Univ. of Illinois Goes War-of-the-Worlds On Students

theodp writes "'Strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.' (Orson Welles, 1938). 'Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.' (Univ. of Illinois, 2011). An alert message sent out Thursday to 87,000 emails and cell phones warning recipients to escape from an 'active shooter' at the University of Illinois was an error, the Office of the Chief of Police confirmed. 'The alert sent today was caused by a person making a mistake,' explained an email. 'Rather than pushing the SAVE button to update the pre-scripted message, the person pushed the SUBMIT button. We are working with the provider of the Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the program to prevent this type of error.'"

Umm, 'scuse me?

[Guspaz]

But Schroyer said some students were shaken by the initial alert and criticized the university for taking about 12 minutes to send an email confirming it was false.

"That was unacceptable in my opinion," he said.

Really? 12 minutes is too slow? The thing sent out 87,000 e-mails (which takes a while no matter how big and distributed your mail system is), and the person who made the error probably didn't notice until either they got the e-mail or somebody who did told them.

I think 12 minute response time for something like this is pretty impressive.

Scary

[Mullen]

The really scary part is that we live in a society where the police have to pre-prepare texts and emails to warn students that someone is shooting up their school.

Re:Easy solution

[Belial6]

In our system the button that resets all of the application's configuration data requires that the user type in "Break this application". We have yet to have someone claim that they accidentally type the letters to spell out "Break this application".