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

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.

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?

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

> 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?

Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.

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

- 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

- 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...

> 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

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.

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.

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?