45 ms·

And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

454 points by _djo_ 2mo ago

ColinWright 2mo ago
Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384 Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.
- esseph 2mo ago
  A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.
  - rglover 2mo ago
    What's the breach/link you tried to share?
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ezfe 2mo ago
      You can click their profile and see it
      - ajkjk 2mo ago
        I can't see anything?
        esseph 2mo ago
        responded above if you want to check out the link
      - AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
        In esseph's submissions, I see only one, from 2025. This does not match their "a few days ago". So, no, I can't click their profile and see it. Could you provide a link to what you see?
        esseph 2mo ago
        It looks like somebody else posted it before it did, so when I added comments it added it to that one. Which is fine, I don't care about that, but it's CRAZY it hasn't gotten more exposure/discussion! Title: Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281251 Article: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-credentials-leaked-in-massive-supply-chain-attack/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-creden... More details: https://exposure.cloudsek.com/ai-supply-chain-incident https://exposure.cloudsek.com/ai-supply-chain-incident
  - trinsic2 2mo ago
    I think one of the reasons is that it depends on the day and time you post things. I have seen submissions get nothing and the end of the day and have a better in the afternoon. And weekends seems like mornings are better.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Many such cases
jameskilton 2mo ago
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.
- Johnny_Bonk 2mo ago
  Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.
  - salynchnew 2mo ago
    It is kind of funny and sad that in the U.S. we've gone from corporations virtue-signalling to vice signalling in just a few years.
    - pjc50 1mo ago
      Having experienced vice signalling, I'm never going to complain about virtue signalling again.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
jMyles 2mo ago
> 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.
- logseman 2mo ago
  Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
  - jMyles 2mo ago
    Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points. My presumption is that, as nation-states are deprecated, coordination between them will have to take the shape of sufficiently decentralized technology that the "networks have the ability to vet and ignore" portion becomes a local and voluntary process. And - probably an area where reasonable people disagree - it's the (real or perceived) authority that makes it possible to "be used for evil"; if there is no badge and gun, and each message (broadly considered) is to be considered on its own merits (both for its truth and its persuasiveness), then I think that corporate propaganda just lands in the 'ignore' (or even 'spam') pile.
    - throwawayffffas 2mo ago
Frieren 2mo ago
> 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)
- stephbook 2mo ago
  "the answer is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" Egypt explicitly rejects this.
- chrismorgan 1mo ago
  Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders (the Nuremberg defence, “we were only following orders”).
mlsu 2mo ago
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?
- justonceokay 2mo ago
  Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity. It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago
  The patriot act expired and was never renewed.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Politics has always been unserious and based in spectacle.
djoldman 2mo ago
> 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.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- protocolture 2mo ago
  > Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending "Before Sending" is the lynchpin here. The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources. Which requires distributed infra.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Some sort of chain... of blocks, that would require distributed consensus before the message would go out? Hmm...
    - protocolture 2mo ago
cjs_ac 2mo ago
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.
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.
  - raffael_de 2mo ago
    care to provide examples?
    - cwmoore 2mo ago
      No, not really. I’m just questioning the axiomatic statement.
    - 9x39 2mo ago
      Social media exposes weakpoints in human nature - mob mentalities, comparisons of global norms over local ones. People died and many more are likely disturbed and divided. India comes to mind as some of the earliest worst-case examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings I buy into teen mental health tanking correlating with the rise of mobile social media in 2012: https://archive.is/frHnA https://archive.is/frHnA I think there's probably far more powerful but hard to describe and prove effects out there in play by connecting to a global async awareness network, but I'll leave it there.
    - bradly 1mo ago
      Jean Baudrillard wrote some really great pieces on what the proliferation of technology with things like the clocks and mirrors did to humans. I highly recommend his book The System of Objects (https://archive.org/details/systemofobjects0000baud/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/systemofobjects0000baud/mode/2up).
logifail 2mo ago
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.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)
  - johneth 1mo ago
    I'd have to agree, given the past alerts (https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts) seem to be reasonable and localised. Hopefully they take heed.
- GJim 1mo ago
  I'm puzzled why your entirely factual and relevant statement documenting your experience has been downvoted. Would a downvoter care to explain themselves?
hollow-moe 2mo ago
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.
- trinsic2 2mo ago
