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> 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

• 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...
    • everyday7732 2mo ago
      What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.
      • khafra 2mo ago
        I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.
        • antonvs 2mo ago
          In Texas, that’s just Tuesday.
    • chasd00 2mo ago
      I live in DFW Texas, use to be when you heard the tornado sirens you hit the deck. Now they go off, not kidding, for pingpong ball hail and “high winds”. That’s basically 1 out of every 4-5 spring/summer thunderstorms.
    • CatMustard 2mo ago
      Completely unrelated to the actual content of your post, but: > megameter Completely valid SI way to represent distance, but I have never seen anyone use this in my entire life! Out of curiosity, do you live in some location or work in some industry where this is used? If so, where?
      • nerdsniper 2mo ago
        I did some intercontinental work and found it easier to say (mostly in my own head) that I was “eleven megameters” from home, rather than “seven thousand miles”. I blame my nerdiness and willingness to be slightly weird. But I do enjoy the unit very much now and I think its time might be coming!
        • CatMustard 2mo ago
  • decimalenough 2mo ago
    There are more granular controls, but the details are OS/phone specific and the selected threat level is ultimately at the discretion of the government bureaucrat pressing the SPAM button.
  • District5524 2mo ago
    There are granular controls also in SK, but the messages themselves are not granular. The grades seem to be somewhat the same as in the US, so this might be set either at the GSM standard level or the device (Silent, Extreme, Sever, issing person, Public safety, test), but the senders do not care or have no control... A translation of my last EXTREME level warning from SK (before switching everything off as most citizens do): "A tropical night advisory is currently in effect. Please take precautions for safety, such as lowering indoor temperatures, staying well-hydrated before going to sleep, and calling the elderly to check on their well being." [Daejeon Metropolitan City] It was hot during the day (33C), but not THAT hot...
• kioleanu 2mo ago
  It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones entering the country, many people have them disabled
  • pepperoni_pizza 2mo ago
    I got the bear one while on Transfăgărășan. Which is funny because the bears are totally expected there.
• imrehg 2mo ago
  Taiwan has emergency messages, though not _that_ high frequency. There the main topics involve: - earthquakes: these can arrive indeed before you even feel them (a few seconds before); they filter it to areas where it's expected to be felt, there are discussions around how sensitive to make it (how wide area it should cover) - extremely heavy rain: this was new recently, and very useful, when locally it all went cats & dogs, more than maybe I've ever seen. See an example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117058657161401667 https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117058657161401667 - military drills: the yearly "if there's an invasion drill", they had sent reminder a week before, and then at the start/end; example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117030180601973598 https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117030180601973598 - Chinese rocket launches that will fly over the island (not sure what could one do about it, and never seen anything, so maybe this is more borderline) Interestingly (for me), the headers seems to change over time. Started with "Presidential Alert", there were "Government Alert" then, now "Emergency Alert" and just "Alert". I'm not sure if there area list of these or it evolved over time...
• boomlinde 2mo ago
  I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue I've seen it during my career as a software developer, too. Heaps of alert spam that remained unread because 99% of them were useless and not indicative of a problem on our end. It's important to be careful about alerts so you know when real problems occur.
  • Muromec 2mo ago
    This also how a part of how a certain flagship got promoted to a submarine recently.
  • soco 2mo ago
    And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).
    • rithdmc 2mo ago
      I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one. (For the curious, a subscription means free delivery. The subscription costs 10 euro a month, and if you don't have a subscription, the delivery fee is around 4 euro)
      • bluefirebrand 2mo ago
        > For the curious, a subscription means free delivery It sounds like a subscription means ad-funded delivery to me though
• k__ 2mo ago
  Just a few days ago, I received one because of "the odour nuisance is no danger for the population" People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.
  • antonvs 2mo ago
    Ironically that was almost certainly false, i.e. wildfire smoke is not healthy. With the smoke from Canadian wildfires in the northeastern US, the advice on the worst days has been to stay indoors. Here’s an announcement from the New Jersey government about this: https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2026/approved/20260717a.shtml https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2026/approved/20260717a.shtml
• khafra 2mo ago
  Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.
