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Senate Wants Netflix, Spotify To Send Out Federal Emergency Alerts (techcrunch.com)
Senators in Hawaii and South Dakota have introduced a bill, called the "Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement (READI) act, that would "explore" broadcasting alerts to "online streaming services, such as Netflix and Spotify," amongst other changes to the Emergency Alert System. TechCrunch reports: Some of the other things the bill touches on:
- Users on many phones can currently disable federal alerts; they want to get rid of that option
- Building a better system for reporting false alarms and figuring out what happened
- Updating the system to better prevent false alarms, and to better retract them when they do happen
- Users on many phones can currently disable federal alerts; they want to get rid of that option
- Building a better system for reporting false alarms and figuring out what happened
- Updating the system to better prevent false alarms, and to better retract them when they do happen
We already have alert systems for phones, TV, and radio. We don't need everything to be an alert system client, or we would force browsers to push alerts as well.
If I want to disable the alerts, I ought to be able to. It's bad enough that I can't disable the "Presidential Alerts" on my Samsung, but it ought to be caveat emptor if you do. Just like enabling wifi calling and knowing you could have an issue with dialing 911 not having your physical address...
We already have emergency sirens all over the place that ought to be good enough.
The fact that I DON'T get the alerts on the streams is a good thing from my perspective. Every week or month or whatever they test the EBS, with some hellaciously loud sound, and it's usually at 3AM when I have the tv on i the background and that tone wakes everyone up up if I don't go cancel it right away.
Given that they are trying to override the behavior of operating systems on phones, it's a good bet this is actually on their list.
That is all...
This is a bunch of crap. If your head is so far up your butt that you don't realize the end of the world is happening, then there is no saving you anyway. WASTE OF MONEY.
Weren't Hawaii the dumbasses that told their citizens that an incoming ICBM was happening.
... so I could push notifications back at the bastards, or bitches as may apply, when I get a goddam 4 am (CST) Amber Alert about a kid missing in Oregon and I live in Texas.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If I'm about to be hit by a nuke then I don't want to be interrupted while I'm watching the new season of The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Here in Canada we only get amber alerts (which I donâ(TM)t mind) and as a cord cutter, the zombie apocalypse could begin and I would have no idea lol
If emergency alerts are to be rolled out in these sorts of situations, and if alerts should be able to reach us in more situations, then the only proper way to do it is on a per-device, basis, not a per-service basis.
The device can provide consistent alerts across ALL services it can run, without forcing each of those services to implement support for the alert system (plus, many of these devices are from manufacturers who make phones, so they already know how to support the alert system). The device can determine its own location and select the relevant alert channel without needing to provide your geolocation to anyone or anything else, meaning that maintaining your privacy is actually possible (though obviously not probable). The device can provide you with alerts even when you're not streaming via a service, meaning they can reach you more reliably. The device can continue to provide alerts so long as it can talk to the alert system itself, without the need for any third-party servers or ongoing infrastructure costs. The device can provide users with a centralized place where they can control and customize all alerts that might appear on the device, rather than needing to play whack-a-mole with dozens or hundreds of services.
Most importantly, the device provides me with a single thing that I can smash if the powers-that-be actually decide it's a good idea to make it impossible to disable the various ridiculous alerts that they are foisting on us these days (e.g. like the 2am amber alert I once received for a kid who had gone missing in a city that's four hours away from us by car).
Mistakes aren't even the problem, turns out that people don't like it when you alert them at 3 AM about an amber alert nowhere near them.
Netflix is a service, or an app on a device. Why should Netflix be delivering alerts? What if the device is offline, should it show pre-scheduled test alerts?
Having sirens is enough. We live in a society of over 300 million where more than 100,000 children disappear every year. Only the tiniest fraction of those get Amber alerts. They are completely ineffective for anything except reminding people of how much they need their government to protect them (NOT given that they have never managed to do so). This mechanism is effective only for keeping taxpayers minds on the danger so that they will give up more freedoms and allow the government to give their cronies more money for nothing.
Most likely, this will cause a device handling Netflix/Spotify to have the basic cell phone alert, followed by Netflix/Spotify giving out an alert as well. This simply causes an alert to be an annoyance rather than being useful.
They should have easily learned from what happened in Ontario: A province wide amber alert (played with an alarm at full volume), an amendment to the province wide amber alert (also played at full volume), and finally the cancellation of the amber alert (again, full volume.) If anything, one is likely to get six notifications instead of what should be one, which makes it more annoying than those apps that want their daily attention.
