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First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess
Mark Gibbs writes "AT&T's implementation of the FCC's Emergency Alerts System provides minimally useful information in an untimely fashion with little geolocational relevance. ... Yesterday California got its first AMBER alert and my notification arrived at 10:54pm. It came up as panel over my lock screen and here's what it looked like on my notifications screen: 'Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door.' The problem with this it that's all there is! You can stab away at the message as much as you like but that's all you get, there's no link to any detail and considering the event it related to occurred over 240 miles away from me near to the Mexican border, the WEA service seems to be poorly implemented. Indeed, many Californians were annoyed and confused by the alert and according to the LA Times 'Some cellphones received only a text message, others buzzed and beeped. Some people got more than one alert.' I got a second copy of the alert at 2:22am and other subscribers reported not receiving any alert until late this morning."
It seems to have gone down about as well as New York's.
Earth to submitter: AT&T is a mess.
Remain calm! All is well!
People on Verizon and T-Mobile got the same message. But sure, just blame AT&T for it anyway.
All services implemented the same feature and sent the EXACT same nearly useless message (which was written by a CA agency and approved by FEMA before being sent out).
Makes no sense to single out "AT&T's implementation"... it's mostly the cell phone manufacturer's implementation, and the govt's decision to send it out to the entire state in the middle of the night...
I live in Illinois and didn't watch the news tonight so I wasn't aware of the Amber alert in California. However, from the message you posted, here is what I got:
AMBER ALERT
Location: Boulevard, California
California License Plate: 6WCU986
Car Make: Nissan
Car Model: Versa
Car Color: Blue
Other Attributes: 4 door, not 2 door.
I received the message via Sprint, despite being 400 miles from the affected area. I guess this is one way to make sure people start ignoring these messages.
Alerts don't sell phones or services, so it's probably funded, staffed, and supported like anything else that doesn't contribute to profits: poorly.
When your government calls on you to protect your freedoms, you must give up your freedoms to answer its call! How else are the free to remain free?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
There WAS NO USEFUL geographic info'.
I got the same message as the submission on Virgin (Sprint). Where the hell is "Boulevard, CA"? California is a big state; more than a day's drive NS for most people.
If I'm driving, the alert is on the big orange-text signs every couple of miles, and I'm NOT supposed to be taking text messages while driving.
If I'm home, in bed (or, in my case, watching a movie), how much good does it do to wake/text me?
As to "what more do I (you) need?": tell me if it's a custody dispute or a "stranger" kidnapping. In the former case, I don't care, while in the latter, I do. The custodial parent isn't always the more fit, they might just have better lawyers, 'specially abusive, wealthy fathers/husbands.
See subject.
I got the same alert four times in the last 24 hours, several hours apart. And I was just in a night class with 100 other people, and four separate times during the class somebody's phone (including mine, once) started blaring the alert at max volume. My phone was on vibrate. One person couldn't figure out how to silence their phone, and ended up running out of the room with phone still blaring. After 3 seconds, if you don't silence it, the phone starts reading the alert text at maximum volume too (using TTS). I have an HTC One, which has incredibly loud speakers, so this is not cool. Of course, Amber Alerts are now disabled on my phone, which reminds me of the stupidity of Windows User Account Control popups -- people click on them just to get them to go away, so they lose their value. Incidentally, Presidential Alerts may not be disabled on Android. I just hope the US President never has a good reason to ring every phone in the nation at full volume.
Don't blame (only) AT&T for the terse message. The WEA system limits messages to 90 characters:
http://www.fema.gov/wireless-emergency-alerts
WEA will look like a text message. The WEA message will show the type and time of the alert, any action you should take, and the agency issuing the alert. The message will be no more than 90 characters.
I can't believe the government asked for such an arbitrary and small limit on message size, so I'm assuming that the carriers said that's all they could provide, probably because a 90 character message fit into some control message they were already sending to phones.
Arbeit macht frei!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Who cares hwo detailed or non detailed the message is. They're just trying to get the point out. Stop being lazy & search it up. Takes no more than 1 minute. Goodness. There's an amber alert & all people can do is complain how little detailed the message is.
Just how long do you think it takes to drive 300 miles in a CAR which can travel at over 60MPH? Why would someone who kidnapped a child stay in the same area anyway? 300 miles is peanuts for that kind of alert, it should really be more like the possible distance travelled in a generous window since the disappearance was reported, not just five hours...
The whole point of the thing is to alert people in a huge radius to be on the lookout for the car. The alert had just the information needed - if you saw that car you could just call 911.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I live in San Francisco, which is 600 miles from San Diego where this alert originated from. For you east coasters that is the equivalent of an Amber Alert in Florida being sent to everybody all the way to Washington DC.
I quickly researched how to turn off Amber Alerts on my phone, I won't be bothered by them ever again. (On an iphone Settings > Notifications, scroll to very bottom where you find Government Alerts, turn off Amber Alerts, leave on Emergency Alerts since that might actually carry important info.) And that of course is the real issue, by sending such an irrelevant and incredible annoying/distracting message they are inviting large swaths of the population to turn them off. Rules should be established around relevancy (ie, does somebody 600+ miles away need to be a recipient?) in order to keep the system useful.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
You don't think a uselesss AMBER alert should be bitched about? Even the people who take these things seriously are going to lose interest when they overly broad.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The radius needs to be quite wide, because a person can travel a great distance in a car in a short period of time. 800 miles would not be unreasonable depending on when the missing child was reported.
Abducted children are often taken quite far away.
The fact it was an Amber alert tells you a child is involved, and the alert had all other information needed to report something, basically the plates and make/model of the car.
I guess the different times of reception are an issue but something is better than nothing, and it takes time to work through a list of many cell phone numbers to send out an alert... obviously they do need to improve on the speed of that, and try to remove duplicates.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, I was watching cable tv when the show was interrupted by the EBS (with a computer synthesized voice, no less, yet it still sounded like a bad CB radio). My cable box inexplicably returned to some random channel that I wasnt watching. Thanks Time Warner and Motorola, your cable box SUCKS in yet another aspect. Then, hours later (at like 10pm or so), all three t-mobile cell phones got the alert. We got the alert yet again the next day. For something that occurred at around 5PM? The suspect could have been out of state or in mexico by then. At the time I was thinking, what makes this kid so special, this sort of thing probably happens daily.. I didn't know the details on the story until the next day. This might be useful if it arrived within, say, an hour or less of the incident and was sent to phones geographically within the area the suspect could have traveled in that amount of time (80 miles?).
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I can say for sure that it's not just AT&T. A couple of weeks ago, I was receiving alerts every 15 minutes for floods that were happening 400 miles away on the east coast. Add to the this the fact that I couldn't stop the annoying screeching my phone was making without unlocking my phone and confirming the message and you had one hell of a case of distracted driving and nearly two accidents. I'd much rather text while driving 100% of the time. It isn't 1/10th as distracting, and less than 1/100th as infuriating. Perhaps those who thought these messages were a good idea need to rethink their sanity.