  This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards. I reached out to their communication department and they had a rep call me to get more information about the emails. She tried to frame it as information only emails but the messaging was clear, that were marketing vaccinations during the holidays and giving no way to opt out of it. I never heard back from them. Now we have corporations like AirBnb and Etsy sending you emails requesting reviews with no way of opting out of those communications. I had to close my accounts. I cant do that with my health provide, but you see where this is going. There is an effort to send communications without giving people a choice.
- teraflop 2mo ago
  Another interesting non-hypothetical example: many US states have so-called "blue alerts" which are used to send cell phone alerts whenever a police officer is attacked or injured. I used to live in Texas and blue alerts were a fairly frequent occurrence. The stated justification for blue alerts is to warn the public of dangerous criminals. But they are only issued in response to attacks on cops, regardless of the level of danger to any other people. Also, at least in Texas, they're broadcast statewide. Texas is an awfully big state, and so the alerts are guaranteed to be irrelevant and non-actionable for the vast majority of people who receive them. So it's fairly obvious to me that blue alerts are first and foremost a propaganda operation, aimed at perpetuating the stereotype that policing is a uniquely dangerous job. (It is indeed more dangerous than an average office job, but it has a much lower rate of fatal injuries than construction, or farming, or driving garbage trucks.)
JuniperMesos 2mo ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  True, but let's talk about that word "legitimate" for a minute. Let us accept that sending a text message about wildfire danger is legitimate. (I'm sure there are some here who will argue that it is not, but let's ignore them for the moment.) Sending a text message "to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country" could be legitimate use of the threat of violence to defend the country. Or it could be a horribly illegitimate abuse of power, in a much more fundamental way than a wildfire warning could ever be. So that's what bugs me about your examples. The second one is far too open to illegitimate use. And if the use is illegitimate, then the monopoly on violence is not legitimate either. (At least not within US civic philosophy: "Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and all that.)
  - JuniperMesos 2mo ago
    > Sending a text message "to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country" could be legitimate use of the threat of violence to defend the country. Or it could be a horribly illegitimate abuse of power, in a much more fundamental way than a wildfire warning could ever be. Yeah, you have to basically decide which side you support more, the Mubarak regime or the rebels, in order to then decide whether you approve or disapprove of the mass text message.
laughing_man 2mo ago
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.
- conception 2mo ago
  And drones.
- xpct 2mo ago
  I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.
  - alansaber 2mo ago
    Precisely, modern multimodal LLMs are a breakthrough in ultra high volume data processing, for all their flaws
  - matheusmoreira 2mo ago
    I asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering susceptibility, likely scenarios. It got to the point it started digging into open source projects I made when I was a teenager and started making eerily accurate inferences about my childhood. I can't even imagine what the NSAs and CIAs of the world are capable of with their limitless black budgets. Anthropic only balked at domestic surveillance, it had zero objections towards allowing the US government to surveil foreign persons like me.
    - xpct 1mo ago
tonymet 2mo ago
no amount of rules will correct for bad people
- petermcneeley 2mo ago
  It is strange how few understand this. Its as they think that what is required is the right structure or set of rules. They probably dont know that most countries have the exact same political structures with radically different outcomes.
  - tonymet 1mo ago
    “If only we could create a realtime propaganda, command and control system with a user manual that says no bad person should ever use this for ill intent”.
asaucerful 2mo ago
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?
- paulv 2mo ago
  I think the thought is that if they kill one guy who didn't vote for them, the rest of the guys who didn't vote for them will fall in line. They'd rather waste a bullet than lose institutional knowledge.
raincole 2mo ago
> 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.
- jackmott42 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Seems logical that the best way to uphold a moral society is for everyone to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions
skybrian 2mo ago
The only way around this is to not to have any employees in the same country as the men with the guns.
decimalenough 2mo ago
> 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.
- doubletwoyou 2mo ago
  One can only hope the government has some klaxons stashed away. Side note: isn’t it crazy how Seoul is so close to the border that you can see North Korea on a clear sunny day? And the aforementioned traditional artillery-ableness of it all because of that?
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago
  > You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests
  - nerdsniper 2mo ago
    I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote parts of Texas, so people who were over 700 miles / 1.1 megameter / 12 hour drive away all got the notification at 4AM. The only option Texans had would have been to disable all alerts entirely, because this was an "EXTREME" level alert. https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notification/ https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notificat...
excalibur 2mo ago
> 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.)
aidenn0 2mo ago
> 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...
ruifjfj274 2mo ago
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
fragmede 2mo ago
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?
Banou 2mo ago
> 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.
- madaxe_again 2mo ago
  I’d go further, and predefine the available messages and bake them in - $place is {under attack|on fire|underwater|beset by the whooping palsy} etc. - and then the decentralised send no longer needs distribution of a message, just an ID and enumerated metadata, like location. Then the men with guns come and you can earnestly say “well guys, i know you want to declare the eternal republic of Basingstoke, but all I can do is send a warning about a tornado in Slough, is that close enough?”
