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I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

I've seen it during my career as a software developer, too. Heaps of alert spam that remained unread because 99% of them were useless and not indicative of a problem on our end. It's important to be careful about alerts so you know when real problems occur.

It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones entering the country, many people have them disabled

In the UK a few years ago, they tested the government emergency alert system, which was basically your phone turning into an air raid siren, regardless of what SMS filters you had set.

I would imagine South Korea has a similar system?

Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Considering most of SK's population is in Seoul, and Seoul is within range of NK artillery, wouldn't most people be aware before the notification came anyways?

Taiwan has emergency messages, though not _that_ high frequency. There the main topics involve:

- earthquakes: these can arrive indeed before you even feel them (a few seconds before); they filter it to areas where it's expected to be felt, there are discussions around how sensitive to make it (how wide area it should cover)

- extremely heavy rain: this was new recently, and very useful, when locally it all went cats & dogs, more than maybe I've ever seen. See an example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117058657161401667

- military drills: the yearly "if there's an invasion drill", they had sent reminder a week before, and then at the start/end; example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117030180601973598

- Chinese rocket launches that will fly over the island (not sure what could one do about it, and never seen anything, so maybe this is more borderline)

Interestingly (for me), the headers seems to change over time. Started with "Presidential Alert", there were "Government Alert" then, now "Emergency Alert" and just "Alert". I'm not sure if there area list of these or it evolved over time...

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are:

Extreme Threats

Severe Threats

AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts)

Public Safety Messages

State and Local Tests

Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.

Just a few days ago, I received one because of "the odour nuisance is no danger for the population"

People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.

One can only hope the government has some klaxons stashed away.

Side note: isn’t it crazy how Seoul is so close to the border that you can see North Korea on a clear sunny day? And the aforementioned traditional artillery-ableness of it all because of that?

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing

The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time period. According to multiple independent opinion polls, his approval rating was high during this period because people were grateful to have stability.

In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing."

Logic compels this conclusion. People who disagree on fundamental aspects of how the world and society should work cannot cooperate in a civil society if we trust that everyone will follow their vision of "the right thing." The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right. The thing I admire most about Anglo-American culture is that people will jump off a bridge if you give them a court order that complies with all required procedural formalities. That's how you create a civil society.

I dunno, trust is a good foundation, and then you need some good ole fashioned checks and balances, required transparency & record-keeping.

I sense that the checks-and-balances & record-keeping around mass-force-push SMS in the US are now extremely stringent especially after the Hawaii incident. And I'm OK with the current situation here.

OTOH, the checks-and-balances/transparency situation around LPR camera networks is... basically non-existent. I am not OK with the current situation here.

Both of these situations in the same (relatively) high-trust US. The difference is one has some serious regulations around it, and the other is cowboying shit.

> trust

One interesting aspect ij academic literature about trust, it is highly reverse correlated with diversity. No matter the grouping and size, the more diverse, the less trust within the group.

Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.

Trust is a Continuum. I have relatives who grew up in places where you didn't need to lock the door at night and those who have to lock the door at night but that's enough and those for who that is not enough.

I am reminded of a story I read lately of a woman who was shocked when her passport and purse were stolen from the beach while she was swimming. Somehow she had the perception that she was in a high trust worthy zone even though she had been doing her doctoral thesis work in a low trust society.

Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things.

Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. This trust creates your beliefs which sets your base-line incentives.

If your society is trustworthy and you are taught to be trustworthy and you see that the rewards are fairly distributed being trustworthy. It creates an incentives to be trustworthy yourself and a society is made by people like you and so everyone else does so too and the society becomes trustworthy and the cycle continues.

You would trust the society because you think your goals are aligned. Both you and society want the same thing.

BUT, the second the average individual works that the society or system is untrustworthy, that the incentives aren't aligned and I can't trust it.

The thing now is that the incentives are so misaligned with the reality of trustworthiness and it has become apparently clear. The incentives have also become unpredictable and questionable sometimes within the society and yet we see society tolerate, dare I say celebrate it sometimes. This makes us question if my personal incentives are aligned with society or not and if I am getting screwed or not by being so trustworthy of society and doing things fairly.

This in turns creates a vicious loop.

As such, fairness, trust and incentives play a very cyclical dependency on each other. You only trust if you feel like its fair and if the incentives prefer you to be fair as well.

I would sadly say that although our society is trending towards unfairness,untrustworthiness and perverse incentives. I do have a glimmer of hope that this too shall pass.

But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcement". In the real world, the ideal number of jails or homeless people is neither zero nor "all of them".

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing.

I was taught as a child that most people deep down genuinely want to be "good people". If only I had known what an absolute lie that really truly was, I'd have chosen a very different path for my life. Going out of my way to be a "good person" to the best of my ability was a total waste of a life that could have been spent in the pursuit of wealth and power, which I would have been very good at, had I not foolishly chosen to adhere to a "moral code" that was based on fantasy and naivety and a "reality" that just didn't exist as it was taught in schools, churches, and homes.

That ignores the men with guns, who would probably say that their alert is very important.

Take a look at the article. The issue is more complex.

Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.

If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too - the only modern tech industry we've ever known has been dominated by players attempting forms of lockin to capture rents and amass enormous fortunes, of course the technology of this society isnt generally helpful to the society at large.