It does NOT work.
Things are built well when people want them, let alone need them.
Now not only does the NSA keep track of most of the meta data on our emails and phone calls, now the FCC has a way to send a message to everyone who has a phone. What's next? . . .
And I like the government.
Send your thoughts to the FCC and the President
AMBER alert over.
Resume your TINFOIL alert.
The only thing this was successful at was prompting me to figure out how to turn off the Amber alert notifications on my phone. I have received it 4 times now on two devices over a 16 hour period, the message appears the same every time.
*turns over*
Wake me when the alert goes black.
Black?
Yeah, when the power's out so we don't get any colorful alerts anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The message was completely irrelevant for those of us 600+ miles away. I don't even own a car, I live in an urban area. I literally have NO idea what a Nissan Versa looks like. Literally NONE. I NEVER look at license plates on vehicles while I'm walking. NEVER.
These messages have ZERO relevance. Send me a pic of the kids or the kidnapper. I don't give a shit about the fucking make/model of a car that is 600 miles away (the distance from Washington DC to Florida btw).
I can only imagine what people in the far Northern side of the state in Shasta or Humboldt thought of it all. 900 miles away something happened and they are also getting this message.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Not only that, but the entire system itself is so inherently flawed it amounts to little more than “crime-control theater.”
"His name was James Damore."
... by the ineptitude, apathy, and selfishness of a corporate contractor? News at 10:54pm!
How may traffic accidents are caused by these?
The number has got to be non-zero.
"His name was James Damore."
My phone made an awful, loud, startling noise. I had never heard it before, and it scared the crap out of me. It sounded like a fire alarm. Once I realized it was my phone, my first thought was some sort of disaster requiring evacuation. Once I saw the message, it was only confusing. No real information, no linkage to details.
A google search turned up more about the Amber alert, which I discovered was several hours away from me in Southern California. I'm in Northern California. The details on the web mentioned that they were suspected of escaping to Texas. So, it was absolutely irrelevant to me. I immediately looked into how to disable it, and had it disabled in a couple minutes. 75% of the others I talked to today also disabled there Amber alerts.
1. The alarm should be more moderate, or at least adjustable. It was very startling. If I had been driving when it went off, I think the effect would have been dangerous. I would have left it on if I could disable the audio alarm and just get the message.
2. It needs more information, or at least a simlpe click-through to details, location radius / distance from me, pictures of the people involved, etc.
They used the national emergency service to inform the population about some child being kidnapped. Erh... Ok, now please tell me why I should care. Yes, yes, it's probably heart breaking for the parents, and yes, yes, if it was my child I'd certainly love to use it for that but the problem is: 99.something % of the population do not give half a fuck, let alone keep an eye out for that car. "Why the fuck should I care about some random brat I don't know about?" will probably be the reaction of nearly ALL the people who got that message.
I see a "cry wolf" scenario waiting to happen. Some day in the future, something actually important, something that actually is meaningful to most of the population, will happen and people will simply click it away after reading "AMBER AL...", thinking "fuck, that kidnapping fad's getting worse than spam texts".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On iOS: settings -> notifications -> Government Alerts down at the bottom. You can turn off just Amber alerts.
On Android: open the Android messaging /application/, then menu -> settings -> emergency alerts -> disable Amber alerts.
We have a similar system in the Netherlands.
I subscribed to it very early on but unsubscribed after very few relevant messages and more often not getting messages that would have been relevant to my location.
Atleast the messages I got were understandable.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They used the national emergency service to inform the population about some child being kidnapped. Erh... Ok, now please tell me why I should care. Yes, yes, it's probably heart breaking for the parents, and yes, yes, if it was my child I'd certainly love to use it for that but the problem is: 99.something % of the population do not give half a fuck, let alone keep an eye out for that car. "Why the fuck should I care about some random brat I don't know about?" will probably be the reaction of nearly ALL the people who got that message.
I see a "cry wolf" scenario waiting to happen. Some day in the future, something actually important, something that actually is meaningful to most of the population, will happen and people will simply click it away after reading "AMBER AL...", thinking "fuck, that kidnapping fad's getting worse than spam texts".
If you don't care about Amber alerts, you can disable them in your phone while still receiving the other emergency alerts.
If you get a message that starts "AMBER AL...", then you can safely ignore it if you don't care about child abductions since Amber alerts are specifically for child abductions.
You're right, the Amber Alert would be much more useful if they provided the exact location of the vehicle.
Oh. Very convenient. Though it shoudl be opt-in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh. Very convenient. Though it shoudl be opt-in.
The whole point of opt-out systems is that they're used when few people would choose to opt-in.
This one fails dismally because they've made it so incredibly annoying that almost everyone goes to the trouble of figuring out how to disable them.
Because women are never abusive.
What is the point of having it be opt-in? No one would use it then. You can "opt-in" to listen to a police radio, too, but the whole point is to tell the general public.
But when I've seen them where I am, they are just posted on highway signs, which I think is less intrusive for some people, but still gets the word out to those out and about.
On iOS: settings -> notifications -> Government Alerts down at the bottom. You can turn off just Amber alerts.
Thank you - I haven't had to deal with these phone alerts yet so I hadn't noticed this setting; but now I've disabled them preemptively.
I don't know about other areas of the US, but around here (Puget Sound region, Washington state) we've got all sorts of computer-controlled signage on our major freeways. For the past couple years these have included Amber Alert notices when those occur. There's no real benefit to having them also appear on my phone - if I'm not in my car, I'm not likely to notice random automobile makes and license plates.
#DeleteChrome
I was in a day long meeting in the Bay Area today and peoples phones (only AT&T) were going off till 2pm. The alert itself could have had more info, but the real issue this post is pointing out is that AT&T could not deliver the alerts in a timely and reliable way.
Oh. Very convenient. Though it shoudl be opt-in.
The whole point of opt-out systems is that they're used when few people would choose to opt-in.
This one fails dismally because they've made it so incredibly annoying that almost everyone goes to the trouble of figuring out how to disable them.
You've just explained why it wasn't set up as an opt-in system -- few people would chose to opt-in. Since nearly everyone that's complaining about the message didn't realize that there was even an option to disable the alerts, non of those people would have opted in, so having them opt-out now is no worse. But most of the rest of the people that don't really care about the alerts (or don't know they can turn them off), will keep them enabled.
If nobody would use it, what purpose does it serve? Unless I'm kinda mistaken here it's a service nobody wants. The population doesn't want it and the service providers sure as hell could do without it.
So who wants it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am skeptical that 99% of the population is as apathetic as you are, especially when it comes to the welfare of children. This is not a "think of the children" situation where the welfare of children is used to leverage some other cause. This is a case where the welfare of a child is actually at stake. Of course we care. And really, no one is asking you to get out of bed and join a search party. The point is that the information is now in you head so that if you see a car matching the description you will be aware.