  - voidUpdate 2mo ago
    That works until you have a sudden and unexpected situation such as "There is an epidemic of black death, please remain indoors" which you didn't account for, and now you have to tell everyone that the country has been beset by the whooping palsy instead and hope the intent comes through
- century19 2mo ago
  I think that is right and with the way Ukraine and Iran is going, we will need smaller decentralised data centres etc too. Its coming from a sad, bad place but it may be better and more democratic, less centralised.
niemandhier 2mo ago
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.
- Muromec 2mo ago
  Most of the time there is exactly one corporation that is above the law in a given area simply as a result of them having the guns.
  - madaxe_again 2mo ago
    Yeah, but they’re allowed to use the guns and have a monopoly on their legal use, because they have the guns. Shut up, it’s not a tautology.
- gib444 2mo ago
  Right. They are the law - they help write them
petterroea 2mo ago
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.
thinking_cactus 2mo ago
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."
- Muromec 2mo ago
  Men with guns from the /other/ country rejected this design already.
Muromec 2mo ago
tl;dr -- "all the hard problems are in humanities", including the problem of humanities people only being able to understand linear dependencies.
eviks 2mo ago
> 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"
gorgoiler 2mo ago
”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.
- gcr 1mo ago
  That ignores the men with guns, who would probably say that their alert is very important. Take a look at the article. The issue is more complex.
gib444 2mo ago
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
- blitzar 2mo ago
  They will then blame the government for their house burning down after they let off a bunch of fireworks inside. The dailymail will join their campaign to seek justice for the victims.
red_admiral 2mo ago
Relevant here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez 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).
solatic 2mo ago
> 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.
- lins1909 1mo ago
  Can't believe it's 2026 and people still believe this nonsense about technology being neutral.
red_admiral 2mo ago
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.
- GJim 1mo ago
  > Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me It most certainly was NOT OK. By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving). By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed. The net result of this is, like most people I know, ALL such alerts are now switched off on my phone. Thus, if Putin does decide to push the button, I'll probably find out about it a little later then you.
  - roryirvine 1mo ago
    An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that. You'd need to get the mobile operators involved to build the list of recipients and then to do the actual work of pushing the message out. Normal SMS is point to point, so a message needs to be sent to each subscriber individually which is a huge job at population-level scale. It makes more sense to use the existing cell broadcast alert infrastructure which has been planned for exactly this type of use case and has been thoroughly tested. A more reasonable complaint might be that it wasn't geofenced to only the drought-hit areas, but that would only have excluded something like a quarter of the population.
    - pm215 1mo ago
      I think it's reasonable to complain that the system doesn't have an "important but not urgent" message category (which might e.g. have the same "window pops up that you have to dismiss" UI but trigger whatever your usual text-message notification sound/vibration is rather than the VERY LOUD siren). And given that the system does not have that "important but not urgent" category it's also reasonable to complain when the government uses the "urgent" notification system for something that is not urgent. It caused me to turn off "severe" alerts (leaving "emergency" enabled).
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
avadodin 1mo ago
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.
Ntrails 1mo ago
> 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.
midtake 1mo ago
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.
- edent 1mo ago
  The author (hello) doesn't really have an opinion about Egypt and the situation in 2011. Regarding attribution. As you can see from the linked images, the messages all have the sender "Vodafone". While they may genuinely be from the armed forces, the reader has no way to verify that. If you received a message saying "The armed forces requires you to pet a cat today" would you immediately believe it was from the army? Regarding the government's unpopularity. I think you might be inferring something I didn't imply. All I've done is link to contemporary news stories and quote from press releases. I haven't expressed any thoughts on the situation at the time, because I wasn't there and am not a scholar of modern Egypt. The point isn't about the Arab Spring per se - it is used as an example of when a network was forced to send messages to their subscribers. Regardless of whether the Government was right to do so, I think we can both agree that compelling speech through violence is not an ideal scenario.
- enoint 1mo ago
  I think it helps that the author was not a party to it. Those daily aphorisms are a canary indicating Vodafone is under occupation. One day, that canary changes. Maybe for good, maybe not.
tonnydourado 1mo ago
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.
LoganDark 1mo ago
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. Anything actually interesting to me is self-evident and doesn't need to be pushed.
fyredge 1mo ago
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.
- MrBuddyCasino 1mo ago
  "To rear a child and give him an education is easy, but to put a good mind into him is impossible... By teaching you will never make the bad man good." — Theognis of Megara (Elegies, lines 429–438) (quoted by both Plato in Meno and Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics) Or: "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret." ("You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will always return.") — Epistles, Book I
