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Fake 'Inbound Missile' Alert Sent To Every Cellphone in Hawaii (chicagotribune.com)
"Somebody sent out a false emergency alert to all cell phones in Hawaii saying, 'BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL'," writes Slashdot reader flopwich, adding "Somebody's had better days at work." The Associated Press reports:
In a conciliatory news conference later in the day, Hawaii officials apologized for the mistake and vowed to ensure it will never happen again. Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi said the error happened when someone hit the wrong button. "We made a mistake," said Miyagi. For nearly 40 minutes, it seemed like the world was about to end in Hawaii, an island paradise already jittery over the threat of nuclear-tipped missiles from North Korea...
On the H-3, a major highway north of Honolulu, vehicles sat empty after drivers left them to run to a nearby tunnel after the alert showed up, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. Workers at a golf club huddled in a kitchen fearing the worst... The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency tweeted there was no threat about 10 minutes after the initial alert, but that didn't reach people who aren't on the social media platform. A revised alert informing of the "false alarm" didn't reach cellphones until 38 minutes later, according to the time stamp on images people shared on social media.
On the H-3, a major highway north of Honolulu, vehicles sat empty after drivers left them to run to a nearby tunnel after the alert showed up, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. Workers at a golf club huddled in a kitchen fearing the worst... The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency tweeted there was no threat about 10 minutes after the initial alert, but that didn't reach people who aren't on the social media platform. A revised alert informing of the "false alarm" didn't reach cellphones until 38 minutes later, according to the time stamp on images people shared on social media.
Bring me my Brown Pants!!
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The White House said President Donald Trump, at his private club in Florida, was briefed on the false alert. White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said it "was purely a state exercise."
Scaring the crap out of everyone is considered "a state exercise?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This message ostensibly was sent to every cell phone in Hawaii - didn't the guy who "pushed the wrong button" get the alert as well?
And seriously - their first thought when sending out a correction was a Tweet? Don't they have the ability to send an "all clear" over the same channel they sent the "LOOK OUT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DIE!!!" message?
#DeleteChrome
So, they have a button programmed to broadcast a missile attack, and the operator "hit it by mistake."
So what other alert buttons are pre-programmed on the board . . . ?
"GIANT TUNA DEVOURING BEACH VISITORS!"
"AI POWERED SLINKY ARMY ATTACKING PASSENGER CARS!"
And, of course, worst of all:
"HAWAII DECLARED TO BE A SHITHOLE!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
From Monsters vs Aliens.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
One of my first memories was in 1950 when the communists in NK invaded the south and the UN voted on a resolution against them. Did you forget almost 70 years of history?
Did any other state get a similar warning? No? Then how was it not a state deal? If the feds has messed up we all would have gotten a notice on our phones, or at least some other part of the U.S.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Funny part is that there was a prompt for "are you sure?"
I don't read AC
It wasn't a "fake alert" it was a real alert from the real Agency empowered to issue them, that's way worse than a "fake" one.
It was a mistake... That's not the same as being "fake", words matter. Editor's please take some English classes before posting any more.
On the 24th floor of a Waikiki Beach condo balcony having coffee when the alert came on my cell. First reaction...WTF?? Second reaction... went straight to the roof. If it's gonna go down, I want to see it (if only for a few milliseconds).
What, me worry?
Today a Swatting tomorrow a MISSLE ATTACK!!!!
Hope I never read a message like that again.
Didn't last long, but people were running red lights, etc.
Friends were trying to decide which of their children to save.
Hanlon's Razor.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
So say I get similar alert in my home in CA. Don't have any basement, have one bathtub where children can fit. How do I maximize chances of long term survival? Stay in the house or in the car which at least has a partial metal envelope?
This may have been the result of minor incompetence, but there is major incompetence happening further west.
We ignore North Korea and China at our peril. They will soon have capability to reach Hawaii. Then what will we do when they start attacking S. Korea? Nothing that is what. Cannot endanger Hawaii.
And anti missile missiles are only partially effective. They would need to be near 100% to risk it.
Sure, we could retaliate, but remember, N. Korea need not act rationally.
Yes and no. Yes, they can easily get a list of everyone's number, but no, it is a little more difficult to locate each individual number at any given time.
Instead, the broadcasts are sent based on connected tower. Think of it just like a broadcast packet on a LAN Subnet. Phones connected to the particular towers (in this case, literally every single tower in the state) received the message.
This is also pretty much the same system the AMBER alter system uses.
Hawaii officials give timeline of events surrounding false alarm
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Although interesting to see what happened after "the wrong button was pressed", I would still love to know more about how such a terribly incorrect action could be triggered so easily with no outside verification. Like the governor doesn't even get one minute to verify and cancel a state-wide alert?
I know time is of the essence in these things but it just seems crazy a shift change could trigger this, and in a way crazier that if that was possible, it never happened before. It seems pretty obvious something must have changed recently to allow this to happen, what was that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's OK, it hasn't been discussed here till now . That discussions is part of the magic of Slashdot.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Why do you imagine that the only way the message could be sent to every phone is to have a list of all phone numbers? I suspect the system relies on beacon signals broadcast from cell towers that every cellphone within range picks up, displays the message, then stores a record of the alert for a pre determined period of time (24 hours), after which the alert is ignored.
Do you really imagine the system sends out several million simultaneous text messages? Why just send a message to every device within range?