False alarms are definitely an issue with Amber alerts as often they are issued without meeting the criteria, usually when the child is abducted by a family member in a custody dispute and is not really in danger. But if you are saying that a real child abduction is not a real emergency, I hope I'm not alone in disagreeing with you.
AT&T - for all that it's the same name as the precursor of the inventor of the telephone system and many innovative systems, is sadly not even a pale ghost of it's former glory. What they are is group of clue avoiding MBAs cum lawyers running a reconstituted monopoly to maximize shareholder profits and piss off customers. They are worse than that barking dog that just won't SHUT UP, they are a drag on innovation, competition, and customer service. While they do a great job of "servicing" their customers, it's not in a way that is appreciated or desired by those same customers. Besides, they use crunchy peanut butter as lube. With no "reach around". (I know how disgusting a mental image that is. Sorry, but that's about what I feel about them.)
If I had the power, anyone at AT&T (Indeed, ANY telco) above lower management would be forever barred from working anywhere near telecommunications, internet, or anything more advanced than a grill for flipping burgers. Even that I would consider high risk; food poisoning, you know.
America: Highest Internet costs, Lowest Internet speeds. Go figure.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
If nobody would use it, what purpose does it serve? Unless I'm kinda mistaken here it's a service nobody wants. The population doesn't want it and the service providers sure as hell could do without it.
So who wants it?
Parents of abducted children?
Sure the implementation could be better, like a followup link/swipe for more info, but a kid was missing. I knew if I saw a blue Versa with that license plate I could call the police and help that kid out.
I could have taken a second to google it if I wanted the full story, but the point of the notification was to make people look around altogether at once for a moment.
Why do so many people seem so upset about being woken up by an Amber alert? They've got to improve the notifications but I don't mind being bothered for a second every once in a while if it could do some good in a big way.
Living in SoCal, I can attest to the following statement:
Locals put bumper stickers on their cars which read "WHERE IN THE HELL IS BOULEVARD?"
which is documented here
At 2:22am with regards to an event hundreds of miles away? I bet they are...
Hmm... quite a small target group, no wonder no funds are being made available to push it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Also in this case, the "random brat" that you don't care about was abducted after her mother and brother were burned to death.
story
I got the message six times. I was in a bar and had already seen the keno machines go nuts displaying it. Unless the car drove through the room, there wasn't a damned thing I could do to catch someone a few hundred miles away. End result is that I disabled Amber alerts on my phone.
What does that change? I still cannot see the public interest.
If you said that he was an escaped child molester who kidnapped a random child on his or her way home from school, I can well see it. There is an inherent danger that he will do it again.
Motivation for a crime is a key element when assessing the threat an individual poses. Not the way the crime was committed. I'd be more wary of a hitman who cleanly killed his mark with a single headshot than of a husband who tortured his cheating wife to death by slicing her from toe to head with a filet knife. Yes, the latter is far more brutal and cruel, but the former is far more likely to repeat his crime.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sure, but they usually can't afford the better lawyer, although there is some courtroom bias in their favor.
Look at the overall numbers, and there are more abusive fathers (and boyfriends of mothers) than mothers.
600 miles away can be a 7 or so hour drive depending on the stops and how fast you can go. By the time the alert gets to your phone, they could be over half way there.
Of *course* it is annoying at the same time it is busy being useless. It has nothing to do with the nature of the emergency and everything to do with keeping the citizens hyper-vigilant...er, scared. Now excuse me I've got to get ready for the Two Minute Hate.
I was around a group of people who all looked at their phone, recognized it, acknowledged it and went about their evening. Why people are even complaining, is beyond me. There's nothing wrong with what went out. It was a good test and I expected to see more in the future. The alert is a non-story (the kidnapping is a story).
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I'm guessing someone who recently committed murder and kidnapping wouldn't want to push 90mph, though I haven't really driven in CA.
Except that it wasn't even 7 hours after, it was more than 24 hours after. The chances that the guy was even in CA at that point seem pretty remote. News articles say that their best info is that he was headed to Canada or Texas; both of those are more than easily reachable in well under that time. Heck, according to Google maps it'd probably be possible to get completely across Texas to New Orleans, or almost to Edmonton, CA in that time.
I live in the eastern US and also am an AT&T customer. A few months ago I got blasted awake by an Amber alert in the middle of the night. It was the loudest sound I ever have heard coming from my iPhone. I honestly did not know it was possible for the phone to produce a sound that loud. I was less than thrilled at having received no warning about this being implemented. The next morning I read up on how to disable the alerts. If you haven't received an Amber alert on your phone, disable them now because you definitely do not want your first experience to be your phone screaming like a banshee in the middle of the night.
yes a state wide alert should be for dangers like "incoming tsunami run for the hills"
A Verizon cellphone in the room at the time did, however and it was slightly less useful than getting no message at all. My tax dollars at work, woo-hoo!
(No seriously, if you were in any way responsible for lobbying for, voting for, or implementing any part of this useless piece of dog shit I could beat with a 50 line perl script and a 10-year old email server you can seriously GO FUCK YOURSELF.)
240 miles away is perfectly reasonable for someone suspected to be on the run. [Insert The Fugitive quotes here.] 240 miles at an average speed of 50mph is under 5 hours. Hell, in 10 hours, they can be in New Mexico at a very leisurely pace.
As for the content of the alert, it would be nice if there was more info but what more do you need than "Amber Alert" and the vehicle description? The cops don't want you to take them down. They want you to report the location of the vehicle if you see it. That doesn't require the life history of the people involved or a thorough report of the event.
Maybe, but so is the number of accidents caused by placemats.
This happened last year and it was incredibly annoying with verizon. I got 4 notifications on my phone (alert messages) at 3 or 4 in the morning, a phone call on my phone with a recorded message, and then right after I got a phone call on my LAN line three times about this and I think that was it. I may be called a douchebag but I unsubscribed after that experience. I think it's great that the system exists but there were NO notification that people would get these notifications and when the sound is just as scary as a nuke warning, you think you're going to die at 3 in the morning. I don't necessarily go out and when I do I tend not to look at people anyways. They should at least provide a picture of the kid that was kidnapped or something. A simple message isn't very good at describing anything.
This is as beautiful an example of idiotic, worthless, counterproductive security theater as we've seen.
For starters, the implementation is something I'd expect from a drunk college sophomore who's been pulling C grades in CS courses. It's miserable. The most significant effects it's had have been to alarm, confuse, annoy and distract people -- some of whom were driving. Great idea, that last one: cause their cell phone to make a noise they've heard before so that it increases the probability they'll pick it up and look at it.
Second, the lack of detail is outrageously stupid. A recipient of this message who just happened to see such a vehicle might approach it because there's nothing in it warning them not to.
Third, sending it 24 hours later is idiotic. Any competent murdered would be in a different vehicle by then. (Once again, police assume that everyone is as stupid as they are. Most people aren't.)
Fourth, sending it multiple times ensures that many people will disable it. Way to go, alleged public safety officials.
