> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant

If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day. Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat".

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

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust.

Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing.

So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.

Paraphrasing from Plato's The Republic, when the rulers and their auxillaries raise children with proper balance in the body and soul, there will be no need to deliberate on what is the right legislation, for the legislators themselves will be just in their duties.

In the end of the day, we need proper education, not only in technical excellence, but also societal awareness, what it means to be good and how to uphold oneself to such a standard even if everyone around them does not. This is how you defend against the men with guns.

”Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused…”

Staged rollout with engagement metrics that cancel the alert if it’s not alerty enough.

Stages: one town, then a city, then one county, then everyone. Can be complemented by picking a percentage nationally as well, or picking two different towns (Croydon vs Barnstaple.)

Engagement: Poll at each stage as to whether the message was useful, or counted as an emergency, or was read for more than X seconds, or opened more than once.

The alert system also has four levels:

(1) National and (2) Imminent Threat (think “we interrupt this programme to bring you breaking news…”);

(3) Public Safety (“Charlie says” but more specific); and

(4) missing persons / Amber alerts.

The use of the we’d-rather-you-crash-your-car-than-not-get-your-attention klaxon should be reserved for the first two, and its use for the “no barbecues plz” warning should probably have been avoided.

> In truth, having experienced fire-starters, I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.

Certainly, if you give up so easily because of a fantasy that some generic PSA becomes the sign to not burn your toast where all the other signs fail, no wonder you need the whole 10 steps to indicate "the impossible"

Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:

> Rapid sending of messages

> Careful checking of the content of messages

> Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area

> Inability to mistakenly send a test message

> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending

> Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure

> That networks have the ability to vet and ignore

> That networks are compelled to send

> Which can only be used for good

> And cannot be used for evil.

Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek.

I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible.

There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.

> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't.

Isn't the obvious answer decentralization? Have persons necessary to send that message in different places across the country/outside the country needing to sign it for it to be sent. All taking the responsibility of following protocol in these cases.

It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.

You can't technology your way out of social problems. The conflicting requirements raised throughout the article are, indeed, ultimately unsolvable.

The only way to stop an oppressive government from abusing the emergency notification system for propaganda is to fight against the oppressive government until it stops existing, then keep fighting to prevent it from existing again.

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?

Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question.

But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies.

There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of law. People are starting to attribute to corporations a power that they do not have, and that is very dangerous.

(The article is good, thou, and opens a lot of interesting questions)

> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't.

This is the wrong prism through which to confront the problem. Technology is neither good nor evil nor neutral - it is a tool lacking agency, to be manipulated by people.

You might as well ask if it's possible to design a gun that can only be used in self-defense, or a knife that can only be used for cutting vegetables and cannot hurt people, or a car that will solve all traffic fatalities. That's impossible. There are certainly designs which improve outcomes, but not designs that definitively solve those problems (i.e. addressing author's use of the word "cannot").

So take your pick: the easier problem of settling for improving outcomes, or the harder problem of building an inclusive and equitable society, where people have a position they can take pride in, a community that they support and which supports them, and where violence (of both physical and other kinds, like aggressive alerting) is a last resort. The solutions for the hard problem aren't found in technology, but in the humanities.

An interesting option that comes to mind would be having pre-specified codes that contain client-side (pre-baked in) messages, something like '1 - Wildfire alert: ...; 2 - Heavy rain; 3- ...; 1023 - False alarm: please disregard ...', possibly with another severity parameter to modulate messages etc.. Then at least no one could simply hijack the system to send arbitrary messages (only one of pre-chosen alerts).

"Sorry men with guns, the most we can do is send one of those messages."

Not taking sides on the Egyptian situation or any other past or future conflict but as scary as men with guns may be, there are also men with information who use it in warfare to achieve similar goals.

I generally turn off all emergency alerts completely, because anything I'd ever like to hear about, I would see from other sources, and generally, anything people try to force me to know is something I'm not interested in. I've experienced this phenomenon countless times: people generally push harder when they already know I wouldn't care.

The UK system has "severe alerts", which is what the wildfire alert was, and "extreme alerts" which is a higher category. Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me.

Both levels can be deactivated on Android (no idea about iOS but I presume it's the same), there's no unblockable presidential alert level.

> it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

So: microphones, tape recorders, radios, television, and even the printing press are all bad civic hygiene? They have all been used to facilitate police states...

The bigger threat to our society is, that large corporations start to assume they are above the law.

We privatized much of the information backbone that keeps our countries running.

Relevant here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez

> Hugo Chavez realized that there’s no technical limit on how often you can invoke the emergency broadcast system. You can do it every day! The “emergency” can be that you had a cool new thought about the true meaning of socialism. Or that you’re opening a new hospital and it makes a good photo op. Or that opposition media is saying something mean about you, and you’d like to prevent anyone from watching that particular channel (which is conveniently bound by law to air emergency broadcasts whenever they occur).

