may get it, they may get it delayed (sometimes significantly - minutes/hours/days delayed texts aren't uncommon), they can be duplicated in flight (recipient gets mulitple - sometimes combined with the delays means they keep receiving the same text for days), or simply disappear.
Of course, in an emergency situation, who knows what failure mode will be seen? And overloaded control channels is a significant issue - the cell may have plenty of voice capacity, but the control channel is so overloaded it's effectively useless. It's the problem AT&T has with their network consistently (leading to oddball situations as having worst connectivity, but damn fast network speeds - if you can get a channel, it'll be clear, the problem being acquiring the channel to begin with).
As for social media - well, everyone's been talking about it for ages. Back when Second Life (remember that?) was the hot new thing, everyone was probalby considering ways to do emergency notifications through that.
I have been asking for the ability to text 911 AND the ability to text the 911 dispatchers. The difference? The neighborhood watch requests we call in all sorts of things; since most are not emergencies we don't use 911, but a number specifically designed for it. There are many times when I'm out walking and would like to report something but I'm afraid of being overheard. If I could text, I could more easily give the exact address and I wouldn't have to fear being over heard. Especially when there are 20+ teens in the park down the street starting a fight, only to have the parents show up and start mooning the people on the other side, I really don't want them to know I reported them (since I'm in my front yard), but the police have found that responding really helps them keep the drug traffic down and the park much safer for the younger kids to play.
You can tweet via text. Every cellphone that can text can therefore tweet, and the tweet will go through if your phone connects for a fraction of a second. Twitter is better than texting in this situation because 1 tweet can alert emergency personnel as well as your family and friends, which means each person doesn't have 50 people trying to call them, and being worried when they don't get an answer, and calling again, overloading the network so no one can call/text anyone back.
After the earthquake & tsunami last year I turned to twitter to ensure everyone I cared about over there was okay. They couldn't get phone calls and at times couldn't charge their phones so were leaving them off most of the time, but turning it on and sending a single tweet every few hours allowed everyone to know they were still okay.
This would really be bad for them. Think how many people can destroy shit like this and by then people are dependent on using the "911 social device. I personally would(If I had enough money for the tech. I need to do it.) spam the shit out the "911 social device or network" which will ultimately bring it down or lock it up for a time being. As soon as they release this (IF) someone is going to or at least try to fuck shit up.
My present Android phone actually has much less reliable texting behavior than my previous dumb phone. I spend a lot of time in areas of marginal signal, and I've found that if a text fails, it won't attempt to resend without going through a 4 step manual process.
That's really annoying when the bear comes back to maul you again.
You're not thinking informal enough. This IS Twitter we're talking about.
"@911 fire at house lol #fire #heat #deathtoplasticbieber"
Not sure if referring to terrorist attack or emergency call.
911 may be ambiguous for phone systems where you must dial 9 to get to the outside. For instance, at my workplace we had serious trouble with employees dialing 911 by accident. People dialed 9 to get out, then 1 for international, then another 1 either by mistake, or as the first part of an area code. The emergency services were not amused.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
There seems to be a lot of competing theory on this. 999 is good because it's hard to loopback dial during maintenance, whereas 112 is easy to loopback dial but harder to butt dial by just holding a button. Anything that has a leading 9 conflicts with 'dial 9 for an outside like' services and so on. I don't envy the guys who try and sort these things out.
Whoops, had those reversed. I guess that's what I get for rephrasing it 3 times :(