AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts 199
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.
Not Big Brother, and long overdue EAS extension (Score:5, Insightful)
You're an idiot if you're complaining about this. The EAS (and its predecessor, the EBS) has been around for almost 50 years and is a necessary, though at times potentially ineffective, capability to have. From the mid-90s into the late 2000's there was concern that the "traditional" methods of activation would be come less and less effective.
Every single broadcast TV and radio station has a manual right in the control room and there's an out-of-band method for heirarchical distribution of messages from local relays to cut in at a moment's notice.
The problems were that people nowadays were spending more and more time away from live, regulated broadcasts, and with cell phones instead of land lines (for reverse 911 calls in the event of an evacuation).
Extending these regulations to "channels where people are actually spending their time" is an important part of keeping the system relevant. Cable systems have been doing text overlays (scrolling text for EAS tests or NWS alerts) for a while, but that now cuts through into your cable-provided DVR if you have one. Netflix and other streaming providers have ways of injecting data into the feed. Hell, at a game company I used to work for there was talk of using zip code subscriber data to forward NWS alerts to users *within the game* to ensure that someone didn't miss a tornado warning if they were spending the evening with their favorite MMORPG and the radio off.
Extending this to cell phone towers and multicast paging simply makes sense. It's not nefarious, it's just good public policy.
(And this is coming from someone definitely of the libertarian-conservative mindset, and no fan of the current President.)
Re:it was designed for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
With regards to shootings or a bear in town, DUH! Do you really expect this to be used as a "news source"? Also, zero difference to the Emergency Broadcast System, just now putting it on an iPhone. Oh wait! Someone rush out and file a patent!
Propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
Or worse it will slowly degrade into a useless bunch of PSAs about emergency preparation, evacuation routes, weather warnings, etc. I love how politicians seem to think it is OK to vote for exemptions for themselves in laws that people want without exemptions. Nobody wants robocalling, nobody wants text spam, nobody wants corporate funding of political parties, nobody wants to be molested by the TSA; yet politicians seem to think that it is OK to exempt themselves from all of these things.
I am very very careful about who I give my number out to. The last person I would want to have my number would be a politician.
Very half-baked (Score:5, Insightful)
You're an idiot if you're complaining about this.
Well, *I* am going to complain, because the system is implemented on my Android phone. It's been incredibly annoying. Remember that big huge east coast snowstorm?
It'd been on the TV and print news and intertubes for DAYS. There was a morning press conference and state of emergency declared. It was only after it had started snowing that someone thought to send out the alerts, and they seemed to make up for lateness through volume/repetition.
I think by the end of the day (at which point it was near white-out conditions) my cell phone had loudly alerted me to the weather emergency something like SIX times. There's clearly no intelligence to the system, or someone just decided that sending it out several times was best just in case we hadn't noticed the massive snowfall or had been hiding in a cave for the last WEEK.
Re:Not Big Brother, and long overdue EAS extension (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, good day to you too, sir.
My complaint isn't about the message, it's the method of delivery. Or rather, the inability to turn off The President's Mouthpiece.
I can turn off the AMBER and weather alerts, but not The President's Mouthpiece. That's the part that truly gets my goat. Now listen to your phone like the good little citizen you are!
Re:Very half-baked (Score:5, Insightful)
People in Seattle got storm warnings about storms in the Caribbean, child abduction alerts for the midwest, etc.
It seems every custody battle is now escalated to an imminent danger of children being murdered simply so that
there is an excuse to send an EAS broadcast to an entire state.
And AMBER alerts .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I ignore AMBER alerts because most likely, the kid was taken by one of his parents because of the all too common ugly divorces that use children as bargaining chips. Especially, when you see a description of the kidnapper and a license plate. You just know it was the parent with custody (usually the mother because the moms get custody even if they're a crack whore who is a hooker to pay for it) who knows the description of the other parent and their license plate. Really; who takes down a plate when an adult is putting a kid into a car? Screaming kid? Yeah, like that never happens.
When a kid is really kidnapped by a pervert or child serial killer, he just disappears - no license plates, description of the kidnapper or other details to put in the news. Just a picture on a milk carton only to never hear from the kid again.
Use for AMBER alerts improper and dangerous. (Score:4, Insightful)
Presidential Alerts (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of "Presidential Alerts" annoys me, for some reason. Call it what it is; a "National Emergency Alert"; that's fine. But the idea that the PRESIDENT is somehow so important that he needs his own alert offends my democratic principles. He's not a king and he's not the heart-n-soul of the nation; he's a bureaucrat we've hired to manage the government. He's about as important as a clerk in the DMV (except he has more responsibilities) and he's no more worthy of adulation than that clerk. If the government feels it needs to notify me of an emergency, that's great. But I neither need nor want a direct line from the president.
Yes, I know it's pedantic. Yes, I know that I won't actually be getting a message from Obama or his successors. But there's increasingly a worshipful mystique being woven around our leaders that smacks of monarchism and I think that fits poorly with the ideals of this nation. So rather than name the messaging service after some bureaucrat, call it what it is - "National Emergency Alert" - and let's remember that ultimately, there's nothing special about our head of state; he's just another American.