Am in Berlin, heard absolutely nothing, not even a push from the NINA (emergencies) app. Is this thing on? tap tap
Berlin has no sirens anymore apparently. I also didn't hear anything.
Why though?
Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#42It just finished. Felt a bit weird actually.
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#43Correction to the article: the annual test day will be the second Thursday in September, not always the tenth. I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used. Surely many people don't have the app installed? I'd never heard of it and I've lived in this country the whole time it's been available.
> I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used
Because of utterly dumb people in charge: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/warntag-zum-ziv...
> Unger: Ja, die Niederlande zum Beispiel setzen auf dieses Cell-Broadcast-System. Wir haben davon Abstand genommen, weil die Mobilfunknetze - wie man etwa an Silvester sieht - im Fall der Fälle nicht ausreichen. Hinzu kommt ein datenschutzrechtliches Problem. Wenn man direkt die Handys ansteuert, werden auch Bewegungsdaten erfasst. Wir setzen daher auf die App...
To roughly translate: cell broadcast has a data protection problem, because directly notifying cellphones leads to movement data being recorded. Also cellphone networks don't have the capacity, as can be seen every new year's eve.
Just... what the fuck! What an utterly incompetent idiot.
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#44It just finished. Felt a bit weird actually.
Oh wow. Living in a medium-sized city in Germany (300k inhabitants), I did not recieve a single message over any channel.
What a great emergency warning system!
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#45> Air raid sirens sounded for one straight minute starting at 11 a.m., testing their tones full blast before varying the pitch of the tone. The sirens are tested in Lyon, France on the first Wednesday of every month. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary but interesting that Germany hasn’t done it in so long.
Same in Prague (first Wednesday of each month). I've been on calls for work the past couple times, people always ask me what the background noise is.
Here it's a siren, and then a spoken message (in Czech and then in English) telling people the emergency broadcast system is being tested. It goes on for a good 5 minutes.
At the start of the lockdown they blasted this [1] children's song over the broadcast system to try cheer everyone up
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#46> Air raid sirens sounded for one straight minute starting at 11 a.m., testing their tones full blast before varying the pitch of the tone. The sirens are tested in Lyon, France on the first Wednesday of every month. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary but interesting that Germany hasn’t done it in so long.
As others in this thread have noted, sirens are tested (at least) once a year locally. What makes this special is that it is a centralized test for the whole country with other channels being tested as well (TV, Radio, mobile app).
Where I live, it was rather underwhelming. I probably would not have noticed if I hadn't known about it before which may be a bad sign, to be honest.
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#47Tests like this have been conducted on smaller scale in the past, either on Landkreis (county) level or state level. Some towns even test their fire sirens once per month. What makes this newsworthy is that it is conducted "nationwide". Beside that, it's not such a special thing.
As someone who lives in The Netherlands I was kind of confused by this post as well. We have a monthly nationwide test of our emergency warning sirens and every so often the cell broadcast system is tested as well. I thought every/most countries did that?
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#48Correction to the article: the annual test day will be the second Thursday in September, not always the tenth. I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used. Surely many people don't have the app installed? I'd never heard of it and I've lived in this country the whole time it's been available.
> I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used Because of utterly dumb people in charge: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/warntag-zum-ziv... > Unger: Ja, die Niederlande zum Beispiel setzen auf dieses Cell-Broadcast-System. Wir haben davon Abstand genommen, weil die Mobilfunknetze - wie man etwa an Silvester sieht - im Fall der Fälle nicht ausreichen. Hinzu kommt ein datenschutzrechtliches Problem. W…
Feedback: this comment might have fared better if it hadn't contained completely unnecessary insults.
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all cities have a sirene. Do you have and apps like NINA or KATWARN?
You need an app? In The Netherlands they use whatever emergency warning system is built-in in iOS and Android. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743
It can't be done with an app. Those are always subject to power saving, do not disturb, etc.
Any country that doesn't use cell broadcasts is doing it wrong.
Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades
#50Am in Berlin, heard absolutely nothing, not even a push from the NINA (emergencies) app. Is this thing on? tap tap
Yeah, absolutely nothing happened. Also no cell broadcast. Yeah well, I guess Berlin doesn't really matter, it's not like it's the freaking capital or something...
There's no emergency CB system in Germany You have to install the app (which might not work anyway - of my colleagues who had it installed, at least one got no warning).