- michigander93 1mo ago
  What standard do we use to teach "what it means to be good"?
  - sigbottle 1mo ago
    More generally, in a system of agents, you could impose deep structure by construction on all the agents, or figure out from a set of black box agents, necessary convergence principles. Or you could treat them as black boxes, but instead of arguing intrinsically, impose external controls on the system to bound the error. Probably a lot of ways to think about it, but when you phrase it this way, it becomes quickly pretty hard!
brachkow 1mo ago
https://xkcd.com/538 https://xkcd.com/538
mofeien 1mo ago
Possible solution/mitigation: have a mandatory "sender" field? Then every inciting message can at least be attributed to the government instead of just a disembodied voice from your phone. That my help people contextualize and reflect on the content a bit.
- rzk 1mo ago
  And then the men with guns ask you to put your name in the "sender" field.
  - mofeien 1mo ago
    Then that's working as intended because the population who has never heard of me would more likely just treat a "warning of extreme threat" from John Doe as spam.
ryzvonusef 1mo ago
I'm in Pakistan, and the amount of spam I receive from the govt is absurd... random patriotic slogans ('We will never forget Kashmiri struggle!'), generic welfare messages('Let's work together for a Polio free Pakistan!'), vague warning messages('Don't use antibiotics without doctor's approval!')...it runs the whole gamut. The latest message I'm being bombarded with it a reminder not to use Whatsapp without a 'valid' sim... like wtf? Is there something should know? Whatsapp is a private org, why is govt asking me about that? But all I get is the random sms bombardment and more questions than answers.
jcarrano 1mo ago
Regarding the Egyptian messages, if you care about these things you simply avoid doing business (especially in regulated industries) in the third world. The fact is that, even before the incident with the messages, cell providers had to sit down with the "men with guns" to even be able to operate in the country.
calgoo 1mo ago
Here in spain they have been abusing the system when heavy rain is expected. The issue here in spain is that they put it at the highest level of extreme and the phones dont let you disable the alerts.
- jeffrallen 1mo ago
  So broken. Sorry for you. MeteoSwiss has an app, which sends geo-specific weather alerts, using the normal handheld notification system. You opt-in by installing it. Simple. No nonsense. I'm so lucky to have competent bureaucrats.
colinsane 1mo ago
i've watched Seattle's lightrail add more announcements over the speakers at the station and the train cars starting with "assaulting a train operator is a federal crime", and then that same message translated into 5 other languages, progressing to "as Seattle gears up to host the world's biggest stage [the world cup], remember our city's values and treat everyone with love and kindness ...". i don't leave my home without earplugs anymore. if there's no opportunity for you as a recipient to put back pressure onto whoever's making the announcements, it seems any broadcast system will just inevitably degrade. they work in smaller situations, like individual buildings and such, but if you really want a message to reach everyone in society, then tell your neighbors: person-to-person remains the only workable structure for that "last mile", so to speak.
- atx2bos 1mo ago
  denham's dentifrice...denham's dentifrice...denham's dentifrice
nirui 1mo ago
> I asked him about the incident - he talked about how they built the SMS infrastructure, what they did to secure it, how they prevented spam, and how one day armed men arrived. Maybe this confusing can be resolved if you view the authority, spammers, and "armed men" as equals. For example, you can treat them as interest groups, but with different level of power. It's a game, it's about incentives, desire, promise and payment, nothing about "do the right thing" or "for the people". Now it's the Armed Forces got the top power, so you obey them until either they get replaced, or your own power grown so you don't have to continue pretending. The rule is just that simple. And on the referenced "Civic Hygiene" article: > But! Shock horror! After creating the database, the Government loses the election and the homophobes at UKIP get in to power! Now they have a database of every gay in the village, and can harass then, try to "cure" them, or make their lives a living hell. Then, you just get cured ;) It's like a magic. Previous day you are a guy with a deeply lovely boyfriend, today you are seeking to marry the most beautiful woman available, because the cure they give you make you realized how disgusting the hairs on man's legs really are, ew! puke! Just lie, everybody can do that. Truth only belongs to people you love and love you, not the people who don't care about you, not even the neutral public. BTW: Completely off-topic here: There was an article titled "Incentives are for losers" posted few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227652. It was beautifully put together, the leftist part of me almost convinced.... But, the rest of me realized that if you look the real "successful" people out there, the rich and powerful etc, you'll found that they all succeed by chasing the right incentives. Interesting uh?
KronisLV 1mo ago
> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't. I'm pretty sure that the men with guns wouldn't be pleased at the system being so tamper proof that you can't do what they ask.
Ancapistani 1mo ago
> And then the men with guns come and tell you what to do. I'm also a man with guns. Yes, I know, you see a lot of blowhard statements like that; this isn't intended to be one of them. There are things that I am capable of doing that I will never do, and people and organizations I won't work for. Furthermore, I won't put myself in a situation if I can at all avoid it where those I love are at risk rather than just myself -- but at the end of the day, every person should already know where they draw the line, and not shy away from acting if it is crossed. The earlier you act, generally speaking, the less extreme action is required.
cpill 1mo ago
I don't know what the problem is: just make guns that can only shout baddies!

