Emergency notification in UK
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The UK govt has decided in it's infinite wisdom (in a time of horrendous inflation and a cost of living crisis, strikes by emergency services, teachers, medic, and so on) that the best thing to spend money on is an alert system that sends a priority notification along with a siren noise to every cell phone in the country. Just in case 50 nukes are headed this way, they can tell us all to kiss our *** goodbye. Today was the first test of the system. Herself didn't even notice - she assumed the siren noise was on the TV, not her phone ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
OriginalGriff wrote:
The UK govt has decided in it's infinite wisdom
Not only UK... we have had it too... twice. And my phone didn't get any of them (work phone got the second one though)
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The UK govt has decided in it's infinite wisdom (in a time of horrendous inflation and a cost of living crisis, strikes by emergency services, teachers, medic, and so on) that the best thing to spend money on is an alert system that sends a priority notification along with a siren noise to every cell phone in the country. Just in case 50 nukes are headed this way, they can tell us all to kiss our *** goodbye. Today was the first test of the system. Herself didn't even notice - she assumed the siren noise was on the TV, not her phone ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Isn't the whole point of testing to find out how it works live, and to reveal where improvements should be made? There's always someone whining about something. If there was a life threatening danger near you and you weren't warned, my guess is that you'd be whining about that too. I used to live in a flood area. We got alert messages over the landline, and I can tell you that the flood warnings were very useful in giving us time to prepare. However cellphone warnings would have been even more useful, for obvious reasons.
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Nothing for Mrs Pete, daughter number 1, or myself. We're the first to go in the zombie apocalypse.
Apparently you need Android 11 (or similar iPhone level) at least for it to work fully. I have Android 9 and only got the visual alert, but that was enough. My wife has A11 and hers worked perfectly. She's now moved to "somewhere safer". Could be the warning was just an excuse ....
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Nothing for Mrs Pete, daughter number 1, or myself. We're the first to go in the zombie apocalypse.
Apparently you need Android 11 (or similar iPhone level) at least for it to work fully. I have Android 9 and only got the visual alert, but that was enough. My wife has A11 and hers worked perfectly. She's now moved to "somewhere safer". Could be the warning was just an excuse ....
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Apparently you need Android 11 (or similar iPhone level) at least for it to work fully. I have Android 9 and only got the visual alert, but that was enough. My wife has A11 and hers worked perfectly. She's now moved to "somewhere safer". Could be the warning was just an excuse ....
As we have the latest generation Android and iPhone incarnations, I don't think that caused the problem here.
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I got mine
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The UK govt has decided in it's infinite wisdom (in a time of horrendous inflation and a cost of living crisis, strikes by emergency services, teachers, medic, and so on) that the best thing to spend money on is an alert system that sends a priority notification along with a siren noise to every cell phone in the country. Just in case 50 nukes are headed this way, they can tell us all to kiss our *** goodbye. Today was the first test of the system. Herself didn't even notice - she assumed the siren noise was on the TV, not her phone ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
OriginalGriff wrote:
Today was the first test of the system. Herself didn't even notice - she assumed the siren noise was on the TV, not her phone ...
I was on-call over the weekend and had left my work phone upstairs. My wife, also upstairs, called down that she thought work were trying to contact me as it was making a loud noise! :)
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Wasn't that H.G.Wells story revealed to be a hoax as early as 1938? Wikipedia:The War of the Worlds[^]
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Apparently you need Android 11 (or similar iPhone level) at least for it to work fully. I have Android 9 and only got the visual alert, but that was enough. My wife has A11 and hers worked perfectly. She's now moved to "somewhere safer". Could be the warning was just an excuse ....
I have a Samsung Galaxy Young. It's tiny, cost £9.99 and is ten years old. It runs Android 4.4.2 Unsurprisingly, I didn't get the alert :laugh: and would have been astonished if I had. My wife's £10 Samsung (no idea of model, but it seems to do everything and reasonably quickly) did. My SiL's £300 Samsung A50 from 4 years ago got nothing. My daughter's phone was off at 3pm yesterday, she turned it on later that evening. She got the alert at 10am today... As I told her, at least it will give the rescuers something to aim for in the rubble... :laugh: I get it when commercial companies target only latest/later versions, they want to minimise the options they write for. It annoys the hell out of me when things like the Covid app or the more general NHS app target only the latest versions of Android; what features are they trying to use that make the app unavailable to (slightly) older phones?
Telegraph marker posts ... nothing to do with IT Phasmid email discussion group ... also nothing to do with IT Beekeeping and honey site ... still nothing to do with IT
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Isn't the whole point of testing to find out how it works live, and to reveal where improvements should be made? There's always someone whining about something. If there was a life threatening danger near you and you weren't warned, my guess is that you'd be whining about that too. I used to live in a flood area. We got alert messages over the landline, and I can tell you that the flood warnings were very useful in giving us time to prepare. However cellphone warnings would have been even more useful, for obvious reasons.
haughtonomous wrote:
We got alert messages over the landline, and I can tell you that the flood warnings were very useful
But of course the land line can't move around. I stopped the weather alerts when I started getting hail warnings for areas that were 100 miles from where I was. Then the traffic alerts service that provided alerts from other side of the city where I have never been. Then the very handy app to live track where the commuter rail car was until I realized that it was not in fact live at all but just programmed to follow where the car should be (as in the train didn't show at all but the app showed it arriving and leaving.) Presumably they will get better, one can hope.
