NPR Labs plans to work with manufacturers to develop “text-based radio receivers,” which will be used in a pilot project aimed at delivering radio emergency alerts to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. The project “concentrates on reaching deaf and hard-of-hearing populations through new implementations of conventional FM broadcasts,” said Rich Rarey, manager of strategic technology applications at NPR Labs. NPR Labs was awarded a contract from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop the project. It will be funded by FEMA for more than $360,000, and it’s contracted for one year, Rarey said in an email. The pilot effort will target people in the Gulf Coast and deliver alerts through local public radio stations and the Public Radio Satellite System, NPR said in a press release (http://n.pr/13kSdjZ). The deaf and hard-of-hearing volunteers “will be alerted to the message by a flashing indicator on their radios or a bed-shaker triggered by their radios, to ensure the message is received day and night,” NPR said. NPR Labs is in the process of refining requests for proposals for the receivers, Rarey said. The public radio organization said it will work with DHS and FEMA to identify 25 public radio stations in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas to participate in the pilot. Some stations have already expressed interest in participating, Rarey said. Mississippi Public Broadcasting in Jackson said it’s excited about the opportunity “to expand the emergency broadcast services MPB provides to Mississippians.” The program “complements the work we are already doing and we are pleased to have another method for helping Mississippians during times of disaster,” MPB Executive Director Ronnie Agnew said in an email. NPR Labs plans to select participating stations by the end of March, Rarey said.
It’s too early to say whether “graduated response” mechanisms are better for fighting copyright violations than regulation, speakers said Wednesday at a panel at the UNESCO First World Summit on the Information Society+10 review meeting in Paris. Speakers representing ISPs, access advocates, the World Wide Web Consortium and the U.S. government disagreed on the necessity for, and potential benefits of, industry self-regulation against digital infringement, but all agreed any solution must involve all stakeholders, be subject to the rule of law, be transparent and accountable, and respect the Internet’s openness and architecture.
Partners in the mobile emergency alert system effort are nearing the end of the technology standardization process and moving toward commercialization of the equipment and implementation of the system, said Harris Broadcast, Mobile500 Alliance and other partners. Commercial and noncommercial broadcasters have demonstrated the technology and are planning to take it up, they said. The effort began as a pilot project headed by PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting aimed at distributing emergency alerts to the public using video, text messages and other media (CD June 6 p11). Mobile EAS uses the mobile DTV equipment infrastructure.
The FCC issued a $4,800 forfeiture order against North County Broadcasting Corp., the licensee of KFSD-AM in Escondido, Calif., for Emergency Alert System (EAS) equipment violations, an order from the Enforcement Bureau said (http://bit.ly/15iwnN9). Following an investigation, the station acknowledged its EAS equipment was not functioning properly between December 2009 and April 2010, the order said.
"The highly automated nature of” the emergency alert system “was demonstrated yet again” last week when EAS warnings at several TV stations were triggered without authorization and hoax alerts about zombies were broadcast through the common alerting protocol (CAP) format, an industry lawyer said. The “downside” of EAS’s automation has been shown before by unintended alerts such as by ads that included tones that triggered the system’s activation, Scott Flick wrote Thursday on the Pillsbury law firm’s blog (http://bit.ly/VVSNCa). “While the automatic nature of EAS creates the risk of false alerts propagating rapidly, at least the false alerts up until now were somewhat self-inflicted wounds, caused by either the system being erroneously activated by a governmental mistake, or by an EAS Participant accidentally airing an activation code contained in third-party content. Because of the closed nature of the system, false activations necessarily required a mistake from a participant.” That changed as “the backbone of the EAS system was moved not long ago from the closed network model to an Internet-based system,” which triggered the fake alerts this time (CD Feb 14 p8), Flick wrote. “The benefit is that mobile and other devices connected to the Internet will be able to relay alerts to the public automatically. ... The bad news, however, is that by shifting to an Internet backbone, we have opened the public alert system to the same outside forces that plague every other aspect of the Internet.” The “good news” of the “unsettling” hoax is that it uncovered security issues “in the system that can be fixed” by resetting factory-set passwords on CAP equipment, the New Jersey Broadcasters Association wrote members Friday in its weekly newsletter (http://bit.ly/Yw1mi6).
The FCC required emergency alert system participants to immediately bar unauthorized use of common alerting protocol-triggered EAS alerts to radio and TV stations and subscription-video providers via the Internet, broadcast industry officials said. They said Tuesday’s FCC advisory came after some stations in Michigan and maybe Montana, too, aired a bogus alert about zombies when their CAP systems had security breached, from what appear to be non-U.S. Internet Protocol addresses. CAP isn’t yet being relied on by federal or state agencies to distribute warnings about bad weather and other hazards, since they also transmit those announcements by broadcasts. All EAS participants are required to be able to get the alerts in that format from a Federal Emergency Management Agency website (CD Sept 17 p6), and industry officials said the unauthorized access is a reminder to take security precautions that the affected stations apparently didn’t.
Preparation for Superstorm Sandy’s landfall was key to New York-area broadcasters’ efforts to disseminate news and information to the public, said executives from Clear Channel Media and WABC during the FCC’s second hearing Tuesday on the storm’s communications impact. Others testified how Google and Twitter helped to fill the void left by outages in the area’s wireless and wireline communications networks.
NAB attorneys told officials from the FCC’s Media and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureaus that existing text-to-speech technology is problematic for creating audio versions of on-screen emergency information that can be heard by the blind and sight impaired, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bodd2x). On-screen emergency information crawls may originate from a variety of sources at a station, such as the newsroom, master control, weather center or its emergency alert system equipment, the notice said. “While text-to-speech technology and software is available, there is currently no methodology for interfacing the output of the graphics equipment” that creates the on-screen crawl to the text-to-speech equipment, it said. “Thus, we urge the commission to refrain from requiring or precluding any technology for audio transcription,” it said.
The FCC proposed fining a Puerto Rico FM station $8,000 because its emergency alert system gear couldn’t automatically interrupt programming with EAS messages and the station isn’t staffed 24 hours a day, said an Enforcement Bureau notice of apparent liability to WVID Anasco. The NAL gave licensee Centro Colegial Cristiano Inc. 30 days to provide the agency with a sworn statement that the system is working (http://xrl.us/bocbev).
The FCC Public Safety Bureau report on June’s derecho wind storm, which knocked out phone service for 3.6 million people in the mid-Atlantic and beyond -- many unable to reach 911 for several hours -- made demands of telcos among its recommendations. The Public Safety Bureau released the 56-page document Thursday after starting an investigation in July (CD July 20 p5). Four 911 centers in northern Virginia lost 911 access completely, prompting a close look at Verizon’s role and backup power generator failures there. FCC recommendations include provisions on backup power and audits and preface a rulemaking notice intended to strengthen emergency communications.