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by hsbauauvhabzb 89 days ago
I live in another part of the world and have never heard of an amber alert being sent, I assumed they were for nuclear/missile events.

Condolences for the subjects, but it’s bonkers they’re used to spam people about vulnerable individuals who aren’t posing an active threat.

2 comments

There are other emergency alerts. Amber alerts are for missing people. At least AFAIK but TBH I don't really care at this point it's a poorly though out and implemented system with shitty software that I end up disabling for better or worse.

It's unfortunate because the world would presumably benefit from a properly standardized and above all globalized way of subscribing to geographically local alerts of various sorts. My local government should be able to advertise their servers via the cell towers and I should be able to add and remove subscriptions from anywhere in the world as I see fit. And above all the messages should be properly authenticated. Last I checked the system was so half baked that it was trivially vulnerable to spoofing.

It's an upper case A, Amber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_alert

I meant no disrespect to victims of awful crimes, but pointing out the capitalization seems awfully pedantic.
Read the linked wikipedia article please. It is a proper name from back in the day, not the color amber. The alert is named after a little girl called Amber. I wasn't being pedantic. I was pointing out the circumstances in which it came to be and what it's used for.