Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/10/dumb-smart-cities.html
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“156 Tornado Sirens”, ah, John Philip Sousa at his best.
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How odd that the sirens did not go off during any of Obama’s many attempts to impose UN approved Sharia law on the free citizens of Texas (and repeal the second amendment while he was at it), but they do go off now that we have a good Christian white guy running the country again. It’s almost as if those sirens aren’t actually working properly at all.
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they’re actually dogwhistles, so now that a good christian whiteguy is in office, he’s letting them rip again.
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Genius is alive and well in Texas, almost unbelievable.
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you know how terrifying these things are…
Not if you live in a small town, where the same siren goes off at least once a week to call the VFD to duty.
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I thought it was from “The Music Man”.
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Or just for testing. The tornado siren a half-mile from my house always went off every Wednesday at noon for ten minutes, sending every dog in the neighborhood into howling fits. Helpful to set your watch by.
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Doh! How correct you are.
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"equally useful for tornadoes and incoming ICBMs"
Tornadoes? Certainly.
ICBMs? You wish.
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@doctorow This happened FRIDAY night, April 7th to SATURDAY morning, April 8th.
From the Ars article:
Late Friday night and early Saturday morning, hackers set off 156 emergency sirens in and around the city of Dallas, Texas. According to The Dallas Morning News, the sirens began blaring shortly before midnight on Friday and were shut off and reactivated “more than a dozen times” before emergency workers shut the system down entirely at around 1:20am on Saturday morning, after confirming that there was no actual emergency and that it wasn’t the result of some benign malfunction.
The 1:20am timeframe agrees with my memory, although at that point I was in the “eh, they’ll figure it out I’m going to sleep anyway” mood.
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I’ve been living in Singapore for three years now. Singapore has an island-wide alarm system that is used to notify people of imminent attack.
Every Total Defence Day (February 15th, the day that Japan formalised the occupation of Singapore during the war), they fire up the civil defence system and ALL THE ALARMS GO OFF AT ONCE.
Three years; three near heart attacks. If you’ve never heard a civil defence system activate, you should count yourself lucky.
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The sirens were activated via an unencrypted radio interface.https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2017/04/10/hacker-broadcast-signal-triggered-dallas-emergency-sirens-friday-night
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The Blue Scream of Death.
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A ‘security-by-obscurity’ tactic, applied to a post-mortem, which demonstrates that they still don’t get it.
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This. Where my grandparents retired to in Wisconsin, they called it the Noon Whistle, but it only went off for a minute. Tornadoes got a two minute whistle. 
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Or daily at noon, to let you know that it’s lunchtime and that the darn thing is working OK. I’ve also lived in towns with volunteer EMS. Then multiple wails = a fire, two wails = need an ambulance, One wail = noon. So you get used to hearing it, but it’s still pretty damn loud if you’re only a hundred yards away from the thing when it goes off.
I’m sold on the truth
but does david attenborough lyre bird cook it swell
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