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Android Phones in Iran Were Hit With False Earthquake Alerts Amidst Ongoing Nationwide Protests

On Wednesday, as Iran continued to deal with widespread protests, false earthquake notifications went off on Android handsets. The official explanations for what transpired were inconsistent. According to Iranian state media, the bogus notice was received by just Android phones, according to Colonel Ramin Pashaei, deputy commander of Iran’s cyber police. The notice was the result of testing, he said, at Iran Mobile Communications, a state-owned telecom.

The state-run IRNA news agency in Iran, however, called the incident a cyberattack and warned its readers to stay inside. Both versions of the event were incorrect and neither could be resolved quickly. 

Since the death of a lady named Mahsa Amini, 22, on September 16 after she was detained by the country’s moral police, Iran has been the target of a string of hacking. The months of unrest that followed her death have been one of the biggest challenges Tehran has confronted since the turbulent years following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. 

Google announced the release of its earthquake detection feature for Android phones in 2020; the feature would use smartphones to collect data that would eventually provide billions of users with crucial seconds of advance notice when a tremor was sensed nearby, notifies them to the potential of an earthquake. 

Land-based sensors were already being used to warn people in places like Japan & Mexico of possible earthquakes before California did. By receiving these warnings, those who are far from the epicenter of an earthquake will have time to relocate to a secure area. 

Because many people in earthquake-prone parts of the world do not have accessibility to the kinds of sensors being used to detect tremors, the earthquake detection feature may help these alerts reach more people everywhere.

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