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I feel old… It never occurred to me that not everyone in America knows what an Amber Alert is and where the name comes from.
It never dawned on me that it wasn’t a thing elsewhere until I moved and stopped having my phone screech like a banshee on occasion.
You can turn them off…I’m a monster
The way they go State-wide makes them especially annoying in places like Texas where there’s a ton of people, and the event is 400+ miles away.
The regulation needs to be fixed so that they can make them more targeted. Currently it cries wolf often enough that nobody pays any attention.
If, when appropriate, they could limit it to a county or two, that’d be a hell of a lot more useful.
It also gets used way too often in cases where it’s a 17yo running off with their boyfriend or a custodial dispute where the child isn’t in any danger but is a day late coming back from the weekend with the other parent.
You can’t turn off Canadian ones. I went to a music fest just over the border of Canada last year, and my phone would randomly go off every few hours because my phone would pick an American tower then swap back to a Canadian tower and sense me as “new to the area” or whatever. I can turn off American amber alerts.
This is on iPhone btw.
Plus not everyone here is American. I’m so thankful that here in Germany these notifications only get used for catastrophic events (which is never) or the yeary test that got postponed 3 times in a row, lol.
What’s the origin story?
It was named after a child that went missing and was later found murdered in 1996.
I disabled these alerts permenantly on my android phone. Best 15 minutes I ever spent.
But now you can’t receive useful alerts like “gry Toyt” (was a real alert that went out).
As Lord Maximus Farquaad magnanimously declared, “Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Abbreviation for “grey Toyota”?
Of course, but that’s every other car on the road… No license plate number makes this meaningless
Not even a location. Every amber alert I’ve gotten has been for towns I’ve never heard of.
Not always, had one last night that was from a town a mere 30 miles away. And due the the sparse population density here, that like an alert 2 blocks away in your big city. And it is possible I have taught one or two other children from that family in past years. Or I might not have. Hard to tell with the information available to me anymore.
Lol right, who do you think I am? Fuckin batman?
What do you think I have? Eyes and some minor consideration for children or their family?
Right? Get outta here with that nonsense
I don’t get amber alerts. They make my phone scream like the world is ending, and any interaction with device removes the message forever. So I can either stare calmly at the obnoxious noise box or stop the sound and never know what the issue was.
Yeah it’s a terrible implementation. Shouldn’t have software designed by politicians. “We need it to make a huge siren sound and makes sure people have to look at it before the siren will stop! Think of the children!”
I think an SMS message would be far more effective. If I get an Amber alert in the middle of the night, I’m not reading it, I’m just shutting it off as quickly so I can to get back to sleep. It’s not like I’m going to be going out in the middle of the night to try to find a kid that went missing a hundred miles away. An SMS wouldn’t wake me up, I’ll actually read when I get up in the morning, and there’s a chance I might be able to help because the information will still be there when I’m actually outside.
Had to look it up (my county doesn’t have them), and two things seem weird to me:
- Why is it text only? Wouldn’t adding a picture of the abducted child make it much more effective?
- Since it can take several hours for the alert to be issued, it doesn’t really require any immediate action from the people who receive it - it makes no sense to use a special emergency protocol to distribute it.
I guess there’s something to be said for everyone simultaneously getting an alert… if someone happens to be near the car they describe, get the alert and see the license plate, they’d call it in. So I guess there’s circumstances where a hard alert where everyone has to simultaneously stop and look around could be beneficial. But yeah images could be useful, and most importantly something in your SMS history (which could have images) to refer back to seems like it would be way better.
I don’t think you can opt out from a specific notification, but you can opt out. If you do you won’t get any emergency broadcast notifications, at least that’s how I think it works.
Not true for all devices. Samsung at least I can disable amber alerts while keeping emergency alerts on. Which I did after being woken up at 3am telling me to be on the lookout for a white SUV, as if I could see that from my bed.
Yeah iPhone as well can independently enable Amber, Emergency, and Public Safety Announcements.
I don’t want to opt out, I just want “let us know if you see a grey Buick” to not use the same alert sound as “nuclear attack incoming”.
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Well zero, but only because I don’t live in Hawaii
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert
Pixel 8 Pro here I can specifically opt out by alert.
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But seriously… Just how many gerbils did you think would fit before you’d need to call in an expert?
The original comment must have been great
that’s why you get a tablet to play games on and then use your phone as a communication device.
The whole point of mobile games are they are shitty little time wasters you can put on the device you have with you tho. I can’t ever imagine buying a whole other device just for something like Clash lol
well there’s no way to sandbox things on mobile a mobile OS
Wouldn’t you run into the same issue though? Clash is online only. The tablets still get amber alerts on WiFi right?
I don’t know…I don’t really use my phone for anything besides communication.
If you have no idea whether or not buying a tablet would fix this situation why did you tell people to buy a tablet? Isn’t that kind of weird?
because a tablet doesn’t have a connection to a cellular network. I thought you were one of the people asking about sandboxing apps
Nope. The one asking how this fixes his alerts issue when mobile gaming requires an internet connection which is what started all this.
TIL about Amber alert. Wth, How many children are going missing over there?
You guys don’t have anything like that? I mean it’s not really a matter of how many… Which yeah we probably have more than average… But I figured most countries had some kind of alert system to try to help track down kidnapped children
Nah we don’t,
There would be one every minute here in India
Lol fair
wdym everything on your phone is sandboxed by design, assuming you’re using android or ios
But you can’t run multiple of the same app in separate sandboxes.
android has user profiles (although most oems disable them in their custom roms), you can just create multiple users with completely separate app data.
you can also create a single Work Profile for each user (which is available and works on basically all devices).
Samsung also has a built-in sandbox feature (“Secure folder”)
There are hundreds of apps that can create a virtualized sandboxes (by running apps within themselves and hooking into api calls)
And of course apps can just be cloned by just patching them to change the app id.
can you run multiple of the same app at the same time with that configuration?
yes, with all of these approaches except user profiles.
you can run instance installed in work profile at the same time as the main app
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