So instead of jamming alerts everywhere, perhaps they could focus on a standard way to make sure alerts are properly handled so that people don't get constant unnecessary alerts.
morning prayers? Tell the government to f off.
This is a bunch of crap. If your head is so far up your butt that you don't realize the end of the world is happening, then there is no saving you anyway. WASTE OF MONEY.
Weren't Hawaii the dumbasses that told their citizens that an incoming ICBM was happening.
Sometimes it's helpful to know in advance -- like if a derailed railcar is spewing toxic chemicals in the air, it'd be nice to know, so instead of going outside to sit on the back deck, I know I should shelter in place or head out of town.
Though I don't really need (or want) my TV to tell me, I think enough people have a cell phone nearby that there's no reason to make every single online content provider do it.
Pretty much all people have a phone, or are near someone with a phone.
Why is this necessary at all? Right now, Netflix doesn't need to know where you are. A system like this would require them to collect location information, which is a privacy issue.
Concentrate on making phone emergency alerts reliable; that should be enough.
Sounds fine, as long as there's an ability to opt-out. Too many of these systems become catchalls for some bureaucratic busybodies or people who don't know what they are doing. Not too long ago in my area there was a potential chemical leak and someone either messed up or didn't know of the limitations of the system so an alert that was only intended to be sent out to people (text message via phone) within a half mile of the area in question instead told an entire city to evacuate. Luckily everyone who didn't specifically see firetrucks and police cruisers buzzing about ignored it and the situation was brought under control before anything happened anyways otherwise it could have been chaos as thousands jammed the streets. Without some kind of consequence to overreach/abuse it WILL be misused. And as most here know government is unwilling/unable to police its own misconduct/mismanagement so unfortunately it has to be left to the people to "solve" the problem, in this case by ignoring/blocking it WHEN it goes off the rails.
It surprises me not in the least that these senators would equate an on-demand internet-based streaming service with broadcast TV of days bygone. It's as if it's too painful for them to think of actual real solutions to the problems, and albeit it's not perfect, cellphone alerts do tend to be the most effective as their geographic physical locations are known to the system. (Notwithstanding the idiots who think that waking my ass up at 3am because some kid was kidnapped and thinking that this is an effective method of recovering the kidnapped kid.)
local weather forecast cut off by 1950 text to speech read out of alert
disable alerts may = can't turn off roaming or txts.
The current alert systems are tower-based. A particular set of towers are told to transmit the alert and that determines the area it covers.
Netflix doesn't know where I am. My IP appears to be near Seattle instead of San Francisco (my ISP is small and happens to be based in Seattle). My Apple TV doesn't have a GPS chip AFAIK. I pay for Netflix through iTunes so Netflix also doesn't have a billing address. I don't use Spotify.
So what are they going to do? Ask for my Zip code so I can receive alerts?
What's the Zip of that town that has 1 resident?
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
It really doesn't matter if the alerts are forced to be pushed to people, if what people does afterwards is completely untrained or unplanned.
Look at a country like Japan where they voluntarily all prepare with annual earthquake drills, evacuation drills, tsunami drills, etc.You think anyone in the US would tolerate being told to do that stuff?
Sure, send the alert, require by law that everyone get it. It'll be chaos all the same, without the fundamental responses ingrained into people to follow the instructions. If the instructions were even coherent, which I doubt.
The device can provide consistent alerts across ALL services it can run, without forcing each of those services to implement support for the alert system
Yes, there should be a consistent API so that all services disseminating alerts talk to one local demon that can identify and manage them all. Further, alerts should be coded like the SAME message for NOAA weather alerts.
BUT, every service still needs to be able to disseminate the alerts since not every device will be running every service. My daily-carry tablet isn't a phone, it can't show Amber alerts or any phone-based alerts. My phone will never be used for Netflix so it would get only phone-based alerts. Spotify and Netflix are pretty orthogonal. People running Spotify aren't going to be running Netflix, so both would disseminate alerts.
The device can provide you with alerts even when you're not streaming via a service, meaning they can reach you more reliably.
No, not all devices can do that.
The device can continue to provide alerts so long as it can talk to the alert system itself, without the need for any third-party servers or ongoing infrastructure costs.
Please explain how my daily-carry will "talk to the alert system" without any third-party servers or costs.
Most importantly, the device provides me with a single thing that I can smash
I envision the opening credits from Second City where people are throwing TVs out windows.
there are only so many manufacturers and so they can be forced
It has nothing to do with how many manufacturers there are, the law covers them all. One or one hundred.
