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Test of Canada’s public alerting system, Alert Ready, coming Wednesday
(www.theweathernetwork.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Don't want to be subjected to random loud noises from your phone? Just turn off the alerts! All you need to do is figure out how to get root access, drop into a shell, explore the file system to learn enough to know where to look for things, figure out which application is responsible for this stuff, and find a way to disable it without breaking anything else.
I swear this whole system is some kind of government program to turn more Canadians into computer hackers.
I don't know if it's unique to grapheneos but I have
over alerts.
Looks to be android as I have that too on my stock Pixel 7.
Interesting though is on my phone test messages is untoggled but I still got the damn thing
That could just be a use of the system. Instead of sending test messages through the test channel, maybe Ontario uses the Amber Alert channel for everything including tests?
The incompetence wouldn't be a surprise honestly.
Hm, good to know. I've heard there are also some stock android roms that let you mute them as well, but not the version of lineageos I've got.
I get the alerts but never any sounds
It's actually easy to do and you don't need root access or "drop into the shell".
Takes about ten minutes if you don't know what you are doing, and maybe 2 minutes if you do.
Nothing breaks.
I mean, if it was easy to opt out of then everybody would do it and that sort of defeats the purpose of having an alert system. This is designed to save lives; if I'm fast asleep and there's a tornado about to drop on top of me I'd like it if my phone would wake me up first, even a few seconds warning gives time to react.
I opted out because they misuse the system.
Everything is sent at the presidential level, which is supposed to be reserved for "You are likely to die if you don't take action, and maybe even if you do."
Most Android devices (and presumably iOS too) have configurable toggles for the different levels. But they aren't used in Canada.
If they ever stop abusing the system and use it as it was intended, I'll opt myself back in.
Yes! So far all of the messages I have gotten from the system should have just been a text.
Exactly.
I understand that they want Amber Alerts to go to everyone. But if I'm sleeping or working, I'm not going to go outside and interrogate everyone with a "White sedan last spotted 150km away from where you live 2 hours ago".
If I'm walking around and get a plain old SMS (or even an alert from the app -- respecting my device settings, of course), then yeah, I'll keep my eye out.
Until they fix it, I'm keeping it off, and I won't be able to contribute even if I were able to.
I had a similar issue visiting my parents in Ontario. They sent six Amber Alert messages in three hours, starting at 1am. I'm sure that people died in car accidents the next day from being repeatedly disturbed. And the worst part of all was that the missing child was found with their grandparent, by police, because the grandfather had gotten lost in downtown Toronto. If they had simply done nothing, it would have been resolved on its own, without waking up most of the 12 million people in southern Ontario.
You would presumably not opt out then. I know many people who would not, even if it were easy. Some of us would, and a few of us feel all the more compelled to do so because it was made unreasonably difficult.