Finally, the entire concept behind this is insane. Untrained civilians are poor observers (as anyone who's studied trial witness dynamics for even an hour knows). How many blue cars got reported because they might be Nissan Versas? (I have no idea what one of those looks like; hell, I didn't even know there was such a model.) How much manpower got diverted to deal with all those false reports instead of being used to pursue leads based on hard evidence?
This is just another case of lazy, sloppy, incompetent police work -- like we saw in Boston when they closed down the entire city and rolled armored vehicles through the streets to catch one frightened teenager and STILL couldn't manage to pull it off. It seems that the pigs in California only know how to drink coffee and shoot helpless unarmed civilians in the back -- something challenging, like tracking down a murderer, is far beyond their pitifully feeble minds.
By a godly coincidence, I read this article on CNN right after bumping into this one. For those wanting more information on the mysterious amber alert, here it is: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/07/justice/california-amber-alert/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
If only I had mod points. That's an insightful comment if ever I heard one.
-- Sent from a computer.
I live in Portland, OR area and got this message at about 11pm that day. I think that puts the radius more around 1000 miles. My carrier is Sprint.
Plus, it is a text message and character limited, so it is hard to put detail in. Links would be nice, but they take space, and lets face it, not all phones can follow links, even with smartphone penetration where it is.
Ultimately I turned them off due to annoyance. Of course one cannot turn off the presidential alerts. I presume I will get one of those when I finally get my Social Security check.
Silence is a state of mime.
I am skeptical that 99% of the population is as apathetic as you are, especially when it comes to the welfare of children. This is not a "think of the children" situation where the welfare of children is used to leverage some other cause. This is a case where the welfare of a child is actually at stake. Of course we care. And really, no one is asking you to get out of bed and join a search party. The point is that the information is now in you head so that if you see a car matching the description you will be aware.
Then they should provide time-of-day settings for the alerts - or at least the Amber alerts. During the day when I may be out and about, sure make noise and I might find it useful. Overnight when I'm trying to sleep, stay quiet. I'll read it in the morning. Add to that, they should allow me to set the obnoxiousness of the alert (again, at least the Amber alert) so it isn't heart-stopping or accident-inducing. Making it highly obnoxious 24x7, with the only available option ON/OFF, simply ensures people are going to turn it off, even some of those who do care about the welfare of the child.
Go through the cases individually, and you'll find it's a lot more equal than you'd like to admit. When cops get called out, they're far more likely to assume the male is the aggressor - and in fact, they will most likely behave in a dominant fashion toward the male, and certainly behave in a sympathetic fashion toward a whimpering female in a given situation. That behaviour causes things to get worse. I've heard of a man being arrested after the female stabbed him in the arm. I've seen men arrested after women assaulted them. I've lived through it with an ex- who was both abusive and aggressive, and would go crying to any male around.
Then there was my mother, who beat herself up and called the police. They prosecuted my father for it, too. That'll go in your statistics in spite of it being a complete lie.
For the record, that didn't happen just the once, either. It happened at least twice, and probably a lot more often than that. Remember: I lived through it. This is first hand.
(I also lived through it when my mother tried to stab me with a kitchen knife, after through dinner plates at me, then started screaming that I was going to assault her. She had a knife, I was barefoot, and surrounded by broken crockery and glass: she was simply putting on a scene for whoever was listening.)
In much the same way that insurance companies ask if you've had any alcohol within the 24 hours preceding a car accident, the statistics you cite simply reflect social bias. Serial killers are usually intelligent white males, so when someone starts researching a serial killer the model begins with "Assuming a white male, intelligent..." If something doesn't fit that profile, it's far more likely to be dropped, and thus not represented in the statistics.
Social bias has it that women are weaker, and need defended from the evil bad mean big bully males, who beat them up. (Social bias completely forgets that women have faster reflexes, and the strength difference between men and women isn't as great as most believe it is, making a fight more of an even match.) Women are dainty and girly and tiday, not aggressive and non-violent, while mean eat steak and drink beer, drive cars fast, pick fights, and shout a lot. Women don't go and get in fights, but guys do.
This is all bullshit. Time to update your profile of humanity.
99.9 in a comment indicates a made up statistics. Just say 'the huge majority' next time, or overwhelming majority if there are more than five nines after the decimal point.
who misread the headline as 'Ultra-violent Chimp'?
Placemats are a necessity in modern society. Having your phone go off like a car alarm in your vehicle, ignoring your settings, is not. You must have half of a wit left to spend after coming up with that one.
The custodial parent isn't always the more fit, they might just have better lawyers, 'specially abusive, wealthy fathers/husbands.
Rely on Slashdot to vote this up to +5.
In the Baltimore/DC area they also have "Silver Alerts": dementia patient got out, can someone catch him for us? Thankfully they're just on the freeway signs (which normally tell other helpful information like "don't drive drunk" and "YAY SAFETY WOOO". Meanwhile people drive like derps on the Beltway anyway.
for how Americans handle any situation. "What does something that happened x miles away have to do with me? Can't you just let me sleep?" Sure we can. Go back to sleep, kids.
I don't get any of those stupid alerts on my phone. No amber alerts. No "OMG there's some drizzle in the area!" severe weather alerts. No nothing.
+1 for a Custom ROM where all of that bullshit can be disabled.
Don't forget the "Report suspicious activity" messages on 95, begging you to call and report the driver next to you for having olive skin and a beard so they can be shipped off to Guantanamo bay without any suspicion whatsoever to live out the rest of their natural lives without any legal representation or due process.
Custodial parent kidnappings aren't even supposed to permit an amber alert.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I've thought about calling the number and saying "Marion Barry reported to work today, he's more likely to commit a crime than anyone else on this road"
Similar weird alert in Las Vegas. Got an alert for a 1988 Ford Thunderbird from Fallon NV (~390 miles away). Yeah, I'll make sure to keep an eye out.
Looked it up and it was a mom who said some crazy things before leaving with her 5 year old. Not a stranger kidnapping, not even a parental kidnapping/custody disupte, just an endangerment issue.
http://www.rgj.com/viewart/20130726/NEWS/307260050/Amber-Alert-canceled-Fallon-girl-mother-found
Then I would have location to drive to beat up at least two people/children for disturbing me in the middle of the night.
I'd be more wary of a hitman who cleanly killed his mark with a single headshot than of a husband who tortured his cheating wife to death by slicing her from toe to head with a filet knife. Yes, the latter is far more brutal and cruel, but the former is far more likely to repeat his crime.
Is that actually true? What are the stats on people who commit grisly murders? Are they likely to stop at one?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
sent the EXACT same nearly useless message (which was written by a CA agency and approved by FEMA before being sent out)
Just as a note, that's the EXACT same information every other state provides in an amber alert: city, car and license plate.
Here in Texas, it's usually the parent on the losing side of the divorce grabbing the kids and running for Mexico.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Politicians who know that putting on a big show of protecting children is a vote-winner.