Yep. The event in Egypt that this article opened with is an example of a state of exception, and it has been used effectively by rulers for a long time. Not just autocrats, but, even more importantly, by elected members of a government with checks and balances, as a way to bypass those checks and balances. The phrase was coined by a Nazi philosopher who proceeded to lay out the groundwork for the subversion of a constitutional parliament, which then worked effectively. It has been picked up by others like Agamben to analyze similar things throughout history (the Patriot Act for one).

It's fundamentally not a matter of technology.

> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending

"Before Sending" is the lynchpin here.

The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources.

Which requires distributed infra.

I think that is right and with the way Ukraine and Iran is going, we will need smaller decentralised data centres etc too. Its coming from a sad, bad place but it may be better and more democratic, less centralised.

I’d go further, and predefine the available messages and bake them in - $place is {under attack|on fire|underwater|beset by the whooping palsy} etc. - and then the decentralised send no longer needs distribution of a message, just an ID and enumerated metadata, like location.

Then the men with guns come and you can earnestly say “well guys, i know you want to declare the eternal republic of Basingstoke, but all I can do is send a warning about a tornado in Slough, is that close enough?”

I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.

And drones.

"the answer is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"

Egypt explicitly rejects this.

Can't believe it's 2026 and people still believe this nonsense about technology being neutral.

Men with guns from the /other/ country rejected this design already.

> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me

It most certainly was NOT OK.

By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving).

By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed.

The net result of this is, like most people I know, ALL such alerts are now switched off on my phone. Thus, if Putin does decide to push the button, I'll probably find out about it a little later then you.

Most of the time there is exactly one corporation that is above the law in a given area simply as a result of them having the guns.

Right. They are the law - they help write them

True, but let's talk about that word "legitimate" for a minute.

Let us accept that sending a text message about wildfire danger is legitimate. (I'm sure there are some here who will argue that it is not, but let's ignore them for the moment.)

Sending a text message "to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country" could be legitimate use of the threat of violence to defend the country. Or it could be a horribly illegitimate abuse of power, in a much more fundamental way than a wildfire warning could ever be.

So that's what bugs me about your examples. The second one is far too open to illegitimate use. And if the use is illegitimate, then the monopoly on violence is not legitimate either. (At least not within US civic philosophy: "Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and all that.)

Another interesting non-hypothetical example: many US states have so-called "blue alerts" which are used to send cell phone alerts whenever a police officer is attacked or injured. I used to live in Texas and blue alerts were a fairly frequent occurrence.

The stated justification for blue alerts is to warn the public of dangerous criminals. But they are only issued in response to attacks on cops, regardless of the level of danger to any other people. Also, at least in Texas, they're broadcast statewide. Texas is an awfully big state, and so the alerts are guaranteed to be irrelevant and non-actionable for the vast majority of people who receive them.

So it's fairly obvious to me that blue alerts are first and foremost a propaganda operation, aimed at perpetuating the stereotype that policing is a uniquely dangerous job. (It is indeed more dangerous than an average office job, but it has a much lower rate of fatal injuries than construction, or farming, or driving garbage trucks.)

This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards.

I reached out to their communication department and they had a rep call me to get more information about the emails. She tried to frame it as information only emails but the messaging was clear, that were marketing vaccinations during the holidays and giving no way to opt out of it. I never heard back from them.

Now we have corporations like AirBnb and Etsy sending you emails requesting reviews with no way of opting out of those communications. I had to close my accounts. I cant do that with my health provide, but you see where this is going. There is an effort to send communications without giving people a choice.

Many such cases

A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.

I think the thought is that if they kill one guy who didn't vote for them, the rest of the guys who didn't vote for them will fall in line. They'd rather waste a bullet than lose institutional knowledge.

I'm puzzled why your entirely factual and relevant statement documenting your experience has been downvoted.

Would a downvoter care to explain themselves?

My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)

Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.

It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.

Politics has always been unserious and based in spectacle.

The patriot act expired and was never renewed.

It is strange how few understand this. Its as they think that what is required is the right structure or set of rules.

They probably dont know that most countries have the exact same political structures with radically different outcomes.

> In this age, there is no longer any state needs to be larger than say, 1500 square km - about the size of a large county.

Assuming a rectangle of 30 by 50 kilometers, and no organized military for defense, it would take the Russians about 30-45 minutes to reintroduce the imperial subject experience on your proposed utopia.

The reason states are required are that other people are organized in states. Now I am guessing you are from the US, the standard of your living is only made possible, by millions of men and women working seriously to guarantee it, and thousands of nuclear weapons. Take either out of the equation, and your standard of living will very quickly become untenable.

Hell, the internet that you believe can solve all the problems, is only operational because hundreds of thousands of people are continuously working on it, many of them government employees.

We need large nation-states to make the modern world possible. The internet isn't just bits; everything depends on stuff that has to be shipped by sea. It takes a hegemon like the US and its allies to keep the sea lanes open. Navies are super expensive and a collection of small states wouldn't be able to build ships that could operate around the world.

If anything, technology is making possible for states like Yemen and Iran to shut off chokepoints. It might take multiple powers working together to keep things open.

What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?

So you propose to replace the nation states with corporate governments. Okay, two questions: who gets to make the laws, including the property laws? and who gets to enforce those laws?

Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.

> The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to.

Nations organize themselves into states to protect and promote their interests, including their existence as cultural and ethnic groups, from competing states (and other dangers, e.g. natural disasters). A.k.a. politics.

I was not aware politics has been solved by the internet.

They will then blame the government for their house burning down after they let off a bunch of fireworks inside.

The dailymail will join their campaign to seek justice for the victims.

Seems logical that the best way to uphold a moral society is for everyone to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions