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Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

nytimes.com

131–140 of 409 posts

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#131

An interesting Reddit comment described a chaotic traffic situation for 20 minutes (people running lights, wrong-side-of-the-road driving, extreme speed, etc.). Human nature in these moments is very “Tragedy of the Commons” apparently.

Link?

Would also like to read this.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#132

So it took 38 minutes to send out a new message informing this was a false alert. How is that possible if this was simply a human error during a "shift change"? You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again?

> You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again? Absolutely not. Once you say “fire” you need official confirmation to say “no fire”. That means certification from the military. The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance could easily introduce delays. In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, f…

If you're engaged in a drill that's a completely predictable failure mode which you should have a standby plan for.

This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home.

Again, why would you perform a drill involving mass emergency mobilization and not manage that risk? What if this had happened during a morning commute or in some part of the country where people are more easily panicked?

With great power comes great responsibility, remember?

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#133

So either this was a security breach, a human mistake or a psyops/test on a small isolated American population. In the first case, we'll probably only be told about it if they actually make an arrest and the system is patched. The second is an interesting case, we'll come back to. The final one: it was intentional and used to track what happened on the islands, and to also watch that information propagate back to the…

I'll go right ahead and call you a conspiracy theorist. If you think The US intelligence community would go out of their way to stir up a panic like this just because CoIntelPro was a thing 50 years ago, with no other evidence or reasonable motives, you must be a UFO chasing loon. If there is anything nefarious here (seems like it), this is the work of a foreign state actor probing our infrastructure for exploitable…

You've got some fake news in your citations, "bro."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/the-v...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-ne...

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#135

An interesting Reddit comment described a chaotic traffic situation for 20 minutes (people running lights, wrong-side-of-the-road driving, extreme speed, etc.). Human nature in these moments is very “Tragedy of the Commons” apparently.

Just recently I spoke to my friends that literally are living in LaLa land. They are making fun of me prepping and saving dry food, water, stacking up on legal guns and munition. I took upon challenge last xmas to meetup with them and they brought my prepardness as one of laughing subjects. It really saddens me when they believe that when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting rules that has been put in greatest part by bodies of virtual government. They laugh when I tell them the history proved the nicest kind of people turn into murders and cannibals when its their turn to die of starving.. or eat someone and survive. This example of maddnes on Hawain streets proves me I am right in my theory :(

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#136

If I were going to erode public trust in emergency broadcast systems in order to increase the amount of damage I would do by launching an actual missile, this is how I would do it. A series of false alarms. A similar, if obviously much smaller and less disastrous example, happens at my apartment about 4 times a week: the fire alarms for entire floors of my apartment building are easily triggered by people smoking in…

A ballistic missile heading for Hawaii would be nuclear, the amount of additional loss of life that would incur from “damaging the public’s trust” in the early warning system would be pretty much negligible if the missile hits any major population center. This is basically not an issue for nuclear missiles for something more like to the situation in southern Israel with conventional unguided munitions blindly shot at their general direction it might work but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pranksters=/=Russia.

I didn't say otherwise. I implied that if pranksters can pull off a hack it is likely that Russia also can.

So why implicate Russia at all, if its so easy? Sounds like a red herring to me, and also just as conspiratorial as the parent comment.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#138
post #86

I've read that it was a human error when someone pushed the wrong button. I feel bad for that person.

I'm sure the UI looked like this: [clear] [send and cause panic in 1.4 million people]

But it was on a Windows CE device with a resistive screen and the user lost the stylus.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#139

Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."

A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.

Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

#140

Not to sound crude but if a nuclear bomb what can people on an island really do?

Hawaii is huge and has a large mountain. You could get far enough away from a atomic bomb fairy easily. H-Bombs are a different story, but even then you would expect some survivors.
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