Survivor of the 4:00AM NYC alert debacle here.
I was told by the he idea of the 'amber alert' alarm blasting out of your cellphone is that if you're on the road you might see the car involved with the crisis and call it in and save the child.
Problem is that very loud alarm is going to tend to make people pull out their phones, type in the password, and read the message. But driving an texting is very dangerous and justifiably illegal. What are the odds of someone getting killed in a car accident caused by the alarm vs. actually saving the victim?
I'm thinking the car accident is far more likely.
PS If you haven't had the pleasure the alarm sound is VERY LOUD and, well, really alarming. When it went off in the very early hour my heart was pounding for a half hour and I never did get back to sleep that morning. I'm wondering how many people will get heart attacks from such an event, now that I think of it.
Apparently, there are lots of people who don't really know how these alerts work on their phones.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Look out for a LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door moron.
You are not the police so you are not entitled to know everything man. In the meantime while bitching about this on Slashdot you probably missed the BLUE Nissan Versa whizzing past you with the licence 6WCU986 heading North on the freeway.
If Californians are really that confused when given the license plate number AND description of a car that contains a kidnapped child then I apologize to the whole state of California for containing citizens too stupid for words.
I would agree that you should be allowed to opt out of this if you truly find the repeated messages sent by police trying to save the life of a child annoying and confusing. I think there should be a "heartless idiot" clause with every cellphone contract that lets self absorbed fucktards opt out of potentially life saving notices.
In the rest of the country and around the world:
"'Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door"
Is painfully obvious!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
My phone is so old that it runs gingerbread, so I don't even have that setting, you insensitive clod!
I can only disable "push messages", WTFever those are. It's disabled already. Does that include Amber alerts?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ha ha, only serious. But more seriously, California has an absolute fuckload of cities in it. That's not surprising for the most populous state. Half the time I have no idea where a random California city is located whatsoever, and I've lived here nearly all my life. Most of those towns are so bad that by the time you're an adult you're wishing someone would kidnap you just to get you out of them. I mean, if you were trapped in Firebaugh, you'd be waiting for a murderer or anyone to come through your door.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The parents of abducted children already know their kid is abducted. There's no point in alerting them.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The message was completely irrelevant for those of us 600+ miles away. I don't even own a car, I live in an urban area. I literally have NO idea what a Nissan Versa looks like. Literally NONE. I NEVER look at license plates on vehicles while I'm walking. NEVER.
There are lots of valid objections in this thread, but all of yours are stupid. Most people are familiar with typical automobiles, especially ubiquitous econoboxes like the Versa. And when alerted to the fact that a child has been kidnapped, many people care enough about other humans to look at some license plates.
I can only imagine what people in the far Northern side of the state in Shasta or Humboldt thought of it all. 900 miles away something happened and they are also getting this message.
By the time most of them got the message, the car could have been in their location. THAT is the biggest problem here; if they can't deliver the message in a timely fashion, then it is utterly useless.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here int he midwest we've been dealing with this alerts for weather from the day was pushed out. The I think it was about 2 days after the update we got multiple Thunderstorm Warnings for things happening 30 miles away and not even on a track for our geographic location. Wasn't part of the point of this to provide more accurate pinpointed alerts? You know where the cell towers are and you could send alerts to just the towers in the area of potential risk.
We also have the delayed messages, we got the first messages on time but well after the actual events we were still getting messages. Turning a recent Tornado Warning the local sirens went off as they should but about the time the all clear sounded then our phones started blowing up with the Tornado Warning. It was very confusing.
There also doesn't seem to be any scale to the level of the alert. They are all "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES" kinds of alerts. A Thunderstorm doesn't deserve the same level of alert as a Tornado.
It all starts at 0
Not a short term fix, but a long term fix for the amber alert system.
Presumably the problem is a child abduction and people out on the streets should be alert. It's not particularly helpful for people asleep at home or at work.
So why tie it into phones? Why not tie it into automobiles that are turned on? How about a system that automatically turns the radio on to 10% higher than it's preset volume and do an audible alert? Or if the radio is already on just increase the volume by 10% for the audible alert.
That way you'll get the attention of the people already on the roads to look out for the vehicle in question.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Why not just set up cell-enabled license plate scanners on major roads, and enable them ONLY for Amber Alerts (and an occasional white Ford Bronco :-) )?
A prerequisite would be that the activation and control records would HAVE TO BE available to the public to prevent abuses.
Um, the people most likely to be in position to see the suspect vehicle are other drivers. If you're driving, you're not supposed to be reading text messages (being startled by loud noises isn't helpful either).
So what the fuck is the point of this?
Do people not test systems before deployment? You can try to argue about the complexity and the difficulty of designing a system like this but in the end if it doesn't work right then it's not a good product. I would assume testing would of noticed these issues.
This could have been useful but it is so badly executed that I turned it off. I asked around and it turns out so did everyone else I spoke to. My first alert was a week or so ago in the middle of a thunder storm. We get many storms at this time of year and this wasn't particularly bad. Suddenly all four iPhones in the house started screeching the emergency alert tone. Scared the kids shitless. What we got was a "flash flood warning" that had already, and more subtly, been noted on Wunderground and Weather.com Apps. Worse it was a warning for an area a hundred miles from here. Weirdly we were watching TV at the time and there was no alert on the TV screen so I don't see why it went out to the phones. We've had a couple since and each time it has been for something that I wouldn't class as an emergency requiring such an intrusive alert but was also only relevant miles away from where I am.
There is an old story about a kid that cries wolf so many times that people start to ignore him.
Bingo! Yes, exactly what I thought. When I got one about a "flash flood warning" it scared the wife and kids and was for an area a hundred miles away. State wide alerts should be for state wide emergencies.
>
Just as a note, that's the EXACT same information every other state provides in an amber alert: city, car and license plate.
False. In Iowa we get a full description of the event and possible whereabouts when AMBER alerts are sent to mobile devices.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Amber Alerts are basically a way of trying to drag everyone into what is almost always a family dispute where a relative takes a kid somewhere and the custodial parents are upset about it for one reason or another. I disabled all the alerts I could on my phone, except the Extreme Alerts. If snowboarders build a halfpipe in my area, I don't want to miss out!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Depends on what was the motivation. If you kill the child of someone, he will probably want bloody revenge, but it's quite unlikely that he'll ever kill again, unless of course he has more kids that get killed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a great example of poor systems thinking. This application doesn't have to reach everyone to be effective, but the people it does reach have to be able to understand and act on an alert. Looks like they got it backwards.
You've just explained why it wasn't set up as an opt-in system -- few people would chose to opt-in.