> I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.

I'm not bothered by the desire to send an informational message to the populace, but the alert is absurd. Sirens going off from a million phones for text that needed to be disseminated within O(day) not O(minutes) - this was patently an inappropriate delivery mechanism.

I have, of course, turned the damned things off on my work phone now too so I shall be blissfully ignorant when the nukes fly.

It’s time like these that I wish technologists didn’t devalue social scientists so much as to effectively alienate them from forums like this.

Comments on these subjects are far less enlightening than when I want to know how to operate the latest LLM.

Tech has gone some distance from when jobs put the early Apple teams together and stated that he thought everyone would be exceptional in their field without computers, it just so happens that computers help them achieve results in their field.

It feels like computers became a field so vast, powerful, that it can sustain itself economically whilst alienating the very people that connect it to societies and the issues faced by them

That is to say, I wish we had expert sociologists on this forum who can add value just as we have people who can with their slice of technology

This article is painfully shortsighted about Egypt's moment in the Arab Spring.

(1) the problematic Vodafone message in question is presented as "without attribution" but it very clearly starts with the words "The Armed Forces asks"!

(2) it makes it seem like the government was naturally unpopular in Egypt and clinging on to power in desperate ways when in reality the online anti-state dissent turned out to be astroturfed by "shadowy" Western organizations, which ironically ended up being the Islamic Brotherhood's ace up their sleeve as their justification for taking control.

So basically, wtf is his point regarding the Arab Spring? The author sounds painfully naive like it's still 2011, this sort of deliberate naivete makes it difficult for me to trust the rest of the article.

This will be my new go-to article whenever I talk to someone about how technology isn't a silver bullet and their thesis is that "yeah it is, we just dont have that technology yet".

The use case outlined in this article should make it very clear to most that believing technology solves all our issues is at least wrong, and at worst dangerous. Technology cannot protect you from bad actors, the solution must be social.

Bitcoin fans in the "cryptobros learning why we have regulation any% speedrun" is another example that comes to mind.

I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government to exist at all - a local monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in order to enforce the law. Everything a government does, from laws regulating food ingredient labeling to collecting the social security tax from paychecks to organizing a formal military to fight a rebellion, is ultimately backed up by men with guns telling people what to do.

I heard stories from friends where such a system is used to broadcast ads to wide areas in South Korea, never had to deal with it myself but the way they described it made it sound like they were sent using that very same emergency message system.

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384

Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.

The only way around this is to not to have any employees in the same country as the men with the guns.

I read this up until the movie trope and statement along the lines of "you can martyr youraelf but someone less moral will give in" but I'd say it's more likely they'll just find someone who voted for the other guy with the same knowledge as you. Why waste the bullet?

Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message.

I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.

I think answer in this day and age, is to invoke Skynet, and give an LLM control of the system. Glue a local model that works without Internet to it, and give it guard rails, and give it a bunch of system instructions defining the rules on what to let though. It wouldn't be perfect, but what system is?

> What if armed thugs are sent in and the choice is send the message or die?

Arm yourselves. Not just one person, arm your entire staff. IMO the most appealing option in this situation is to shoot the thugs in the face. (Ha ha, you're in the UK, I know.)

Technology is, of course, downstream of society.

We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious.

Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unlocked and the gleaming glowing beating heart of civic power is sitting right there completely unprotected. There were warnings after 9/11, with the patriot act and the GWOT. People who raised these concerns were dismissed as cranks but in fact they were the only serious people in the room. The unseriousness has increasingly accelerated in the last 10 years.

Now we are seeing the consequences. There's a timely acronym for this I think. FAFO?

no amount of rules will correct for bad people

tl;dr -- "all the hard problems are in humanities", including the problem of humanities people only being able to understand linear dependencies.

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:

There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state.

The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central republic structure because it's too difficult to coordinate disparate statehouses via horseback with every little intrastate decision) is solved by dint of instant communication and long-term data retention. So it is with every other claim in favor of these huge legacy state structures.

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. This way, people can flee on foot to an adjacent state if needed, and no state can possibly control enough infrastructure to force Vodaphone to send such nauseating propaganda.

We need the elder statesmen in the room to read the writing on the wall and begin this process.

The UK SMS decision also perhaps shows a misunderstanding of the British public these days: I had never smelled so many BBQs the day after that alert was sent and I'd heard similar reports of people being rebellious, fireworks etc

Yes, they used the SMS as a prompt to increase risk. People are awful these days

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?

If Trump administration/US congress told you to use your AI agent to eavesdrop their political enemies should you be loyal to them? To kill children in middle east? To help them in a war against your mother country?

When the rulers of countries and corporations conspire, the amount of evil they can do is unlimited. Thus, I believe the willingness of corporations to stand against the rulers is the cornerstone of a civilized society.