454 points by _djo_ 2mo ago

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384 Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.

esseph 2mo ago
A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.
- rglover 2mo ago
  What's the breach/link you tried to share?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ezfe 2mo ago
    You can click their profile and see it
    - ajkjk 2mo ago
      I can't see anything?
      - esseph 2mo ago
        responded above if you want to check out the link
    - AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
      In esseph's submissions, I see only one, from 2025. This does not match their "a few days ago". So, no, I can't click their profile and see it. Could you provide a link to what you see?
      - esseph 2mo ago
        It looks like somebody else posted it before it did, so when I added comments it added it to that one. Which is fine, I don't care about that, but it's CRAZY it hasn't gotten more exposure/discussion! Title: Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281251 Article: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-credentials-leaked-in-massive-supply-chain-attack/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-creden... More details: https://exposure.cloudsek.com/ai-supply-chain-incident https://exposure.cloudsek.com/ai-supply-chain-incident
- trinsic2 2mo ago
  I think one of the reasons is that it depends on the day and time you post things. I have seen submissions get nothing and the end of the day and have a better in the afternoon. And weekends seems like mornings are better.
alansaber 2mo ago
Many such cases

jameskilton 2mo ago

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.

Johnny_Bonk 2mo ago
Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.
- salynchnew 2mo ago
  It is kind of funny and sad that in the U.S. we've gone from corporations virtue-signalling to vice signalling in just a few years.
  - pjc50 1mo ago
    Having experienced vice signalling, I'm never going to complain about virtue signalling again.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

jMyles 2mo ago

> 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.

logseman 2mo ago
Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
- jMyles 2mo ago
  Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points. My presumption is that, as nation-states are deprecated, coordination between them will have to take the shape of sufficiently decentralized technology that the "networks have the ability to vet and ignore" portion becomes a local and voluntary process. And - probably an area where reasonable people disagree - it's the (real or perceived) authority that makes it possible to "be used for evil"; if there is no badge and gun, and each message (broadly considered) is to be considered on its own merits (both for its truth and its persuasiveness), then I think that corporate propaganda just lands in the 'ignore' (or even 'spam') pile.
  - throwawayffffas 2mo ago

Frieren 2mo ago

> 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)

stephbook 2mo ago
"the answer is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" Egypt explicitly rejects this.
chrismorgan 1mo ago
Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders (the Nuremberg defence, “we were only following orders”).

mlsu 2mo ago

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?

justonceokay 2mo ago
Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity. It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo ago
The patriot act expired and was never renewed.
alansaber 2mo ago
Politics has always been unserious and based in spectacle.

djoldman 2mo ago

> 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.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
protocolture 2mo ago
> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending "Before Sending" is the lynchpin here. The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources. Which requires distributed infra.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Some sort of chain... of blocks, that would require distributed consensus before the message would go out? Hmm...
  - protocolture 2mo ago

cjs_ac 2mo ago

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.

cwmoore 2mo ago
Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.
- raffael_de 2mo ago
  care to provide examples?
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    No, not really. I’m just questioning the axiomatic statement.
  - 9x39 2mo ago
    Social media exposes weakpoints in human nature - mob mentalities, comparisons of global norms over local ones. People died and many more are likely disturbed and divided. India comes to mind as some of the earliest worst-case examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings I buy into teen mental health tanking correlating with the rise of mobile social media in 2012: https://archive.is/frHnA https://archive.is/frHnA I think there's probably far more powerful but hard to describe and prove effects out there in play by connecting to a global async awareness network, but I'll leave it there.
  - bradly 1mo ago
    Jean Baudrillard wrote some really great pieces on what the proliferation of technology with things like the clocks and mirrors did to humans. I highly recommend his book The System of Objects (https://archive.org/details/systemofobjects0000baud/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/systemofobjects0000baud/mode/2up).

logifail 2mo ago

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.

alansaber 2mo ago
My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)
- johneth 1mo ago
  I'd have to agree, given the past alerts (https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts) seem to be reasonable and localised. Hopefully they take heed.
GJim 1mo ago
I'm puzzled why your entirely factual and relevant statement documenting your experience has been downvoted. Would a downvoter care to explain themselves?

hollow-moe 2mo ago

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.