Right, but setting it up as an opt-out system and then failing so very badly at it just makes people angry and distrustful of all such efforts. Unless that was the goal, the Amber alert system is a failure on every level.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The system works fairly well here in Atlanta. I have a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and when the alerts come in it buzzes and it's quite loud with it's own alert tone similar to the one you hear during emergency broadcasts. The message appears over the lock screen and the screen automatically turns on for about 2 minutes.My wife has an iPhone on Sprint and gets very similar alerts at the same time mine does. We've noticed that if I'm at work 30 miles away she may get a message and I won't so the geographical locating is pretty good. While I have seen it for Amber alerts they most frequently use it for tornado warnings and flash floods. Both of which Atlanta gets a lot of each year and a recent one gave me enough warning to seek shelter when a tornado was spotted so I welcome the system and hope they get the bugs out in other areas of the country.
As to "what more do I (you) need?": tell me if it's a custody dispute or a "stranger" kidnapping.
AMBER alerts are only issued (or are only supposed to be issued) in the case where there is a chance of violent harm to the child; e.g., kidnapping by a stranger. In most cases, those result in the death of the kid. Custody abductions (which make up the vast number of kidnappings) do not trigger AMBER alerts.
So if you see an AMBER alert, its because some nutcase has grabbed the kid, not because Mom thinks she would be the better parent.
Whether these alerts are in any way effective is an entirely different matter.
Really? Huh...
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/girls-commit-dating-violence-often-boys-studies-show-6C10809607
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Not only does it have some areas of pretty high population density, but California is also pretty large just in terms of area.
Honestly, I think the US needs some reorganization. Split the larger states into parts, and merge up all the small ones (Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts). Try to get every state to around 6-7 million people - right now state populations cover nearly two orders of magnitude, from 600K to 38M. There will be some weirdness - I believe that will require New York City to be not just its own state, but three different states, due to having 19M people. Some cases can't really be avoided, due to geography - Hawaii has only 1.4M people, but merging it with another state is just ludicrous.
Yes, I disabled all the damn alerts. Got one three weeks ago that said something about "Contra Costa county: evacuate immediately gas leak". Wonderful. Turns out it was about 10 miles from me. So I should evacuate work? Nope. People 50 miles away got that one. This one I got at 3:40 AM while I was 2/3 of the way to work (driving). I had already passed two of the signs showing the alert. It was pitch dark. All the cars look black. I don't know what a Nissan Versa looks like anyway and as far as I can tell at that time, there are no blue cars. After those two - I turned off all alerting. Although from the articles, it looks like the president can still send me a message to wake me up. If the whole idea was to get people to turn off alerting, they succeeded in dramatic fashion.
What went down as well as New York's ?
And considering how truthy some government agencies have been lately, how long until somebody running fugitive from some supposed crime (likely something stupid which most people don't really give a shit about), but publicly tracked down under the premise of a kidnapping which never occurred. Sooner or later the system is bound to be abused, and if it gets found out there's going to be a greater loss of public confidence. So crying wolf isn't even all of it.
Parents of abducted children?
Are you sure about that? How many false alerts does this system produce? How many police officer's work is wasted by following up on these false alerts? What is the reaction of the typical kidnapper to hearing these alerts? How does the kidnapper's reaction affect the survival of the abducted child? What are the opportunity costs? How does the reduced attention of drivers looking for that one car affect their ability to avoid accidents? Do you have any data on any of these questions? Are the alerts actually a net positive?
The fact it was an Amber alert tells you a child is involved
Since our government now thinks embarrassing facts deserve the same secrecy as threats to national security, when they place a BOLO on a car and says it's urgent because a child is involved, well, maybe, maybe not.
Every time I see something like this, I flashback to the scene in Farenheit 451 when the government takes over everyone's wall-screen to post pictures of the fugitive (the protagonist) and tell them to go outside and look for him so he can't hide.
Anyone who thinks the government should have this power is not my friend.
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between how things work in reality vs how they are "supposed" to work.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I've been getting Amber alerts in Texas since January. They are always useless. The national amber alert center does not usually have any more details, it just ends in a redirect loop. The whole system is a joke. Until they get it together, the should stop sending them out.
That is why we should have these built into phones, instead of this lame alert system.
If you're in range of the transmitter, you're close enough to be affected.
My ham radio can scan these silently, and sound an alarm when an EAS tone is detected. It would be trivial for a phone to do this, too.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Maybe, but so is the number of accidents caused by placemats.
And if the government were tossing placemats on the freeway, we'd complain similarly.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
SERIOUSLY. This is the only guy here who can make a logical argument.
I live in that area and everyone on I-95, I-495, and I-695 drives like a dementia patient. How would you tell?
I-495 is a full circle traffic jam, 24 hours per day. Cars not moving, two feet apart from each other. I-695 has the cars two feet apart from each other but everyone is going 85. I-95 is just America's cholesterol-clogged carotid artery.
is that this experience annoyed so many people, a lot of people will turn the feature off. Then when a real alert that affects a large population comes out, such as a Shelter in Place alert, a lot of people won't get the message.
The emergency system should only be used for disasters, not for amber alerts. I personally received the exact same alert 5 times.
ALL of the amber alerts that I have followed up on have been a parent "kidnapping". One of them was even perpetrated by one of my renters. It's no phone to hear one of your rental addresses on the radio. Turns out that she was foster caring for some children and was allowing the real parents to spend time with the children, which the state in it's wisdom was not allowed. One day when the kids were with their real parents, she found out that the Child Services were coming by to check up on the children, and she panicked and called 911, saying the children had been abducted by their parents. An Amber Alert was issued.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I'm confused (although this is fairly normal). If they have the license plate number, and if cars are pretty much all equipped with GPS, why is it such a chore to find them? I mean, we can bitch about different agencies sharing information inappropriately with other departments, but we already know it's taking place anyway. I don't see what is gained by NOT using the technology that's already in place...I mean, presumably the DMV knows which plate goes with which VIN, and with the VIN couldn't they pull the GPS info? Obviously not an expert, but shit, if we're going to have our rights stripped away anyway why not use their power (at least occasionally) to solve some problems? (I'm sorry, is that too logical?)
I disagree. This message could have easily been implemented for Smartphones to include photos of the kids/kidnapper, and stock photos of a blue NIssan Versa. (Or at the least, include a link to a page with those things on it.)
The other problem with this of course is that the kidnapper ALSO got the Amber Alert and is now aware he needs to change vehicles. The second he does that the Amber Alert is useless, and if he thought to do it BEFORE the Amber Alert when out then it is doubly useless. With a photo of the suspect and children? He is going to have to stop for gas at some point, regardless of what vehicle he is in.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Right.. but at least they would know that others have been alerted which might bring them some more hopes of finding their missing kid.
And not all phones will allow you to disable the alerts.
Particualry, most phones not purchased in the US; or unbranded phones.
Mine falls under HTC unbranded. I get the alerts, but have no option to disable (most of the world won't let you opt out of the Emergency Broadcast System)
I'm on TMO and I got the same message. No link. No extra info. So don't feel too bad about that. What you should be concerned about is the fact that you got this message a whole 14 hours after I did. I got mine VIA sms @ 8am.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Amber Alert seems like a really good idea, until you look at it closely. The root problem is false positives. Not false reports of sightings of abducted children, those can be weeded through pretty effectively. False Amber Alerts.