  • bell-cot 2mo ago
    Unfortunately, you're asking for every gov't to be reliably competent. With no petty bureaucrats trying to advance their careers by getting their notices prioritized. And no politicians bowing to (say) the demands of a lightning victim's family, to have top-priority alerts sound whenever lightning might maybe-in-theory be possible within 10 or so miles.
• t-3 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. Considering most of SK's population is in Seoul, and Seoul is within range of NK artillery, wouldn't most people be aware before the notification came anyways?
  • rgblambda 2mo ago
    South Korean Intelligence and it's allies presumably have agents in the NK military who would give them advance notice.
    • t-3 2mo ago
      NK can just set up their own cell phone receiving SK alerts and know that they know and cancel the strike, making it into a boy that called wolf situation and possibly exposing agents.
      • travisjungroth 2mo ago
        Seems like a better way outcome than getting hit by artillery right now.
  • derf_ 2mo ago
    "Aware" is definitely one choice of word. The expectation in Seoul is that if the day ever does come, you will be dead before you make it out of the office building you work in. They run evacuation drills anyway, because of course they do.
    • 542354234235 2mo ago
      But artillery barrages don't delivery 100% of their payload in the first round. If your building is hit with the first round, yes you'll be dead. But there will be a second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. round coming and many people could get to better, more survivable locations, before those impacted. In the book "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" the author talks about being under artillery fire in an open area. >"To be shelled by mass artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it." It is estimated that Seoul would have 2-4 minutes of warning of an NK barrage due to the artillery shell flight time. Having 2 to 4 minutes to get anywhere other than an open area is valuable. A NK artillery barrage on Seoul would be horrific and devastating but it wouldn't kill everyone. > One early examination of the problem, by Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, finds that circa 1995 the KPA may have been capable of firing as many as 200,000 long-range rounds into South Korea on the first day of a conflict—and that even a short 3-to-5-minute artillery barrage into the Seoul metro area could cause as many as 7,500 civilian casualties—with the total fatalities rising much higher if North Korea continued the attack. An analysis from 2012 by Roger Cavazos finds that a North Korean artillery attack on Seoul could produce around 30,000 fatalities. And a recent study by researchers at RAND finds that an hour-long artillery barrage on Seoul would produce between 87,600 and 130,000 casualties, of which between 6,620 and 10,680 would be fatalities—with many more fatalities to come if the artillery bombardment continued. [0] [0] https://tnsr.org/2025/06/lost-seoul-assessing-pyongyangs-other-deterrent/ https://tnsr.org/2025/06/lost-seoul-assessing-pyongyangs-oth...
• rgblambda 2mo ago
  In the UK a few years ago, they tested the government emergency alert system, which was basically your phone turning into an air raid siren, regardless of what SMS filters you had set. I would imagine South Korea has a similar system?
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• Roark66 2mo ago
  A somewhat similar situation here in Poland. While the volumes of these messages are much, much lower (the most i ever got was one or two a week. Normally there is maybe one every month or two) they are typically about bad weather. Something like "stormy weather, be ready for electricity interruption". So of course "Armed drones have been seen in the area, don't touch any suspicious objects on the ground" message arrived I opened it on next day...
• hobo123 2mo ago
  In Germany there is the NINA warning app which filters based on region. You'll sometimes get warnings that there's is a fire somewhere, please keep windows closed, or if they found a WW2 bomb (every couple months) on a construction site. I'd say it works rather well.
• lupire 2mo ago
  SK government is solving that problem by ending the war with NK
  • cryptonector 2mo ago
    In two generations North Koreans will be able to walk over to South Korea and admire the ruins. The SK army will be non-existent at that point. Of course I am referring to SK's .7 TFR.
• rkuykendall-com 2mo ago
  In Texas, you get alerts for anything the government wants to virtue-signal about. Silver for elderly, Blue for police, Amber for children, Clear for adults, and of course Camo for veterans. If a cop is shot anywhere in the 250,000+ square miles of the state, the entire population gets woken up by the same blaring noise they use for tornados.
• cryptonector 2mo ago
  > but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Doubt.
• Perepiska 2mo ago
  Classical issue. Someone make a pipe to deliver urgent news and then effective managers starts to push their stupid spam. E.g. notification about order delivery and notification "also try this: xxx" from marketplaces in same channel.