trinsic2 2mo ago
This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards. I reached out to their communication department and they had a rep call me to get more information about the emails. She tried to frame it as information only emails but the messaging was clear, that were marketing vaccinations during the holidays and giving no way to opt out of it. I never heard back from them. Now we have corporations like AirBnb and Etsy sending you emails requesting reviews with no way of opting out of those communications. I had to close my accounts. I cant do that with my health provide, but you see where this is going. There is an effort to send communications without giving people a choice.
teraflop 2mo ago
Another interesting non-hypothetical example: many US states have so-called "blue alerts" which are used to send cell phone alerts whenever a police officer is attacked or injured. I used to live in Texas and blue alerts were a fairly frequent occurrence. The stated justification for blue alerts is to warn the public of dangerous criminals. But they are only issued in response to attacks on cops, regardless of the level of danger to any other people. Also, at least in Texas, they're broadcast statewide. Texas is an awfully big state, and so the alerts are guaranteed to be irrelevant and non-actionable for the vast majority of people who receive them. So it's fairly obvious to me that blue alerts are first and foremost a propaganda operation, aimed at perpetuating the stereotype that policing is a uniquely dangerous job. (It is indeed more dangerous than an average office job, but it has a much lower rate of fatal injuries than construction, or farming, or driving garbage trucks.)

JuniperMesos 2mo ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
True, but let's talk about that word "legitimate" for a minute. Let us accept that sending a text message about wildfire danger is legitimate. (I'm sure there are some here who will argue that it is not, but let's ignore them for the moment.) Sending a text message "to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country" could be legitimate use of the threat of violence to defend the country. Or it could be a horribly illegitimate abuse of power, in a much more fundamental way than a wildfire warning could ever be. So that's what bugs me about your examples. The second one is far too open to illegitimate use. And if the use is illegitimate, then the monopoly on violence is not legitimate either. (At least not within US civic philosophy: "Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and all that.)
- JuniperMesos 2mo ago
  > Sending a text message "to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country" could be legitimate use of the threat of violence to defend the country. Or it could be a horribly illegitimate abuse of power, in a much more fundamental way than a wildfire warning could ever be. Yeah, you have to basically decide which side you support more, the Mubarak regime or the rebels, in order to then decide whether you approve or disapprove of the mass text message.

laughing_man 2mo ago

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.

conception 2mo ago
And drones.
xpct 2mo ago
I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Precisely, modern multimodal LLMs are a breakthrough in ultra high volume data processing, for all their flaws
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  I asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering susceptibility, likely scenarios. It got to the point it started digging into open source projects I made when I was a teenager and started making eerily accurate inferences about my childhood. I can't even imagine what the NSAs and CIAs of the world are capable of with their limitless black budgets. Anthropic only balked at domestic surveillance, it had zero objections towards allowing the US government to surveil foreign persons like me.
  - xpct 1mo ago

tonymet 2mo ago

no amount of rules will correct for bad people

petermcneeley 2mo ago
It is strange how few understand this. Its as they think that what is required is the right structure or set of rules. They probably dont know that most countries have the exact same political structures with radically different outcomes.
- tonymet 1mo ago
  “If only we could create a realtime propaganda, command and control system with a user manual that says no bad person should ever use this for ill intent”.

asaucerful 2mo ago

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?

paulv 2mo ago
I think the thought is that if they kill one guy who didn't vote for them, the rest of the guys who didn't vote for them will fall in line. They'd rather waste a bullet than lose institutional knowledge.

raincole 2mo ago

> 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.

jackmott42 2mo ago
[flagged]
alansaber 2mo ago
Seems logical that the best way to uphold a moral society is for everyone to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions

skybrian 2mo ago

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

decimalenough 2mo ago

> 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.

doubletwoyou 2mo ago
One can only hope the government has some klaxons stashed away. Side note: isn’t it crazy how Seoul is so close to the border that you can see North Korea on a clear sunny day? And the aforementioned traditional artillery-ableness of it all because of that?
alansaber 2mo ago
Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.
hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago
> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests
- nerdsniper 2mo ago
  I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote parts of Texas, so people who were over 700 miles / 1.1 megameter / 12 hour drive away all got the notification at 4AM. The only option Texans had would have been to disable all alerts entirely, because this was an "EXTREME" level alert. https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notification/ https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notificat...

excalibur 2mo ago

> 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.)

aidenn0 2mo ago

> 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...

ruifjfj274 2mo ago

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

fragmede 2mo ago

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?

Banou 2mo ago

> 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.

madaxe_again 2mo ago
I’d go further, and predefine the available messages and bake them in - $place is {under attack|on fire|underwater|beset by the whooping palsy} etc. - and then the decentralised send no longer needs distribution of a message, just an ID and enumerated metadata, like location. Then the men with guns come and you can earnestly say “well guys, i know you want to declare the eternal republic of Basingstoke, but all I can do is send a warning about a tornado in Slough, is that close enough?”
- voidUpdate 2mo ago
  That works until you have a sudden and unexpected situation such as "There is an epidemic of black death, please remain indoors" which you didn't account for, and now you have to tell everyone that the country has been beset by the whooping palsy instead and hope the intent comes through
century19 2mo ago
I think that is right and with the way Ukraine and Iran is going, we will need smaller decentralised data centres etc too. Its coming from a sad, bad place but it may be better and more democratic, less centralised.

niemandhier 2mo ago

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.

