Alright, I changed my mind about the porn and the boobies, however righteous that somewhat convoluted logic might have seemed in the moment. I did get some boobies up on one of the LinkNYC kiosks just for bragging rights and to make some people laugh, but I’m not doing that again. It’s just… icky to leave porn lying around like that. I also think the kiosks’ reputation for having been conduits for “widespread” consumption of porn was vastly overblown, with absolutely no evidence I could find to back up the claim. It made for a damn good headline.
Other than backtracking on the porn heroics this was a strange and intriguing afternoon on the Links, the likes of which I haven’t had in a long time. I am, most certainly, the only person alive who has figured out how to get video and general web content onto those screens and keep it there. That last bit is important because there is a timeout function on the kiosks, a function I found a way to override. The kiosks cannot be made to play all video but it will play some. I got one of them to play The World According To Garp video I posted the other night but that was about it. I think it depends how the video is embedded into the page. There are content filters in play here but I do not understand how they are supposed to work. The filters are clearly trying to do something, but whatever they are trying to do they are not doing it well. All images on flaneur.nyc are blocked but audio and video are not. Nothing is blocked on sorabji.com but images are blocked on the payphone site. It will also play some but not all audio, though I could not find a way to make that audio loud enough to be audible.
It’s funny how the filters block YouTube and Facebook but not lesser known sites like mine. I guess they were not intending to block lewd content so much as streaming, to stop people from camping out at the terminals.
I left my poetry and scans of my receipts on some of the screens, deciding in the end that animated gifs might be the ace way to go with this.
This mind is just reeling today, like I just came back to life, not that I’d been slumbering these days. It really is like those teenage days phreaking the voicemail systems (before knowing that “phreak” was even a word). The circumstances that led me to this discovery are very similar to the serendipity that led me to the voicemail shenanigans. I thought there might something waiting for me but I did not know what I was getting into when I hit the pound button on the payphone that portentous day. Similarly I had a hunch about what I found today but had no idea what might come of it. I don’t think there is any way this could lead to any kind of consequence like The Case did. It’s just good fun.
If I had a deeper tech knowledge I could probably find ways to make web pages with crazy Javascript that could manipulate the web browser. But, well, that’s a little too deep into the jungle for my risk tolerance, and my intentions are not to hack these kiosks into submission. I would not even know how to do that.
Here are some pictures of what I got onto the screens today. I recognize that getting stuff like this onto LinkNYC screens might not be as amazing to others as it is to me, but to me, on this day at least, this is a breakthrough.
