Cell Broadcast 2023

For today the German authorities announced another war(n) message through all medias, including mobile devices via Cell Broadcast, as attached from an iPhone. My L5 kept silence and so perhaps I will never know when Germany is invaded by whomever.

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Didn’t work for me either.
Neither did I get the all-clear followup message.

That feels particularly bad, because one of the main reasons that we got cell broadcast is exactly to warn people like us who can’t have the apps.

I hope that this is ever fixable and that it’s not a baseband firmware issue.

(Is the BM818 firmware even proprietary? There seems to be a thread about it but I don’t understand whether they’re talking about a replacement firmware or the original thing.)

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You didn’t got my ironic tone of my post: I’m not keen it this.

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Interesting why you would think that, given you have no way to know.

I do.

it was kind of hard to identify your tone here, maybe think about adding some suitable smiley to amplify it next time :wink:
Back to the technical side, I can understand why some people would want it, it would probably be a good idea to implement it, I don’t know if this is some kind of one system by country, or a generic one
But if this kind of feature is added, I hope there would be a way to disable it, because I hate useless notifications, worst when it’s coming from the allowed propaganda.

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This issue seems to suggest that there should be but that it doesn’t work (yet).

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oh nice :+1:, it’s already implemented, I can see with the bm818-tool that CBS can be enabled/disabled

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I don’t think so because of the used words/phrase

war(n) message

and

when Germany is invaded.

What would be a good smiley for sarcasm?

Could have been a weather warning. Worms had a hailstorm yesterday and it is still Summer.

war(n) message : what I see here is a kind of play on words war / warn(ing), I don’t understand anything more here
when Germany is invaded. : Some people could think it’s possible for their country to be invaded, some other won’t

I’ve heard and seen crazy talk those past years, even with the craziest shit, you think it’s a joke but that person is serious

To indicate the irony, I would have probably used some of those (or variants) : :poop: or :clown_face: or :crazy_face: or :sweat_smile: or :man_facepalming: or even a :heart: (to indicate you liked the L5 keeping silence for example)

/s

is the semi-official indicator of sarcasm, occurring at the end of the sarcastic text.

I want to give all my personal information to Google. /s

Regardless though

a) it should be possible that this functionality works, and
b) it should be possible that a Librem 5 customer can disable it.

The customer should have the choice.

It wasn’t clear to me which setting in bm818-tool you are using for CBS (enabled v. disabled) but maybe it just doesn’t work at all yet so the question is academic.

I see in the bm818-tool the checkbox for enable CBS. I could enable this and ask the German authorities to re-run the war warning /s

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Those sirens were loud and clear, no need for an app or message on my L5 on the Dutch side of the border :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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That’s great! Another good reason for having the Librem5. No one can push notifications on my device without my consent. Besides I’m pretty sure that I’ll find out anyway if something’s happening.
Obviously getting the message gives you the advantage of always knowing what to do … i.e. pressing OK. /s

I don’t think it’s currently working. When I ran the bm818-tools in the terminal it says it enables, but then I keep missing alerts. Maybe it resets after the modem has been turned off (ie. phone reboot or HKS).

In the USA the alerts are usually only weather/disaster related. I missed the one for an earthquake a few weeks ago, but my wife’s phone went off just before we felt it. Luckily it was pretty mild, but if it weren’t then I would like to have those few seconds to try and get to cover.

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I would say that there is some evidence that you are correct. It would be nice for Purism to answer this definitively.

Even after a reset, it would be possible for software to re-establish the current setting i.e. if the setting is volatile on the modem. (That could leave a small window of time for losing broadcasts though - which is not really much worse than you just lose the broadcast because the modem is off the mobile network, including but not limited to because you switched the modem off.)

I’m all about personal choice.

I would probably choose to enable this (once it works) as I have not seen evidence of government misuse or the government using it for trivial or annoying purposes. In my country, it is used to warn about approaching bushfire, which is a frequent occurrence (measured across the country as a whole) and is a legitimately helpful use.

Really, your regular SMSs are pushed to your device without your consent - but it is open to you, one way or another, to have them silently dropped.

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Yes, but you can safely ignore them, while the broadcasted alarm locks the phone until you take some action. So it’s really intrusive.
You are lucky enough to live in a credible country. Here, in my opinion, the real danger is the State itself.

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Once this works on the Librem 5, it is possible that the behaviour will be different from a mainstream phone i.e. give you the choice as to how the broadcast is handled.

Once you have experience in the type of messages the government is sending out, you might even make the handling rules dependent on the content.

As an example, but I am not certain that it is being done by cell broadcast, I receive on my iPhone messages, from the carrier used by that phone, about planned mobile service outages in the area that I am travelling through. I would be happy for those messages to be filed without notification or filed with no more intrusiveness than a regular SMS.

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someone in the Netherlands could test the bm818-tool setting: we get a message like that every first monday of the month at noon.

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No, the broadcast message is less frequent. Maybe twice a year. Last time I tested with the Librem 5, but it did not work.

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