Thursday, July 13, 2006

A Bad Idea from Homeland Security

First, I promise that I will soon put up a personal post about the joy of my recent nuptials and my beautiful wife. Short story: Everything right now is dreamy, as she has said many times over.

Before I get to that, here's a quick post regarding the new emergency broadcast system proposed by Homeland Security. The DHS spokesman was quoted as saying, "Anything that can receive a text message will receive the alert." This just seems like a very bad idea to me. First, broadcasting that kind of warning would cause a very sharp spike in cell phone traffic, possibly (though not likely due to the small size of the message) overloading the network. And second, any bets on how long it would take before somebody hacks it?