Muromec 2mo ago
Most of the time there is exactly one corporation that is above the law in a given area simply as a result of them having the guns.
- madaxe_again 2mo ago
  Yeah, but they’re allowed to use the guns and have a monopoly on their legal use, because they have the guns. Shut up, it’s not a tautology.
gib444 2mo ago
Right. They are the law - they help write them

petterroea 2mo ago

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.

thinking_cactus 2mo ago

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."

Muromec 2mo ago
Men with guns from the /other/ country rejected this design already.

Muromec 2mo ago

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

eviks 2mo ago

> 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"

gorgoiler 2mo ago

”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.

gcr 1mo ago
That ignores the men with guns, who would probably say that their alert is very important. Take a look at the article. The issue is more complex.

gib444 2mo ago

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

blitzar 2mo ago
They will then blame the government for their house burning down after they let off a bunch of fireworks inside. The dailymail will join their campaign to seek justice for the victims.

red_admiral 2mo ago

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

solatic 2mo ago

> 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.

lins1909 1mo ago
Can't believe it's 2026 and people still believe this nonsense about technology being neutral.

red_admiral 2mo ago

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.

GJim 1mo ago
> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me It most certainly was NOT OK. By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving). By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed. The net result of this is, like most people I know, ALL such alerts are now switched off on my phone. Thus, if Putin does decide to push the button, I'll probably find out about it a little later then you.
- roryirvine 1mo ago
  An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that. You'd need to get the mobile operators involved to build the list of recipients and then to do the actual work of pushing the message out. Normal SMS is point to point, so a message needs to be sent to each subscriber individually which is a huge job at population-level scale. It makes more sense to use the existing cell broadcast alert infrastructure which has been planned for exactly this type of use case and has been thoroughly tested. A more reasonable complaint might be that it wasn't geofenced to only the drought-hit areas, but that would only have excluded something like a quarter of the population.
  - pm215 1mo ago
    I think it's reasonable to complain that the system doesn't have an "important but not urgent" message category (which might e.g. have the same "window pops up that you have to dismiss" UI but trigger whatever your usual text-message notification sound/vibration is rather than the VERY LOUD siren). And given that the system does not have that "important but not urgent" category it's also reasonable to complain when the government uses the "urgent" notification system for something that is not urgent. It caused me to turn off "severe" alerts (leaving "emergency" enabled).

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

avadodin 1mo ago

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.

Ntrails 1mo ago

> 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.

midtake 1mo ago

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.

edent 1mo ago
The author (hello) doesn't really have an opinion about Egypt and the situation in 2011. Regarding attribution. As you can see from the linked images, the messages all have the sender "Vodafone". While they may genuinely be from the armed forces, the reader has no way to verify that. If you received a message saying "The armed forces requires you to pet a cat today" would you immediately believe it was from the army? Regarding the government's unpopularity. I think you might be inferring something I didn't imply. All I've done is link to contemporary news stories and quote from press releases. I haven't expressed any thoughts on the situation at the time, because I wasn't there and am not a scholar of modern Egypt. The point isn't about the Arab Spring per se - it is used as an example of when a network was forced to send messages to their subscribers. Regardless of whether the Government was right to do so, I think we can both agree that compelling speech through violence is not an ideal scenario.
enoint 1mo ago
I think it helps that the author was not a party to it. Those daily aphorisms are a canary indicating Vodafone is under occupation. One day, that canary changes. Maybe for good, maybe not.

tonnydourado 1mo ago

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.

LoganDark 1mo ago

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. Anything actually interesting to me is self-evident and doesn't need to be pushed.

fyredge 1mo ago

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.

MrBuddyCasino 1mo ago
"To rear a child and give him an education is easy, but to put a good mind into him is impossible... By teaching you will never make the bad man good." — Theognis of Megara (Elegies, lines 429–438) (quoted by both Plato in Meno and Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics) Or: "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret." ("You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will always return.") — Epistles, Book I
michigander93 1mo ago
What standard do we use to teach "what it means to be good"?
- sigbottle 1mo ago
  More generally, in a system of agents, you could impose deep structure by construction on all the agents, or figure out from a set of black box agents, necessary convergence principles. Or you could treat them as black boxes, but instead of arguing intrinsically, impose external controls on the system to bound the error. Probably a lot of ways to think about it, but when you phrase it this way, it becomes quickly pretty hard!

