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Recently they had a significant country wide false alarm in Israel at 3AM... There was a emergency alert cell broadcast (similar to amber alert), which caused e
by irvymike 1y ago
Recently they had a significant country wide false alarm in Israel at 3AM... There was a emergency alert cell broadcast (similar to amber alert), which caused everyone to move their phone at the same time, which was falsely detected as an earthquake, which caused an Android earthquake alert to be sent to all phones in Israel 30 seconds later. I guess they didn't plan for this scenario
Edit: Arstechina article seems to mention this: "only three were false positives. One of those was triggered by a different system sending an alert that vibrated a lot of phones"
- underdeserver 1y agoI heard it was the cell broadcast which caused the phones to vibrate at the same time, not people picking them up.
- ls-a 1y agoTypical Google product. Reminds me of a person who put a bunch of phones in a car and drove which caused Google maps to wrongly show traffic in that area. It was deliberately done though as an experiment
- Miraste 1y agoThat would be quite an implementation flaw if it didn't account for the phone's own vibrations. Lots of countries use widespread emergency alert messages frequently.
- irvymike 1y agoThey fixed this bug, we had plenty of emergency cell broadcasts since the false alarm.
- dylan604 1y agoif (!isShakerRunning) { sendAlert() } seems like a pretty obvious thing to add
- underdeserver 1y agoOnly obvious once you've thought of it I suppose...
- dylan604 1y agoIt's obvious to anyone that's written software for hardware sensors to ensure the hardware itself is not going to interfere with readings of other sensors. Don't tell the motor to run if the motor is already running type of issues. It's a fairly common bozo check
- John7878781 1y agoDoesn't seem that obvious to me
- tirant 1y agoWhat if it's actually another phone's vibration laying next to each other? Me and my wife leave our phones together when going to sleep.
- wraptile 1y agonot only that but my android phone sleeps together with my android reading tablet
- OrangeMusic 1y agoAwww that's cute. Did they produce little baby Android devices?
- Aachen 1y agoNote that those are three completely false events. The survey results Google published show 15% of people not feeling any shaking (neither strong nor light). That's still a good figure, but reading there were only 3 false positives gave me the impression that you're basically always in for a ride when you get the alert and it's not that miraculously accurate either
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoI was thinking the same thing. A taylor swift concert where she tells everyone to sway their phones in unison might trigger this
- unixhero 1y agoMaybe it was due to the blasts from their own ordenances
- dheera 1y agoSurprised they don't do some signal processing on all the IMU signals to see if they correlate (to within a rotation matrix), and if the timing of shaking at different locations is consistent with the distance to some (solvable) epicenter. The whole country moving phones in random directions at exactly the same time isn't what an earthquake signature should look like.
- HexPhantom 1y agoKind of ironic that the alert caused the earthquake warning
- Galanwe 1y agoI don't get it. I thought earthquake alerts were meant to trigger _before_ the earthquake arrives. If it happens 30 secondes after detecting vibrations, not considering the false positive, it can only mean "hey, you just felt, or are feeling an earthquake, hope you're sheltered".
- tgv 1y agoThe first alert made the phones vibrate (or people touching them), which got falsely detected as an earthquake.
- ragebol 1y agoYes, and they sent a notification apparently after the detection. That is not a warning system
- foobarbecue 1y agoEarthquake early warning only works because the internet is faster than seismic waves. It only works for people who are far enough from the epicenter.
- neurostimulant 1y agoA faster moving small quake (p-wave) will precede the bigger, more damaging quake. This system detects the p-wave and alert people hoping they can get out in time before the big quake hit.
- foobarbecue 1y agoTo clarify: pressure waves travel faster than shear waves. Both start at the same time and the same place (epicenter). Earthquake early warning only works because the internet is faster than seismic waves. It only works for people who are far enough from the epicenter.
- foobarbecue 1y agoEarthquake early warning only works because the internet is faster than seismic waves. It only works for people who are far enough from the epicenter.
- jldugger 1y agoSomewhat relatedly, I support a service with global scale traffic. Whenever there's an earthquake in APAC, we get a traffic spike, like 100x normal for that time of night. I'm pretty sure it's incoming alerts waking people up / checking where the epicenter is and if they need to run from any tsunami or flooding, but it's still really hard to scale that kind of thing up for regional demand when it spikes that hard!