Re: Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

[Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>]

On 3/11/19 6:57 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 6:25 PM Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com 
> <mailto:mike () mtcc com>> wrote:
> > This entire thing strikes me as a horrible layering violation. Why on
> > earth should alerts be required to dogleg through content providers?
> >
> > It seems to me that it would be much better to use the standards we
> > already have to deliver text, voice and video, and just make it a
> > requirement that some list of devices must be able to listen for these
> > announcements and act accordingly.
>
> Hi Mike,
>
> What;'s the plan then? Establish a multicast path throughout my 
> backbone for the emergency alert messages and pray none of them loop 
> back in to my system to create a storm? If my $30 home firewall 
> receives a multicast message on the proper port it should rebroadcast 
> it inside? What could go wrong!
>
> Wide area multicast sucks dude. That's why we have video dogleg its 
> way through content delivery networks in the first place.

While multicast would be advantageous, it's hardly required. Brute force 
and ignorance (= unicast) would work too.

And yeah, maybe you need to alert all of the "viewable" devices unless 
you have some way of detecting what I'm paying attention to.

Mike