brachkow 1mo ago

https://xkcd.com/538 https://xkcd.com/538

mofeien 1mo ago

Possible solution/mitigation: have a mandatory "sender" field? Then every inciting message can at least be attributed to the government instead of just a disembodied voice from your phone. That my help people contextualize and reflect on the content a bit.

rzk 1mo ago
And then the men with guns ask you to put your name in the "sender" field.
- mofeien 1mo ago
  Then that's working as intended because the population who has never heard of me would more likely just treat a "warning of extreme threat" from John Doe as spam.

ryzvonusef 1mo ago

I'm in Pakistan, and the amount of spam I receive from the govt is absurd... random patriotic slogans ('We will never forget Kashmiri struggle!'), generic welfare messages('Let's work together for a Polio free Pakistan!'), vague warning messages('Don't use antibiotics without doctor's approval!')...it runs the whole gamut. The latest message I'm being bombarded with it a reminder not to use Whatsapp without a 'valid' sim... like wtf? Is there something should know? Whatsapp is a private org, why is govt asking me about that? But all I get is the random sms bombardment and more questions than answers.

jcarrano 1mo ago

Regarding the Egyptian messages, if you care about these things you simply avoid doing business (especially in regulated industries) in the third world. The fact is that, even before the incident with the messages, cell providers had to sit down with the "men with guns" to even be able to operate in the country.

calgoo 1mo ago

Here in spain they have been abusing the system when heavy rain is expected. The issue here in spain is that they put it at the highest level of extreme and the phones dont let you disable the alerts.

jeffrallen 1mo ago
So broken. Sorry for you. MeteoSwiss has an app, which sends geo-specific weather alerts, using the normal handheld notification system. You opt-in by installing it. Simple. No nonsense. I'm so lucky to have competent bureaucrats.

colinsane 1mo ago

i've watched Seattle's lightrail add more announcements over the speakers at the station and the train cars starting with "assaulting a train operator is a federal crime", and then that same message translated into 5 other languages, progressing to "as Seattle gears up to host the world's biggest stage [the world cup], remember our city's values and treat everyone with love and kindness ...". i don't leave my home without earplugs anymore. if there's no opportunity for you as a recipient to put back pressure onto whoever's making the announcements, it seems any broadcast system will just inevitably degrade. they work in smaller situations, like individual buildings and such, but if you really want a message to reach everyone in society, then tell your neighbors: person-to-person remains the only workable structure for that "last mile", so to speak.

atx2bos 1mo ago
denham's dentifrice...denham's dentifrice...denham's dentifrice

nirui 1mo ago

> I asked him about the incident - he talked about how they built the SMS infrastructure, what they did to secure it, how they prevented spam, and how one day armed men arrived. Maybe this confusing can be resolved if you view the authority, spammers, and "armed men" as equals. For example, you can treat them as interest groups, but with different level of power. It's a game, it's about incentives, desire, promise and payment, nothing about "do the right thing" or "for the people". Now it's the Armed Forces got the top power, so you obey them until either they get replaced, or your own power grown so you don't have to continue pretending. The rule is just that simple. And on the referenced "Civic Hygiene" article: > But! Shock horror! After creating the database, the Government loses the election and the homophobes at UKIP get in to power! Now they have a database of every gay in the village, and can harass then, try to "cure" them, or make their lives a living hell. Then, you just get cured ;) It's like a magic. Previous day you are a guy with a deeply lovely boyfriend, today you are seeking to marry the most beautiful woman available, because the cure they give you make you realized how disgusting the hairs on man's legs really are, ew! puke! Just lie, everybody can do that. Truth only belongs to people you love and love you, not the people who don't care about you, not even the neutral public. BTW: Completely off-topic here: There was an article titled "Incentives are for losers" posted few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227652. It was beautifully put together, the leftist part of me almost convinced.... But, the rest of me realized that if you look the real "successful" people out there, the rich and powerful etc, you'll found that they all succeed by chasing the right incentives. Interesting uh?

KronisLV 1mo ago

> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't. I'm pretty sure that the men with guns wouldn't be pleased at the system being so tamper proof that you can't do what they ask.

Ancapistani 1mo ago

> And then the men with guns come and tell you what to do. I'm also a man with guns. Yes, I know, you see a lot of blowhard statements like that; this isn't intended to be one of them. There are things that I am capable of doing that I will never do, and people and organizations I won't work for. Furthermore, I won't put myself in a situation if I can at all avoid it where those I love are at risk rather than just myself -- but at the end of the day, every person should already know where they draw the line, and not shy away from acting if it is crossed. The earlier you act, generally speaking, the less extreme action is required.

cpill 1mo ago

I don't know what the problem is: just make guns that can only shout baddies!