Re: Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

[Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>]

On 3/12/19 4:52 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Mar 2019, Michael Thomas wrote:
> > What's with perpetuating the thought that it needs to be in the bios? 
> > It's
> > just a normal app on a normal computer like Biff.
>
> I know, after working with network engineers in too many meetings.
>
> As I keep repeating, for smart devices (Smart TVs, Smart Speakers) 
> emergency alerts should be part of the intelligent assistant mediation 
> layer (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant). The specifics vary depending on 
> the smart device ecosystem. Its not part of the hardware bios. Its not 
> part of a third-party app. Its not part of the content stream. Most of 
> the intelligent assistant "smarts" live in a "cloud" in a bunch of 
> data centers.
>
> On classic desktop computers, i.e. linux and windows, an emergency 
> alert handler is usually implemented as a daemon or background 
> process. Desktop computers would likely use a thick-client 
> implementation. There are several vendors that sell classic desktop 
> emergency alerting products. If you've ever been inside a Department 
> of Defense facility during one of their active shooter drills, its a 
> bit insane when all the alerting systems go off.
>
> I would suggest a different UX for home users.

This seriously seems like something that needs formal standardization. 
Not the exact UI of course, but how it's transported, what the nature of 
the alert is (= prioritization), the security profile, location 
information. Jason Livingood chimed in so maybe there's something up 
that I'm just not aware of, but this strikes me as a pretty ietf-y kind 
of thing since we already had to deal with e911, calea and all of that 
for telephony... so there's some clue there.

One thing that does bug me a little are the privacy implications (ie, it 
needs to know approximately where you are). But maybe with everything 
else we do it's... yet another part of our brave new world.

Mike