Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

In Germany people may not be as used to natural disasters and the like, but where I've travelled where the weather is way more extreme, these are like life saving emergency alerts so you don't get sucked into a tornado like a cow or die in a flood or tsunami. I love how jarring the alerts are, there was an incident in the USA recently where some way too close menu entry got hit at an emergency alert center for a nuclear bomb and people ended up taking cover thinking they were going to get nuked in Hawaii [1]. The USA system you can understand the technical workings of here [2] while this seems to cover more of the technical workings of the EU systems [3] - These are simply service area broadcasts [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmkTkWB40Q

[3] https://media.ccc.de/v/osmodevcon2019-107-production-grade-c...

[4] https://osmocom.org/projects/cellular-infrastructure/wiki/Se...

You can turn off all the government alerts in iOS, in the US at least. I have had them all off for many years since one woke me up in the middle of the night for no reason.

Quite the opposite in Canada unfortunately, specifically Ontario but other provinces may be a joke as well... Can't turn off alerts, and we're well known for sending them out in the middle of the night, or just sending test alerts with no significant value. Thankfully silent mode turns them into vibrations, I feel sorry for those who use ringtones. Moved back here after living in SF for so long and this feels ass backwards, far preferred the optionality y'all are given.

That is unfortunate. The alert that caused me to turn them all off was even written about in the news that day. Millions of people in the entire NYC metro region had their sleep disturbed and were pissed.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-phone-4...

I remember group chats of people discussing how to turn it off and my friends and I telling our parents how to turn them off.

Can't you pull out your sim card when you go to bed?

Seems pretty inconvenient, plus the world is moving to eSIM. Although, I wonder if the alert system even cares about SIM. Presumably they would send it out to any device connected to the network, not just those with a SIM?

> there was an incident in the USA [where a mistake] at an emergency alert center had people thought they were going to get nuked in Hawaii

I think your example is a powerful reminder why folks turn off alerts. For most of us tho, it was the bazillionth urgent notice of a non-applicable event.

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