Ken
There should be more of this in the US. Lots more. In fact, we should reinstate bi-yearly air raid drills for schools and businesses. For everyone within 100 miles of a strategically important target. That would be 95% of the population I bet. Remember that the nukes are wayyyyyy more powerful nowadays? It needs to be made perfectly clear to the US population that if our great leader pops his top and starts a nuclear confrontation, people have a 10% chance of survival, and that's only IF they manage to get to a shelter. A ton of people in this country have forgotten that the world is connected. They think that they can just ignore the rest of the world and they will be fine. Personally, I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that WW2 is fading into the rearview mirror. Up until the last decade, there were a lot of vets from that war still around. People who were actually in Japan after the bombs and saw it with their own eyes. Lots of people who lost friends and family members fighting overseas. The population generally understood that what happens on the other side of the planet can come home to roost on their own doorsteps. We've largely forgotten this, and we elected an unstable, unqualified, angry leader and put him in charge of the nuclear arsenal. Because hey, we don't really believe anymore that what happens on the other side of the world can actually impinge on our lives in any real way. The entire US population needs a brutal reminder of how small the world actually has become. We all ought to spend some time practicing the soothing art of putting our heads between our legs and kissing our asses goodbye. Let all those conservative rural parents and grandparents spend some time answering awkward questions from the kids about the air raids drills they get at school.
Trump is trying to create... a problem in Korea where there has never been one before?
You can't be that stupid.
Ever heard of the Korean War? They made a tv show about it called M.A.S.H., it was quite popular.
There was also a movie, called Team America, that explored some of the issues involved with North Korea.
Every president since Eisenhower has had to deal with a "North Korea Problem", even Obama, the difference is Trump isn't trying to bribe North Korea to get them to pretend to suspend their nuclear weapons efforts...
Ken
I guess you're the last to know.
What we know about North Korea's missile programme
The government shouldn't have everyone's number. They should definitely not have such a tool of powerful propaganda and fear in everyone's pockets.
You propose they instead do what, print their alerts about impending danger in the newspaper, but not on the front page - that might scare people?
Ken
Get used to it. In a year UnKim will have re-entry.
Imagine Kim is drunk, time to troll Hawaii....
Kimmie wants a raise, time to troll Hawaii, Alaska, NYC
Kimmie just enjoys a good laugh
After all Pops made a good living at it and there only bonuses....
you don't need everyones number for these sort of broadcast alerts, hell your phone doesn't even have to be connected, as long as it can receive the broadcast towers signal it should display the alert.
I can only hope that the real need for a use for this never actually arises, because if it does, the fact that this goofup happened is going to cause people to not take any real one as seriously, and people will die who might not have if they had heeded the warning.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's not a universal law, it's a methodological tool for critical thinking. Like Occam's razor, it encourages you to include no more assumptions than you have evidence for.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I don't know, people can wrap their heads around fucking up once. A second such incident would probably have the result you mentioned, though.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Honestly, I hope you're right...
Although I hope even more that we never need to find out.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Feature phones like most flip-phones are not equipped with this protocol, so folks like me with a Samsung T-219 for example are blissfully unaware of all this silliness. At some point I gather the cell towers will require me to get a new device, but so far I can't find a new mobile telephone with real buttons, no web, and no camera; most confusing.
FALSE. NK missles have gone a bit over Japan. There is zero indication they have the technology to hit anything besides the ocean.
FALSE. The missiles were a lot more than a bit over Japan, in one case the apogee was 4,500km. An ICBM will generally have an apogee of about 1,200km, so by flattening the trajectory the range can be greatly increased.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency says that during its 53 minutes flight time, the missile soared some 4500km into space — that’s 10 times higher than the orbit of the International Space Station.
Defence analysts say this demonstrates it has the power and range of a fully functional ICBM capable of travelling more than 10,000km - putting all of the United States mainland and most of the world within its reach.
http://www.news.com.au/world/a...
American tanks *WILL* roll into Bejing.
Oh please. Dream on.
America could possibly beat China in an all-out war (and tanks driving into Beijing would require an all-out war) but the only way the US will be driving tanks into Beijing is if they've already levelled it with nukes first.
The US just isn't going to win a conventional war against China in China.
How about, just like when a company is testing the fire alarms in a building, you ANNOUNCE BEFOREHAND that a TEST will be happening that day. You can just as thoroughly test your system without it being a surprise.
. . . of Leeeeeerrooooyyyyyy Jeeeeeeeeennnnkkkiinnsssss!!!
(grin)
We live in Honolulu, got the scary message, did not panic,
immediately attempted to verify its veracity, because
I DON'T BELIEVE EVERY FUCKING THING I READ ON A PHONE.
Sure, it was un-nerving as hell to get the message, but I am a skeptic by nature.
There were no sirens, nothing on the internet, nothing on the local news, no stream of military jets and choppers out of Pearl and KMCB, etc, etc. Nothing. Yawn. Saturday morning.
There is nothing Trollish about saying that V.P. Pence would be a theocratic authoritarian but at least I wouldn't be worried about a nuclear war every few days.
It's just a fact. Like "the sky is blue".
Trump, during his briefings showed he thinks of Nuclear weapons as merely 'big bombs' and said if we had them we should use them.
Pence, while governor oversaw laws that required women to pay $1000 to bury their miscarriages to back his religious beliefs. The backlash was so intense had had to back down on that one. Pence is a glorified talk show host who lacks the intellect to qualify for president *but* he's not callous about nuclear weapons, he's not struggling with dementia or sundowner's syndrome, and he doesn't constantly show narcissistic traits nor does he push other leaders out of the way to strut to the front and then stick his chin out like some kind of preening dog.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
What?
How should Trump and Obama have stopped the State of Hawaii from doing this ??
I'm afraid knee jerk reactions like this is going to enable the bad guys to get away with this.
What technology is used for ballistic missile alerts? I guess this one was via the Wireless Emergency Alerts network but what was the over-the-air protocol used?
The obvious one is the ancient GSM SMS Cell Broadcast standard but do Hawaii networks support this (and its descendants) and do all/most mobiles? Which mobile phone models received it? And which did not? What proportion of users in Hawaii saw this?