: Later today (July 27) 2:pm nsw time the government will issue what is called aus alert which means every phone in Australia will have an alarm at the exact same time. If you are someone that uses a safety phone it is best to turn it off for 24 hours. I would also recommend avoiding traffic or any situation that could cause danger to the governments poorly planned aus alert. I hope this does not cause to much chaos.
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poorly planned
Have you been living under a rock? This messaging about the AusAlert test has been going on for a solid two months, on television, on radio, in printed media, and all over the internet.
The alert system utilises existing software in nearly every modern smartphone and it is used in plenty of countries around the world.
Japan uses it for earthquake alerts before the actual earthquake arrives.
States in the US use it for missing kid alerts - when they’ve just been noticed missing, right in that critical timeframe where they are easiest to find.
South Korea uses it for alerting when their North Korean neighbours are getting a bit antsy, and for other, less emergency-ish uses. When I was in South Korea during covid the local government would loudly broadcast daily infection numbers as an emergency alert, so I went into my phone’s settings and turned it off
Of course, the Australian government won’t mention how to turn it off because they want people to be aware of these alerts. But for people with hidden phones it’s very important information to know, and I dislike that no mention of the ability to silence it has been made in media.
In Android, it’s under Settings -> Safety and Emergency -> Wireless Emergency Alerts. You can turn off numerous sub-categories of emergency alerts in there.
In iPhone, it’s in Settings -> Notifications -> Government Alerts/Enhanced Safety Alerts -> Again, you can turn off any categories you deem irrelevant.
I believe people were complaining those alert settings will turn themselves back on after a short period (hour/day/week I am not sure)
My understanding is that those settings just disable priority alerts, only some custom roms will let you disable critical alerts.
It’s poorly planned because it’s essentially reaching out and giving every Australian in the country a rough jostle. Regardless of who they are, where they are, or what they’re doing. I wonder how many car crashes and other accidents or incidents this little test has caused
I’m just excited because nobody messages me 😞
Can I message them back?
I got my Presidential altert! Woo USA, USA, USA.
On second thoughts, maybe we are now officially a republic.
The voice that came through on my old tablet was clearly Madame President!
Can confirm Graphene OS does not alert with all of those settings disabled.
I was curious to find out if my phone - which is always on silent mode - would make a noise. It did.
I did not get anything :( feel left out :(((
what phone do you have?
I’ve seen some phones with this type of broadcast alert disabled by default, you need to dig through some menus to enable it, but even phones from 10 years ago should support it.
It’s definitely an old operating system issue - not on the latest.
It was very noisy in my office for a moment. And one guy did not get alert. So useful test.
Both my phone and my watch went off together, and cancelling one did not cancel the other.
That’s expected, there is no communication or smarts with this type of alert, account or profile awareness, it’s broadcast from the towers and anything that can receive it, will receive it.
I have a spare old fold3 with no sim card or esim installed and it went off too, no sim needed.
I had a look through my phones (fold7, latest OneUI/android versions, Telstra eSim) emergency alert settings this morning and found that “critical alerts” were actually disabled, so I enabled them and sure enough the alert came through as expected.
Not sure if it would have worked the same way if I hadn’t enabled that setting, but there are a lot of settings in there for different types of emergency alerts, so I suspect there are going to be a few people who’d phones support it, but the options are disabled
my bosses phone is an old google pixel 4, it worked just fine too.
