While I agree with the thrust of what Sabri is saying, let's not delude ourselves - this is not a freedom of speech/"1st amdt." issue. The freedom of the press does not mean the government is obligated not to favour given presses (to include its own). That one's religion - freedom of religion means the government cannot (dis)favour any religion to be practiced by any given person (except, in many European countries, the King).

This is primarily a disability rights or equal protection issue (a disabled person should be able to choose some aspects of an emergency alert e.g. strobing their lights rather than firing a siren, or doing neither if their response to the startle response would train them to hit dismiss w/o reading, by which point the alert isn't saved as a notification). Disability rights frankly are not widely recognized by governments, even where laws exist.

There's also the risk that this could create false alarm over non-alarming circumstances used spuriously by parties with alerting access.

Le 5 octobre 2023 15:31:00 UTC, Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> a écrit :

On 10/4/23 6:15 PM, Sabri Berisha wrote:
If this is true, and I will take your word for it, that is outrageous.

Why is this outrageous?

My wife is a teacher who works with special needs kids, and her phone went of twice (the second time 15 minutes after the first). This was very disruptive as you can imagine.

I can understand and appreciate the situation.

Obviously, I made sure all of the emergency notifications were set to OFF on her phone. If setting this nonsense to OFF is not working, why even have the menu option?

Because the menu options apply to -- let's go with -- lesser priority / lower authority alerts.

The government has no right to disrupt the day of 350 million people, however much the self-appointed emergency communication "professionals" like to think so.

I can't speak to the government's right to do something or not.

But I can see why governments would want the ability for one person, or their proxies, to have the technical capability to send an alert to all devices in their territory.

I think this is a case of where four nines of alerts can be suppressed in software, but the fifth nine deliberately can't be suppressed.

Furthermore, it's simply unnecessary. It is incredibly easy to add a one-bit flag indicating whether or not it's a test to such alerts.

There is a test flag.

My phone shows an option to ignore tests.

My phone does ignore weekly tests without any problem.

It seems to be that the powers that be decided to send this test without the test bit set. -- Or perhaps the presidential indicator is mutually exclusive to the test bit.

This whole test was a display of poor engineering and disrespect for people's first amendment rights.

I disagree. But I digress.

Thanks,

:-)