Emergency Alert test descends into chaos as it fails to work on up to 10 million phones
Customers on Three, one of Britain’s biggest mobile networks, didn’t receive the 10-second alert
Or are we against the very idea itself?
Myself I think a system to warn us when The Enemy are coming, wavcing their strings of onions, baguettes and breathing garlic at us (of course, how else would an Englishman describe as the enemy?) some value. But some do differ….
Waste of time, money and effort. And, like all government projects riddled with incompetence and inefficiency. The enemy is already crossing the Channel. If it floods, we can look out of the window. As for wildfires, given that we are a damp, soggy little island surrounded by water that falls regularly out of the sky, highly unlikely. If Vlad decides to nuke us, an early warning system will be somewhat moot. This is just more project fear.
I’d switched off the alerts in my settings, so was spared this little bit of government stupidity on my phone.
The alert system will be a key part of the Wonderful Reset, both to broadcast instructions to the masses and to reach out to individuals. For example: “You have breached the limit of your 15 minute zone – return to your pod immediately. Only a half portion of snackworms for you tonight”.
I for one welcome our Technocrat overlords !
So Three’s appalling coverage finally has some benefits
What do you reckon the chances of the use of this “Emergency” system being restricted to what any reasonable person would regard as their emergency?
My guess approximates zero.
Whilst I can see it being very useful in places that have tsunami etc. it’s not too relevant to the UK, though a chemical spill perhaps? Being built into phones as standard it’s effectively free and people (the usual people) would shriek if the UK chose not to have access to it.
So the “test” didn’t work too well for Three Mobile. Great. That is exactly what a good test is for: work out what is broken so you can fix it.
It worked great for me (on both 3 and vodafone). I was testing that disabling it worked fine, and my post-sunday-lunch nap was blissfully uninterrupted.
BiW I’m told only a few pints of Rosa – DIPA will do that…
If I worked in government I’d definitely test a thing. After I’d left. And started collecting my pension.
The only thing that was an absolute raging cert is that it WOULDN’T work properly…
I mean, I guess it might be useful as a warning that the nukes are flying, but given the incompetence of “The Blob”, we’d already be into heavy fallout by the time the message went through.
Assuming there were any phones still working after the pre-emptive EMP strike.
Apart from that what other “Emergencies” do we get that might warrant it? We don’t get Earthquakes of any magnitude, nor tornadoes of any frequency.
If they throw BBC Weather Alerts out using it we’ll simply turn the bloody thing off.
No obvious middle ground between the Apocalypse and bad weather.
” Being built into phones as standard it’s effectively free”
Hasn’t it cost a considerable sum to those cunts Fujitsu to create and operate this alerts system?
Tim, I turned it off in advance because I’ve been suffering from anxiety and fed-upness ever since they brought us into this Gay New World of health fascism.
I don’t watch TV or pay a license fee or listen to radio, so I’m sure as lions not interested in any more of the British government’s “emergencies”.
They can fuck right off.
If the Russians nuke us: I told you so, but I also don’t care anymore. God will either spare us or He won’t. By that point nothing Rishi Sunak has to say will make the slightest difference.
“Myself I think a system to warn us when The Enemy are coming”
But these days the government IS the enemy…
At least that’s one way to bring an end to NetZero.
We’ll be digging up as much of that coal were sat on until we’re down to the last candle.
In order to use such a system in a discriminating manner (i.e not warning those in Scotland about a wildfire in Dorset) the State might claim they need a live feed from the mobile operators as to the location of each SIM (because an “emergency” might happen at any moment, and delays cost lives etc)?
So this “emergency alert system” is perhaps just a pretext for demanding real-time data, and an excuse for the mobile operators to justify the provision of it?
I switched off emergency alerts.
The problem is that there will be a department, a team of people, responsible for this system. If the thing is never used, their jobs will be called into question. So they’ll lower the threshold for use until their jobs are no longer at risk. Then they’ll be able to say: “We successfully warned the the people in Fishlake-under-Water that a flood was coming”, and thus the thing becomes established.
A few decades from now, an incoming government with a notional aim to reduce the size of the state will look at things like this and say “that looks useful, let’s keep it”. Meanwhile, we’ll all keep getting warnings every time a fire alarm goes off in a building half a mile away.
I’ve been trying to think of a situation where this system might be useful. But I can’t. If a plane crashes into the BT Tower, I’ll either see it happen, by which time I can’t take precautions, or I’m too far away to need warning. If a flood happens, I’ll either be underwater already or in a locality not at risk. Etc etc etc. It’s just pointless
If the Russians nuke us: I told you so, but I also don’t care anymore. God will either spare us or He won’t. By that point nothing Rishi Sunak has to say will make the slightest difference.
The US gets ~30 minutes warning of incoming ICBMs, the UK only gets 4 minutes, which isn’t enough time to do – well, anything much. As I live a mile down the road from RAF HQ, I’d rate my chances of surviving a first strike as ‘low’, which is how I’d prefer it – the survivors will envy the dead.
Wildfires? Ilkley Moor goes up in flames every so often, but as no one lives there and the smoke is visible from 20 miles all around, not one person is going to think “I haven’t had my Emergency Alert so I’m getting my walking boots on”
Chris – it definitely looked more than a bit shite on THREADS.
But I hope you survive and get super powers from the radiation (that is also my plan).
As someone with a lot of experience with EBS’ – broadcast and phone – it won’t really do you any good.
1. It’s only useful for *sudden* emergencies like tornados and earthquakes, tidal waves. Not many of those in Tealandia.
2. If you live in the city then notifying you of incoming nukes does nothing – either you’re in a blast zone or you’ll get sufficient notification to seek a fallout shelter when you hear the blast;)
3. Most everyone else in the country not in cities will get weather alerts for weather *in the cities*, miles away. I get notifications for flood conditions in a place 300 miles from where I live.
So incompetent they couldn’t even get the translation into Welsh correct, you’d think a bunch of civil servants could at least get the text right even if they have no idea of the technology.
Not only did they use a non-Welsh word (Vogel) there is no V in the welsh alphabet so you couldn’t even say it looked right
I forgot (probably because I couldn’t be bothered) to go through the rigmarole of blocking it.
So I got the alert just after I set out for a walk.
I am on Three – the UKIPgraph is wrong
Maybe some Three users didn’t get the warning but is NOT true that all Three users did not
“It’s just pointless”
On the contrary it’ll prove very useful as a way of informing the peasantry that their electric will be cut off at the following times when the grid faces collapse due to some ‘renewables’ failure…………..
Quite, it’s for control purposes rather than being informative
It has reportedly cost the taxpayers £22Million (so far) for zero benefit. I had an argument on Twatter yesterday with a character who claimed that it would have somehow prevented the Hungerford massacre, even though the stated aim of it is to warn of natural occurences and not nutcases walking around shooting random people. If it was, there would be daily uses of it warning Londoners of random feral youths walking the streets armed with knives looking for likely victims.
And how exactly would it describe these “random feral youths” given the reluctance of our “Liberal” (hah!) establishment to describe perpetrators of no appearance?