The basic concept behind the system is that since many abducted children are killed in the first three hours, it's necessary to get the alert out there fast. But, it's also really important that there not be a flood of Amber alerts issued about kids who just wandered off to a friend's house or something, so the process of verifying that a particular case meets all of the criteria for issuing an alert pretty much guarantees that by the time the alert is issued it's too late for kids who were victims of the most frightening form of child abduction, the sort for which the alert system was created.
Research backs this logic up. Multiple studies have been done, and none have demonstrated that Amber alerts do much at all that's useful. They're most effective at finding family abduction cases, but those almost never harm the kids and almost always get resolved anyway, without the alert.
All of the actual research papers I can find are paywalled, but here's a Boston Globe article that discusses the results of one of the earliest studies. Several more have reaffirmed and even strengthened the findings of the first.
So, it really doesn't matter much if the alert delivery system is broken. The alert issuance system is fundamentally and likely irreparably flawed.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
One time there was a flash flood watch for my city and the neighboring county, that's 2 alerts, then it kept repeating about every 10 minutes.
Certainly with the flood alerts they need to reevaluate how/when the alerts are sent out. The NWS will frequently extend flood alerts by 10-30 minutes at a time over the course of a storm on how fast the storm is moving through an area. The CMAS system will send out new alert for each update by the NWS regardless if it's just extending the previous alert by 10 minutes or ("It may flood in the next 30 minutes? Okay thanks. I can see that it hasn't yet stopped raining an hour later, it's not necessary to send me another frigging alert saying it may flood.").
The lack of foresight into the deployment of CMAS is going to have a long term negative effect on the effectiveness of the system. I know a lot of people in VA who have disabled the system on their phone after receiving half a dozen alerts between midnight and 0600 during the last big storm. They'll probably never think to re-enable it now.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
In this case the kidnapper was not a parent, and actually murdered the mother and burned down the house. The man was not the mothers boyfriend. Probably a danger to a lot of people, not just the children.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/amber-alert-james-lee-dimaggio-_n_3711084.html
I thought about signing up for an emergency service system in our county ("Code Red" I think?) but when they lumped AMBER alerts in with it that desire ended. I can appreciate the idea of a system for letting the public assist in locating children in danger, but from what I understand in a VAST majority of the issued AMBER alerts the child is in no real danger (child custody issues both legal (mixup of who was picking the kid up from a location) and illegal (didn't agree with a court decision)). Child abduction by a stranger is (despite what many believe) an exceedingly rare occurrence, of the ~260,000 "missing children" a year only about 90 of them are snatched by a stranger for nefarious reasons. The rest are children who get lost, parents/babysitters running off with kids out of fear/anger & simple misunderstandings. The "boy who cried wolf" precept comes to mind, you can't create a system to "save children from a horrible fate" and then turn around and use it where the child is in no danger 99% of the time, people will tire of it quickly negating its usefulness.
Your example is different to what you think it is.
Child with care services by court order, abducted by parents is very different to a father denied visitation by mother takes children to park without permission.
Jason.
He is going to have to stop for gas at some point, regardless of what vehicle he is in.
oh yeah, what if it is a tesla?
The kidnapper likely also has a cell phone and would receive this message. It's more akin to a signal to dump the car and find a new one, assuming they can. Granted it would still be useful to find the car even if it was dumped but you see my point.
They have them here in Austin, TX too. They don't have a catchy name (just "MISSING ELDERLY", city, car description, license plate), but almost all have a city name that I've never heard of. The few that I do recognize seem to be all from the Houston area (over 100 miles away).
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Actually, isn't it about time to give up hogging Hawaii now? It's so far from the mainland it's just ridiculous. Problem solved. You can still go there on vacation you know.
Oh, at the same time, leave Alaska to Canada, the maps look weird enough as it is...
c++;
While watching the chariot race scene in "Ben Hur" screen goes blank with text "emergency alert" (huh? big gas spill or toxic fumes release someplace nearby?), no it was the amber alert for this vehicle. Which reminded me of the infamous NYC alert. I don't have such on my cellphone and thankfully not on my home phone. Though these BOLs are a noble cause, generally not practical to alert entire state. Maybe this could have helped nabbed the perpetrators but the next amber alert will be ignored.
mfwright@batnet.com
WAP push messages let you buy ringtones, themes, etc and have them installed on your phone by 'pushing' them at your phone. Not so bad to have disabled. I think Gingerbread is too old to even have support for the super annoying Amber Alerts, so you'd only get them as normal SMS messages. Though I could be wrong.
I am a few miles from where this alert mas about. I got 2 alerts, it was the same sound as the TV emergency broadcast system alert. The issue, for me, and probably most people is that I recieved one at around 7PM, which is fine, but again at 2AM, was not fine. It woke my fiance and myself up, and I then had to spend 10 mins figuring out how to turn those alerts off so I didn't get woken up again. I was conflicted about turning it off, because I apprecite what they are trying to do with this system, and would like to get AMBER alerts, but they shouldn't be sending AMBER alerts more than once per device. It would stop me from turning off the feature if I knew it would happen only once.
1) The alert comes in the middle of the night. You are woken up and there's nothing you can do unless you want to go outside and start watching cars go by.
2) The alert comes during the day... while you're driving... and you're so startled by this loud-ass alarm that you crash.
Let me get this straight: they want to a) ban texting while driving and b) send random texts to a half a state at a time?!?!? Do they REALIZE how many cars are on the road at any given moment? Fucking brilliant.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Holy crap, that adds a whole new angle of WTF to this alert message. It's bad enough when it's some random place you've never heard of, but when people go to the actual trouble of making bumper stickers about nobody knowing where it is, that's really bad.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
There are a lot of other situations where you could receive this message not just two. Please mod parent down.
Maybe Apple doesn't want to make the iPhone thicker ?!?
To be honest, the alert is not particularly well-suited to be parsed by humans. Let's do this bit by bit.
"Boulevard, CA" - This part is confusing because the town has a confusing name. I suspected that it was a mangled address before I learned that there is actually a town called "Boulevard" in California. It doesn't help that this bit comes at the very beginning without any kind of context.
"AMBER Alert UPDATE:" - Clear enough.
"LIC/6WCU986 (CA)" - Come again? Is this some kind of FEMA incident code or something? Before you mentioned license plate numbers I never suspected that "LIC/" could mean "the following string is a license plate number". Unless you are aware of this acronym this part of the message is just line noise, especially since the slash suggests that "LIC" and "6WCU986" are one syntactic unit.
"Blue Nissan Versa 4 door" - Easy to understand again.
The alert is mostly reasonable. The alert isn't at fault for Boulevard, CA having a name that makes the message hard to parse. However, I think that writing the license plate information in a clearer manner would've tremendously improved readability. Or perhaps even something that makes the city name less ambiguous like this:
"UPDATE on AMBER ALERT in Boulevard, CA: Blue Nissan Versa 4 door, license plate 6WCU986 (CA)" - We first state what we're talking about. The "in [city], [state]" makes it contextually clear that we're talking about a city. Then we spell things out instead of using non-whitespace to separate an acronym from information that's written in all-capitals. Just 17 characters more (and still 68 below the usual maximum size of a text message) and the message is much clearer.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I have iPhone and service with T-Mobile. My phone beeped at 10:54 p.m. as though there was a fire in my house. When I swiped my finger to turn the phone "on" the message disappeared and I could not find the message anywhere on the phone. How is one supposed to remember the license plate of the car? The least that the implementers of this idea could have done is to have this message persist as one of the text messages. I live in the Bay Area and I do not know whether it was necessary to send the alert that far that late in the night. Yesterday, I received the same alert 3 more times and by then I figured to hit the Volume Down Button to silence the alarm but leave the message on the screen. Of course the message was gone the moment I used the phone to make a call or surf the web or scan my email messages.
-Wannahelpbut
I was around a group of people who all looked at their phone, recognized it, acknowledged it and went about their evening. Why people are even complaining, is beyond me.
Because you get them even if you're home, asleep, with your phone on silent and the do-not-disturb setting activated. And it's loud and intrusive as hell; if you're sleeping in a quiet bedroom with your phone on the bedside table, it'll give you an adrenaline jolt that will keep you awake for the next hour, not to mention waking up every child and pet in the house. It's like an air horn.
I doubt the kidnapper is driving his blue fucking Nisan Versa through anyone's bedroom. So now, thanks to the brain-dead implementation, people will be disabling the feature altogether.
If they'd just make it work like any other text message, things would have been just fine, people would leave them on, and it might actually do some good.
I received about 8 alerts throughout the day. Plus it shuts down my audio player and doesn't honor the fact that I'm wearing headphones and BLASTS an audio alert out of the speaker - there's no way and no controls anywhere to change that behavior so it becomes a monolithic pain in the ass that you can't do jack shit about. What if I was in a meeting?
I'm tempted to hack the phone and shut them off permanently.
Isn't their range only like 100 miles? He'd have to plug in, and I can only imagine that would draw even more attention.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
If it made the same or similar in magnitude and duration noises i have set for alerts, alarms, and messages, it would be fine.
Going off like an air raid siren at tremendous volume made me hate the use of such an attention getting system for an amber alert.
I wonder if the kidnapper himself (her?) received the amber alert too.
OMG, people got a text message! Some even got TWO text messages!!
Good freakin' grief, all this whining and hand wringing over a couple of text messages? Seriously? Because that is all the amber alert messages really are. Just read and delete them, or if you don't want to read them just ignore and delete them. It is not like a couple of messages are going to end the world or make people's phones melt.
I didn't get it. So I applaud AT&T for not giving me the message. Though I do have text messaging disabled on my account which may account for it.
I turned off all the EAS alerts I could after I bought a new phone and received around a dozen flash flood alerts a day, every day. This, while I'm on the 34th floor in an office building in downtown Chicago. To me, EAS suffers from "the Boy that Cried Wolf" syndrome. There is too much irrelevant noise, that people either disregard or disable the alerts. And, then on the days it matter, like earlier in the spring when we got 6-8 inches of rain in a few hours, I didn't get the alerts when flash flooding actually occurred.
In particular, the parent doing the abducting *definitely* knows their kid is abducted.
I get these messages from AT&T on my phone all the time, doesn't change the fact that they're not very helpful
while
Californians annoyed when asked to help try to save a 16 year old girl is about to get killed. Story at 11.
Sure, you're modded as insightful because we love to think of all federal government initiatives as security theatre. But this article cites no actual statistics to the contrary. Its entire premise seems to be that child abduction is rare, and law enforcement often can't get an alert out within three hours, therefore "probably" the system is useless. Seriously, it cites no actual numbers as to the effectiveness of the system, and uses the word "probably" and pure rhetoric (i.e. bullshit) a lot. If the same article was changed around so that the author appeared to be a law enforcement spokesman and the conclusions were just reversed, we'd all be picking it apart as bullshit.
Everyone already knew this system was being rolled out for an extremely rare type of crime. Society decided (yes, it did, that's why the media hype launched this in the first place) that the crime was bad enough that no matter how rare, we wanted a system to help mitigate it. Yes, society can be emotional like that, but that is no reason in itself to condemn the system. I want to see actual numbers, not bullshit opinion pieces.
How is it a first alert, when just a few months ago there was one in San Jose area?
What about the presidential alerts that cannot be disabled? Is it possible to disable them?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm in Seattle and have received two of the Southern California Amber alerts since 6:00 pm tonight PDT. This is a good way to encourage people to disable the alerts.
I haven't tried - I suspect you'd have to root.
Still, I've never seen a Presidential Alert, so won't worry about it - presumably that's something really freaking important like 'Nukes are in the air.' If we ever get campaign messages or 'Flooding in [another state]' on it then I'm sure someone will figure it out.
Or hacked. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Here in mendocino county - yeah, same comment as everyone else: useless annoyance we all could have done without.
We've had this for a year in Texas. Those complaining sound like bunch of whining spoiled brats. Grow up its about saving kids. This post needs to be moderated, and removed. Since when is Slashdot about idiots shirking their responsibilities by complaining about something that isn't technology related, the police departments investigating decide when to issue the alert, and what the range is. The carriers are required to issue the broadcast, they have no control.
I late in the evening, three cell phones in our household started loudly emitting the most obnoxious noises since the last Pelosi news conference. What the HELL is that? When we finally figured it out, I Googled 'Amber Alert on cell phones', and was able to turn off the racket. And, I disabled the function. What was it for? Does ANYONE in Sacramento really think that alerting the entire state helps find abducted children? If so, wouldn't a simple text or email work? All that will happen now is that AT&T users will disable Amber alert functions, and get on with their lives. How much taxpayer money was WASTED on the fiasco?
It's not just AT&T. My Verizon phone sent me that alert late afternoon, and I live in northern Oregon, a two day drive away from most of California. I think the AMBER alert system needs to have standards for exactly what information must be included and in what format before somebody hits send and spams the phones of millions of people.
The alert system is illogical and chaotic. The stupid people are the politicians who created this mess. Nothing new in California. Like the billions going into a high speed rail system for an area where no one lives.....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It reached all the way through Oregon as well as up to Seattle Washington. I watched the signs. Hey. Wait. They are still flashing. But one addition was thrown up. 2013 Nissan versa.
Ugghhhhh
I was out of state in Dallas TX at the time which is 1300 miles away with DND turned on and I got two separate AMBER alerts on my iPhone 5. The CMAS/IPAWS implementation is broken.
I've been seeing Amber Alerts in Texas for a while now. I find the most surprising part of this that Californians have never seen one before... FYI, Settings > Notifications > AMBER Alerts (ON/OFF)
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