AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts

First time accepted submitter TigerPlish writes "AT&T has rolled out Wireless Emergency Alerts for iPhones. The alerts are for huge catastrophes (a Presidential Alert), for weather / natural calamities, and for AMBER alerts. One can turn off the latter two, but the Presidential alert cannot be turned off. The article mentions only 4S and 5 get this update. That said, I have a 4 and it got the update this morning. This was enacted in 2006, for those keeping track of such things. I, for one, do not care for this any more than I like the idea of them reading my communications to begin with. Oh, I'm sorry, the "metadata" from my communications." As promised.

Re:Really object to emergency information ?

[starless]

My girlfriend has Sprint which enabled these alerts previously.
Several months ago we were woken at 5am by a loud alert
at about 5am.
This was an Amber alert. While it's a great shame, we certainly didn't want to woken for this,
and there was nothing we could do.
Although the alert can be turned off, the default was for it to be on, which I believe is not the proper way this
should have been enabled.

Re:Mass SMS?

[FuzzNugget]

I doubt it.

The control channel along which SMS runs is used to bounce a signal back and forth between your phone and the nearest tower(s). That's a signal that triggers every few seconds for keep-alive purposes and it's the same byte size whether it carries an SMS or not (that's why SMS messages are limited to 160 characters). Broadcasting a network-wide SMS should little effect on network congestion.

And now you also know that any carrier charging you more than $0 for SMS is full of shit (it doesn't cost then anything)

Re:Hack it to disable it

[EvilSS]

You realize that the "Presidential Alerts" are for things like imminent nuclear attack and other such "kiss your ass goodbye" national moments? There has never been a national activation of the alert system in the history of the system (going back to the EBS and before that the CONELRAD system. Ever. Not even during 9/11, the most significant event on US soil since Pearl Harbor.

Re:Not Big Brother, and long overdue EAS extension

[silas_moeckel]

The key issue with it is it demands that presidential broadcasts go through. I'm ok with a required default on. Tivo/Comcast implemented this badly at first weather a NWS alert for 2 states away would flip me to live tv and no allow me to ignore it, Asside for turning the tv off you had to watch it twice in English and Spanish all the way through before your device returned control to the owner. Now mind you since I used DPMS to turn the TV off this means that a test alert at 3am would pop the TV on to do so. Why can I not configure it to never give me Spanish should it not give whatever language the device UI is set for? Can we not setup priorities I don't care about flash floods heavy rain etc I have a window and can feel that sort of thing in my bones anyways.