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People Hate Canada's New 'Amber Alert' System (www.cbc.ca)
The CBC reports:
When the siren-like sounds from an Amber Alert rang out on cellular phones across Ontario on Monday, it sparked a bit of a backlash against Canada's new mobile emergency alert system. The Ontario Provincial Police had issued the alert for a missing eight-year-old boy in the Thunder Bay region. (The boy has since been found safe)... On social media, people startled by the alerts complained about the number of alerts they received and that they had received separate alerts in English and French... Meanwhile, others who were located far from the incident felt that receiving the alert was pointless. "I've received two Amber Alerts today for Thunder Bay, which is 15 hours away from Toronto by car," tweeted Molly Sauter. "Congrats, you have trained me to ignore Emergency Alerts...."
The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats. Telecom companies had favoured an opt-out option or the ability to disable the alarm for some types of alerts. But this was rejected by the broadcasting and telecommunications regulator. Individuals concerned about receiving these alerts are left with a couple of options: they can turn off their phone -- it will not be forced on by the alert -- or mute their phone so they won't hear it.
Long-time Slashdot reader knorthern knight complains that the first two alerts-- one in English, followed by one in French -- were then followed by a third (bi-lingual) alert advising recipients to ignore the previous two alerts, since the missing child had been found.
The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats. Telecom companies had favoured an opt-out option or the ability to disable the alarm for some types of alerts. But this was rejected by the broadcasting and telecommunications regulator. Individuals concerned about receiving these alerts are left with a couple of options: they can turn off their phone -- it will not be forced on by the alert -- or mute their phone so they won't hear it.
Long-time Slashdot reader knorthern knight complains that the first two alerts-- one in English, followed by one in French -- were then followed by a third (bi-lingual) alert advising recipients to ignore the previous two alerts, since the missing child had been found.
Thunder Bay is 870 miles away from Toronto by road. This is equivalent to setting off an amber alert in Pittsburgh or Washington because of a missing kid in Florida.
Why are you not thinking of the Children? Are you some kind of sociopath?
Coming soon: child-in-a-hot-car alerts, child-accidentally-saw-someone-naked alerts, child-missed-school alerts, child-using-drugs alerts, child-feeling-depressed alerts, child-feeling-repressed alerts, child-defying-authority alerts, child-attempting-suicide alerts, public-child-funeral alerts, government-overreach alerts, government-collapse alerts, and finally no alerts once children are starving in a lawless land.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Likely get downvoated but whatever. As a Canadian, fuck this. Ottawa does _not_ speak for the rest of Canada, despite what Trudy wants the world to believe. This is yet another example of it.
The Amber alert is _frequently_ abused by couples as part of their own internal marital problems. Thankfully not all reports get full blown Province wide alerts but enough do go out. It wasn't enough to plaster them all over highway signs and the media, oh no.
I don't care about your marriage problems. What I do care about is their continuing to implement frameworks used for totalitarian control. Even in Canada we have already tested using these systems to "alert" the public about crimes. Warn me when an actual emergency - say a power plant going into melt down - happens. Otherwise fuck off.
I'm curious, though.
Say someone is kidnapped two days before their 18th birthday. Still a child, so the entire country goes into a panic.
Then two days later it's said child's birthday. They're now a legal adult. Does the country relax because there's no child in danger anymore?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
There are not enough pedophiles to present any meaningful risk to me or my family.
My children are more likely to be abused by members of my own family.
My children are more likely to be run over walking home from school.
My children are more likely to be shot by my own gun in the family home.
For fuck sake everyone, gain some perspective!
The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats.
One of these things is not like the other... one of these things is not the same...
I'm not sure what kind of flawed logic you need to consider an "Amber Alert" (which basically affects a single child) to be a safety threat anywhere near on the same level as natural disasters. Many "terrorist threats" may be false or localized, but even those affect many more people than a single child.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You are beginning to understand American culture.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
On the bright side, it will probably save billions of autobody work per year.
Seems to be a huge failure in the design of the system.
