Can the internet be used as an emergency broadcast system?

Factual Questions
1

My mother (a wee bit on the nervous side) has been urging me to leave the radio and/or TV on during the day so I will know immediately if I am about to drop dead of anthrax or if terrorists are heading for my house, etc. I mostly rely on the internet for news.

However, even I realize this only works if I am reading news sites, and being online won’t do me much good if I am playing Tetrinet or reading web sites about Buffalo Sabres playoff history. So I was wondering if it was possible for ISPs to be used as an emergency broadcast system. Can an ISP force your computer to open a message window in the event of an emergency?

The ethics of whether or not this is a good idea is something for GD, I believe. But is it technically possible for something like this to happen?

2

No, they can’t do exactly that but there are some half-measures that could get the message out to some people.

For example, they could re-direct all web browser requests to a single site. As soon as a user tried to access a new site that their browser hadn’t cached, they could be shown a warning message instead of what the equested site. This would require a positive action in the part of the user and would indiscriminately disrupt every single web user until the block was removed. Doable, yes, good idea, probably not.

Likewise, ISPs could send an eamil to every individual user of their service. This might or might not require a positive action on the user’s part, depending on their mail client.

The best option I see is that the major Instant Messaging providers like AOL, ICQ, MSN, etc could pop up a message on every single subscriber’s screen. There are only a handful of such providers and they’ll supposedly be interoperable someday soon. Even this wouldn’t get everybody but it would get to a large proportion of online PC users.

3

If you can open an additional window, you can keep NewsHub up. It updates news every 15 minutes. You just have to refresh/reload it: http://www.newshub.com/

4

Many major news sites such as CNN will send you breaking news alerts by email. This only works for those who request such alerts, and set up their mail program to check mail frequently, its better than nothing.

5

RealPlayer joined NBC in a venture where through Startcenter you can get notices of major events or stories as it happens (or as it is typed by MSNBC)

6

The BBC has a real time news ticker you can download and have sit on your desktop. There may be a US equivalent:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/services/ticker/default.stm

“Newsline, the BBC’s News ticker can sit anywhere on your desktop, and will automatically update throughout the day with the latest news, sport, travel, finance and weather. When you click on the headline, you’ll be taken to the full story.”

7

Certainly the Internet can be used in this manner. And there are already plans to use it to warn people of dire events.

It involves sending out a single e-mail message and telling the recipient to forward it to everyone in their address book.

8

There is no way at all to accomplish this, just as there is not on the television, the televsion requires the mass cooperation of all the broadcasters to pull it off as well. Furthermore, the internet works in a interesting way, and there are many technologies that run on top of it that each need to be addressed.

First, there is the operating system itslef, this would be the best place to attempt to implement this, and to the best of my knowledge, could be done now. Both Macintosh and windows now offer automatic notification of OS updates, this being a message the OS company puts out based on the current version you are running. So all they would have to do is just reconfigure things so that rather than “the monolith has patched a previous security hole, you should update it” poppin up, you would get the Eneergnecy message.

Next, are the many serives that run ontop of the internet.

http web browser, to the best of my knowledge, the browser itself does nothing on it’s own, it is a send recieve communication, you send a request, the computer on the other end gets it, and sends something back. So on its own, there is not much to be done about this. There are a few roundabout ways. Most browsers default to a certain page when you launch it, so it would not be too hard to get a list of all browsers default pages and put up some message at those sites, again, this would not get the whole world in one shot either. The previous idea of redirecting all traffic to one site, as posted earlier, would probably just crash the server on the other end. No amount of server farming, load balancing etc could deal with a hit that large IMO, or at least the cost of such a system would make it prohibitive for such a one time use.

The next means being email, first I want to discount the email forwarding scheme that is mentioned above. Most savy internet users know to regard forwards as fake or hoaxes, and I would not want something serious like a Emergency Broadcast Message to be confused as for it’s validity. You would also be very surprised of the sheer vastness of email servers out there, I run a few myself, and not all of them are capable of broadcasting a message to all users. Granted, AOL, yahoo, hotmail, etc, places like that certainly can, but smaller ISP’s like the local ones most use to dial into, would have a hard time doing this, and I can say for certain, several of the mail servers I run can not do such a think without taking steps to make this happen early on in the configuring of the server.

Now on to Instant Messsaging, this being the one way that is opposite of send and wait for a receive, they can indeed pump out a message at will like that. However, the infrastructure behind this is even less robust than that of webservers. I have seen AIM chat rooms as small as 50 people crash all the time, and the service is far from reliable.

The bottom line, I would not even want this to happen, too much trouble to implement a system that is used in such rareness and could be abused in such mass. As it is now, I can not jump through more than 3 sites without getting some update here or there on one site.

Also, as far as I know, every town has loud horns that sound off in the event of a emergency, or at least a neighboring town that you could hear it from, which will tell you to turn the radio or television on

9

Go to the dictionary and look up the word “joke.”

10

I disagree that it’s even doable. Redirecting web traffic would require a near-immediate change to hundreds of thousands of routing tables. Changes in the root servers take hours if not days to propogate through the system, so in order to do it quickly, every single DNS server would have to alter their routing table. We can’t even get most of them to patch their software on a routine basis, so getting immediate response is out of the question. You might as well ask every website admin to change their homepage right now.

Another issue is the slashdot effect on the server you want to redirect to. There’s not a server farm in the world that can handle a significant portion of the load on the web. Even if you could modify the routing to redirect requests, you’d immediately crash the server you redirect to. Just consider how many people were unable to access online news on CNN or MSNBC immediately following the 9/11 attacks. It’s possible a distributed system like Akamai’s could be used to handle the load, but there would be a lot of technical details to work out, and it would be tremendously expensive to maintain as a standby system.

There are plenty of ways you could handle an emergency broadcast system. There are broadcast protocols that distribute the load by having nodes forward to other nodes instead of sending each node receive directly from the server. There are also a number of ways to handle streaming data and server push. However, each of these cases requires a proactive step by the user to “opt in” to the system.

If you want to hijack existing web traffic, one practical scheme might be to solicit the cooperation of the handful of sites that account for the bulk of all traffic. It’s been demonstrated that a very few sites account for most traffic and, in addition, these few sites form a central bottleneck on other traffic meaning that most other sites tend to link to these central sites more often than they link to one another. If these central sites cooperate in a system to display emergency information on their own site, you might overcome the problems with a universal redirect: the server/bandwidth problem is solved by distributing the traffic across many servers that were already handling the load, and the redirect issue is alleviated by only requiring the cooperation of a few very professional admins rather than every DNS server in the world. Granted, this doesn’t redirect all traffic, but it would serve to alert a large portion of surfers.