And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
50 points by rrampage
50 points by rrampage
One detail missing from the UK alert regarding wildfires: these alerts came in as ‘Severe’ alerts. As implemented on iOS these come through with a piercingly loud alarm. I strongly believe you should reserve piercingly loud alarms for imminent danger to all who can hear. My next step after reading the alert was to look up how to disable severe alerts, which I then did, because I don’t want to be alerted like that
I understand there is a severity system for these alerts ranging from 1 to 4, with 4 being the lowest and for extreme weather (which would have been perfect for this) and 1 being an unnamed, impossible to disable severity presumably reserved for nukes/alien invasions. Implementing 4 to let out a distinct chime at normal user volume would be the best move, I think.
there's a fire alarm in my apartment that's so loud that the last time it went off, I simply gave up being able to escape. My cat bolted and it took me 15 minutes to find him.
This is a great article, and I mostly agree with the author... but, zooming out - is being able to abuse these systems to beam out something like
The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt.
really that bad? There are other effective ways of getting your propaganda out and, all things considered, this seems like an acceptable cost for having an emergency response system.
Even if you lock it down so the only message you can send is "Seek cover", that still could potentially be abused to quench protests and stuff.
iOS lets you turn these off. I’m sure Android does too. But, yes, this sort of thing is why telecom technology is seen as fundamentally authoritarian in some anarchist circles.
I really appreciate that GrapheneOS allows completely opting out of all emergency alerts, including those that regular Android and iOS treat as unoptoutable (like "presidential" alerts in the US).
My phone is my phone, thank you.
Technology has nothing to do with this. It’s a strictly legal matter.
When in Rome etc. The people with guns are enforcing the law of the land.
As an individual, if you don’t like the law, you have to overthrow the law and replace it with what you want.
Whenever the temptation to be righteous overcomes you, just recall that the people with guns think they are righteous too.
I will not write the bigger screed on why you and the people holding the guns are on the same side. It’s just that the smarter people who control the gun supply are better than either of you at this game.
As an individual, if you don’t like the law, you have to overthrow the law and replace it with what you want.
This is an idealized reality that only the privileged may live in.
There's plenty of people in lots of fun happy places like Yemen, Syria and the Congo who would disagree.
The real reality is there's a balance of privilege around "not so good that you actually have autonomy, but good enough that most people have enough to lose they don't complain too hard", which is where governments tend to be happy.