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my belief that "maybe running my own build of android daily isn't the absolute best idea" has evaporated within one millisecond of inserting my SIM card and discovering the amount of spam my carrier sends via SIM toolkit, which you can't normally disable or stop from being modal

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What the hell even the US carriers don't do this shit

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EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE ENDS UP AS A MODAL DIALOG I HAVE TO DISMISS BY CAREFULLY CLICKING "CANCEL" WHEN IT APPEARS ON TOP OF WHATEVER IT IS I AM ACTUALLY DOING i'm sorry for shouting this is just an extremely aggravating dark pattern

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Related: in Canada, our government marks every emergency alert as a presidential alert. That means they can't be disabled without an illegal build of the OS. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert_Rea It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't issue follow-up alerts about the same things at 3am-6am.

en.wikipedia.org

Alert Ready - Wikipedia

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it's actually illegal to *build* and install such an OS? not *distribute*? is your government insane?

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I'm not sure if simply using it would be illegal. Simply building it wouldn't be an issue. I wish they would just use the alert levels designed in the US instead of everything being a presidential alert. It really bothers me, especially since it goes off on more than one phone.

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So, what generally happens is two parents have some kind of nasty custody battle and one takes the child with them. The other files a police report. The police send out an alert with basic information, then update it 2-3 times with more information sometimes after they're found.

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This is done via a system that makes a loud, sudden siren noise and cannot be disabled. You have to interact with the alert to make it stop. If you have multiple phones, across all of them. I don't think it currently works without a SIM card but maybe it will in the future.

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I've never had a blg problem with amber alerts in the US but I've also never really lived in a major metro area. My impression is people who do often do turn them off.

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I live in Toronto, and since they send them as presidential alerts we can't turn them off. They don't send them out for the vast majority of missing children cases. Turning off the amber alerts warnings doesn't do anything since they don't send them as amber alerts like the US.

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I'm sure amber alerts are presented in a much more reasonable way in the US. In Canada, they're being presented as if there's an incoming nuclear attack. There's a history of the controversies here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert_Rea Note how many are from where I live (Toronto, Ontario).

en.wikipedia.org

Alert Ready - Wikipedia

8:33 PM · Sep 21, 2020Twitter Web App

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If they were sending amber alerts properly, I don't think the system is designed to wake people up and scare them. In the US, they're also not sending out extra alerts in French (12th most common 1st language in Toronto: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph) or to provide unimportant updates.

en.wikipedia.org

Demographics of Toronto - Wikipedia