That's harder to do when you get to really small form factors like phones, though. You can still do it, but your phone would be huge.
It would also not be allowed to talk to the cell network and would be completely illegal. Building your own phone is not like building your own ham radio.
> I'd be careful parsing those alerts. Just sayin'.
What harm could a memcpy do? We'll just read the length from this here 64 bit signed integer that the remote packet conveniently had as the third field. No problems at all.
Agree. Was thinking of possible flash floods due to heavy rain not near where individuals are at. How about tornado warnings.... You mentioned train, enough tractor trailers also carry harsh chemicals.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Kiss my ass with all your heat advisory alerts, amber alerts, silver alerts, flash flood alerts, dry weather alerts, wet weather alerts, what the hell ever. You figure out a way to show me alerts that are local to me, that may affect me, or close enough that I may affect it, then maybe I'll pay attention to them. You start showing me alerts for some kid or grandma halfway across the country, and you bet your ass I'm going to ignore all the alerts.
Same thing happened with a friend of mine on Facebook who insisted on filling her newsfeed with every missing kid notice she could find, no matter what. Didn't matter if the missing kid was from 2000 miles away. Didn't matter if the missing kid is on an entirely different continent even, it's amazing how many missing kid notices she can find from England. Doesn't matter if the missing kid actually went missing MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS AGO, she still posts it.
Yeah, she's trying to be 'helpful', but what happened is after a few days of that, she's blocked and now I see none of them. The same thing will happen if I start getting alert after alert after alert on my phone. I will find a way and I will block them, totally defeating the purpose of your alert system, and all because of the flaws in your system.
We already have alert systems for phones, TV, and radio. We don't need everything to be an alert system client, or we would force browsers to push alerts as well.
Yeah, I don't want to see an amber alert during my morning news on the telegraph. God forbid, if the government ever wants to waste my paper and ink using my fax machine...
Conventional TV and radio as a technology to supply entertainment services are becoming less and less popular as the internet becomes easier to access. Services like netflix, youtube, spotify (among many others) are providing these alternitives, so it makes sense to expand to them if the currently existing systems are falling in popularity.
Governmental agencies ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS whatever power they have. If governmental agencies manage to force cell carriers or Netflix or Spotify to carry their alerts, you can count on the fact that some of those "critical alerts" will be things that are only critical in the eyes of government flunkies.
We need to have iron-clad penalties for abuse or misuse of any governmental alert system, without any "good faith" exceptions when they abuse that authority. Because in general, governmental agencies and personnel NEVER are acting in "good faith".
You can buy stand-alone baseband controllers, which are perfectly fine to incorporate into a build and use. What you can't do is sell a finished product without a battery of tests and approvals. Building and using one is just fine as long as you aren't spoofing anything.
including Presidential alerts from that orange thing
You get French alerts on your phone?
Ezekiel 23:20
Yet another reason why we need an open source phone OS
No it's not. I figured out how to override it on my phone after being woken up a two am with and again at 4 am by the horrid alert tone, that I couldn't silence for an Amber alert for kids taken by their father in a custody dispute 500 miles away.
If I could trust it to be used wisely and I could set the warning tone to one of my choice it might be tolerable. But as the alerts are continually misused, no way, this needs to be shot down.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
The folks pushing the message want to call it "an alert", which makes it sound important (sometimes it is), official and mandatory.
A more neutral term is "message", as in "The Feds want to send you a message". We have a long history of people with power trying to force users to listen to or view a message. Corporations embed spam messages in devices ("Your operating system is out of date" and "You haven't backed up your IPhone in four weeks"),. Governments... remember when Amber Alerts were sold as a way to stop child kidnappers? Now the messages on the Amber Alert signs on the highway are about "Granddad didn't come home last night", the 15 year-old girl who ran off with her 18 year-old boyfriend and about divorced spouses who didn't get the kids back home in time after a mandatory visit.
And now we have the end of the line of absurdities; when there is absolutely nothing to report the signs tell us to "Buckle your seat belt", which is pure "public service" advertising. If reading a text while driving is slightly dangerous what about a ticker-tape Amber sign?
Somewhere on those signs may be a real kidnapper or murderer on the loose. But crying wolf too often with vague messages has conditioned us to ignore the message stream, which is too bad for the occasional real Ambers we once claimed to protect.
The federal alert messages may be true or false, important or not important; the issue is "Should you be forced to receive them on your phone?".
Note I said "messages", not "Alerts". There are arguments on both sides. I'm only dealing with the slanted ad-lingo which the word "Alert" represents.