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AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts
First time accepted submitter TigerPlish writes "AT&T has rolled out Wireless Emergency Alerts for iPhones. The alerts are for huge catastrophes (a Presidential Alert), for weather / natural calamities, and for AMBER alerts. One can turn off the latter two, but the Presidential alert cannot be turned off. The article mentions only 4S and 5 get this update. That said, I have a 4 and it got the update this morning. This was enacted in 2006, for those keeping track of such things. I, for one, do not care for this any more than I like the idea of them reading my communications to begin with. Oh, I'm sorry, the "metadata" from my communications." As promised.
Why cant emergency services just use plain old SMS service? "don't go outside, there is a hurricane if you havent noticed"
that's the fucking hilarious part! I'm laughing my ass off here at this. Wireless Emergency Alerts! FUCKING BRILLIANT! if they had done their gsm networks as they were supposed to they would have had these localized alerts long time ago.
nobody really uses them in anywhere in the world for much anything though, I think it's probably because areas that have this implemented aren't hit with catastrophes that would warrant such.. around here basically there would have to be a bombing raid I think.. I mean, just a "bear in downtown" or shit like that wouldn't be serious enough.
I don't think they're going to be broadcasting info about shootings etc over this in the states either..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You're an idiot if you're complaining about this. The EAS (and its predecessor, the EBS) has been around for almost 50 years and is a necessary, though at times potentially ineffective, capability to have. From the mid-90s into the late 2000's there was concern that the "traditional" methods of activation would be come less and less effective.
Every single broadcast TV and radio station has a manual right in the control room and there's an out-of-band method for heirarchical distribution of messages from local relays to cut in at a moment's notice.
The problems were that people nowadays were spending more and more time away from live, regulated broadcasts, and with cell phones instead of land lines (for reverse 911 calls in the event of an evacuation).
Extending these regulations to "channels where people are actually spending their time" is an important part of keeping the system relevant. Cable systems have been doing text overlays (scrolling text for EAS tests or NWS alerts) for a while, but that now cuts through into your cable-provided DVR if you have one. Netflix and other streaming providers have ways of injecting data into the feed. Hell, at a game company I used to work for there was talk of using zip code subscriber data to forward NWS alerts to users *within the game* to ensure that someone didn't miss a tornado warning if they were spending the evening with their favorite MMORPG and the radio off.
Extending this to cell phone towers and multicast paging simply makes sense. It's not nefarious, it's just good public policy.
(And this is coming from someone definitely of the libertarian-conservative mindset, and no fan of the current President.)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I received a blizzard warning in February on my Galaxy S3 through Verizon, so apparently the only news is that iPhone is catching up. I suppose there should be some page that tells us which phone/provider combinations provide these messages.
You're an idiot if you're complaining about this.
Well, *I* am going to complain, because the system is implemented on my Android phone. It's been incredibly annoying. Remember that big huge east coast snowstorm?
It'd been on the TV and print news and intertubes for DAYS. There was a morning press conference and state of emergency declared. It was only after it had started snowing that someone thought to send out the alerts, and they seemed to make up for lateness through volume/repetition.
I think by the end of the day (at which point it was near white-out conditions) my cell phone had loudly alerted me to the weather emergency something like SIX times. There's clearly no intelligence to the system, or someone just decided that sending it out several times was best just in case we hadn't noticed the massive snowfall or had been hiding in a cave for the last WEEK.
Please help metamoderate.
I ignore AMBER alerts because most likely, the kid was taken by one of his parents because of the all too common ugly divorces that use children as bargaining chips. Especially, when you see a description of the kidnapper and a license plate. You just know it was the parent with custody (usually the mother because the moms get custody even if they're a crack whore who is a hooker to pay for it) who knows the description of the other parent and their license plate. Really; who takes down a plate when an adult is putting a kid into a car? Screaming kid? Yeah, like that never happens.
When a kid is really kidnapped by a pervert or child serial killer, he just disappears - no license plates, description of the kidnapper or other details to put in the news. Just a picture on a milk carton only to never hear from the kid again.
My girlfriend has Sprint which enabled these alerts previously.
Several months ago we were woken at 5am by a loud alert
at about 5am.
This was an Amber alert. While it's a great shame, we certainly didn't want to woken for this,
and there was nothing we could do.
Although the alert can be turned off, the default was for it to be on, which I believe is not the proper way this
should have been enabled.
You realize that the "Presidential Alerts" are for things like imminent nuclear attack and other such "kiss your ass goodbye" national moments? There has never been a national activation of the alert system in the history of the system (going back to the EBS and before that the CONELRAD system. Ever. Not even during 9/11, the most significant event on US soil since Pearl Harbor.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I was furious when they started using weather radios to announce AMBER alerts and I'm equally annoyed they are extending that to this system as well. These systems were designed for major public emergencies. Use for AMBER alerts and other emergencies impacting only small groups of people will only encourage people to ignore or deactivate their alert enabled devices. Here where I live, weather radios routinely go off for AMBER alerts. The average radio also goes off for a variety of minor weather issues, rather than only triggering for weather warnings. Many people simply unplug their radios after being woken up one too many times by a screaming alert radio letting them know there is a thunderstorm WATCH or AMBER alert. I imagine people will similarly disable all the available phone alerts, because the system will simply trigger far to often and annoy them. I know the very first thing I did when I read this article was find and disable the AMBER alert option. The settings were omitting from the article. You can find them in Settings >> Notifications, located at the bottom. There are two options, one to disable/enable AMBER alerts and another to disabled/enable "Emergency Alerts."
... and other such "kiss your ass goodbye" national moments...
Like when dolphins need broadcast "So long, and thanks for all the fish" on their way out?
http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB410692&cv=820#fbid=X5Yfnrwu8Fd
AT&T has several wireless devices that are WEA capable, including new 4G LTE devices. WEA capable devices will display the following logo on the packaging and in the device instruction manual:
Wireless Emergency Alerts Capable Logo
The following AT&T devices are WEA capable*:
http://www.slashgear.com/google-now-update-brings-emergency-alerts-to-android-4-1-jelly-bean-30244815/
There are three new features to note in this Google Now update: ... Support for emergency messages has been added in this update as well, giving you severe weather warnings and other emergency alerts right on your Now page. This will undoubtedly come in handy for the more turbulent areas of the world, and it could potentially save a few lives, so it’s good to have it along.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
(the rarely vindicated paranoids
Well clearly YOU need a little more connectivity to current events, but I suspect it is unlikely to come via s special notice from the president.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The idea of "Presidential Alerts" annoys me, for some reason. Call it what it is; a "National Emergency Alert"; that's fine. But the idea that the PRESIDENT is somehow so important that he needs his own alert offends my democratic principles. He's not a king and he's not the heart-n-soul of the nation; he's a bureaucrat we've hired to manage the government. He's about as important as a clerk in the DMV (except he has more responsibilities) and he's no more worthy of adulation than that clerk. If the government feels it needs to notify me of an emergency, that's great. But I neither need nor want a direct line from the president.
Yes, I know it's pedantic. Yes, I know that I won't actually be getting a message from Obama or his successors. But there's increasingly a worshipful mystique being woven around our leaders that smacks of monarchism and I think that fits poorly with the ideals of this nation. So rather than name the messaging service after some bureaucrat, call it what it is - "National Emergency Alert" - and let's remember that ultimately, there's nothing special about our head of state; he's just another American.