SMS is a bit of a nasty kludge. The messages themselves exist inside call setup packets that your phone needs to send and receive anyway. It wasn't originally intended for the sending of text messages -- it was merely a packet that needed to be sent and received, but where most of the packet data was empty, and so someone had the bright idea of putting message data in there.
This presents a number of problems. It's not exactly efficient. There is no guarantee of timeliness or message order. You can't message people geographically. And as the number of messages to transmit on a single cell increases, so do lost packets.
At the same time, SMS is store-and-forward; like e-mail if your phone isn't available to receive a transmitted message, the message will be stored and then transmitted once your phone is reconnected to the network. This again affects the timeliness of receiving messages -- if you're cell is offline or out of range, you might get alerts long after they have lost relevance. This would could cause confusion.
SMS was a great way for cell providers to extract more value out of packets of data they had to send and receive anyway, but otherwise SMS is a really crappy protocol. You don't want to base your emergency messaging for the general population of a large geographic area on SMS. You'd break the SMS network.
Yaz
Submitter here. There was so much more I wanted to put into the submission, but didn't have room for.
How would you feel if somebody took away your $100 or $1000 cellphone and gave you a dedicated pager that only worked for alerts? Pretty bad, right? The primary use cases for cellphones are
1) making/receiving phone calls (dohhh)
2) listening to built-in FM radio (if your model has one)
3) listening to music or podcasts in storage
4) listening to streaming internet music
5) receiving messages when at meetings
Given that the alert sound is *DAMN LOUD*, and cannot be turned off easily...
1) So you're in a phone call and holding the phone up to your ear, or using earphones/earbuds... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
2) FM radio requires earphones/earbuds, so that the wire can be used as an FM antenna... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
3) You're listening to pre-recorded music or podcasts... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
4) you're listening to streaming internet music... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
5) You're at a meeting, or at a movie, or at church, or whatever with your phone set to vibrate-only "meeting mode"... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
From https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/heal...
> What is noise-induced hearing loss?
> Every day, we experience sound in our environment, such as the sounds from
> television and radio, household appliances, and traffic. Normally, these
> sounds are at safe levels that don't damage our hearing. But sounds can be
> harmful when they are too loud, even for a brief time, or when they
> are both loud and long-lasting. These sounds can damage sensitive
> structures in the inner ear and cause noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).
Fortunately, my phone has the option to be forced down to 3G-only. Since the Canadian alert system is LTE-only, that protects me. The other options are rooting the phone and/or flashing LineageOS on it.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The TV emergency broadcast system has the problem that it can only reach those who have the TV turned on.
Which is why one of the emergency siren codes is "important message, listen to radio/TV". During the cold war, we were drilled in these, but these days, I would wager that nine out of ten people can't tell what any of the siren codes mean.
A child missing warning has almost NOTHING to do with public safety on the scale you're talking about.
That child's safety, yes. But I don't want a text every time he crosses the road not at a crossing, walks along the top of a wall.
It's an ENTIRELY different thing to flood alerts, tornado alerts, etc.
We just don't have missing child alerts like that in my country. They are on police-force websites, missing-child sites, people copy/paste them to Facebook if they're local, but unless it's something incredibly drastic then they are certainly not forced down anyone's throat. There has not been a time when *everyone* was informed indiscriminately about a missing child in such a manner, even with a few that made the news.
Waking up an entire city at 3am because of a reported-missing child is a ridiculous solution and abuse of the service - and just as the article states, it makes people ignore ALL the alerts.
So, yes, if someone starts pressing the panic button and forcing through junk alerts to my phone where *my* life isn't in danger if I don't receive them, then there's going to be a problem. And, note, this only applies if I can't turn them off. If I don't consent to getting such alerts, then I don't consent. Let me burn to death in the forest fire, drown in the flood or be taken away by the tornado.
But if you class "little Johnny 200 miles away has been hiding in the garden and we can't find him" in the same manner, then I'm going to turn them off and charge you the cost of waking me up for absolute nonsense.