This could potentially and unfortunately be popular with illegal landlords Airbnb hosts.
Those free thermostats in exchange for the power company being able to lock it on high use days tend to be popular with landlords. Renter or visitor goes to turn down the temp and then finds out they can’t.
Regardless of whether or not it’s proscribed in the ToS I can definitely see these becoming the furnished TV in a lot of “apartment share” units.
As a sort of inb4 and slight tangent, a free smart thermostat program is a good idea if it’s smartly implemented.
The better ones automatically bump the temp up warmer on high demand days yet allow the user to override it if they manually choose to.
Milestones in TV technology:
1997: Plasma
2007: LED (light-emitting diode)
2012: OLED (organic light-emitting diode)
2023: UEOS (unblinking eye of Sauron)
I’m pretty sure that only members of the inner party are eligible to turn off the telescreen; and even they can’t be sure about the camera.
We have always been at war with rampant capitalism.
And Eastasia. Always.
Oh look, Alladvantage 2.0. So if I get a TV from them, and then it gets “stolen”, am I somehow on the hook? Is this landfill capitalism at work again?
I was thinking more bar owners. Free TV. Who even gives a crap: in “live” venues most of us are already used to being bombarded with ad messaging and/or being watched.
It would be interesting if people hack it to disable to tracking - but then would the company notice the lack of data coming in and demand $500?
We would need a ‘Speed’ style of looped faked data going in to convince the servers that it was still going (50 channels per hour haha).
the ad unit could come to life in a fun way
There is no fun way.
The last thing the camera would see on my new free TV:
‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Take that tape off the camera! I know where you are! You can’t escape the ads!’
I’ve been following this thing in some technical forums, and there’s a few important points that are being glossed over:
You have to sign a contract when you buy it which requires a minimum number of hours of on time per day for the TV so it can show ads. If you drop below this number, they charge your credit card $1000. Basically they force-sell you the TV at that point. The legality of this is dubious at best.
The TV has an unknown (but >2) number of microphones and cameras in it. It will be harvesting data from you hard.
It has tamper detection mechanisms built in that trip clause #1
They don’t care if you cover the little ads screen because they are getting paid for impressions from their ad verticals either way. No different than holding your hand over the banner ads in a mobile game.
The structure of all this is because they are selling the ad space on the TV and have to guarantee a specific number of impressions to the buyers. They’re likely running it through standard Android ad marketplaces like MoPub and Vungle, since it’s an Android tablet under the hood.
Yes, I’m sure all this stuff is hackable and bypassable, but it just ain’t worth the effort and you could never be certain you didn’t miss a camera or microphone somewhere. A real TV isn’t much more money.
As the [Hackaday] writeup points out, this business model depends on the value of advertising to people who can’t find $300 to spend on a TV once a decade.
Or it would, if it were trying to make financial sense. If this is a Ponz– I mean, an investment play, then it only needs to sound plausible to people with a very high wealth-to-brain ratio. For that audience, it’s probably a good thing to reek of dotcom idiocy, as it flatters the rest of their dumbass investments.
Unkillable ad-screens for Airbnb are a grimly believable scenario, but then the pitch would be that you pay the landlord. Because, again, no one financially interesting to advertisers is going to trade a pile of star ratings to save a couple of dozen dollars per year.
I would imagine that it’s going to be incentivised more with content than with the hardware itself
You can always attack the analog loophole, but I’d bet they didn’t put very strong encryption onto the video feed
I’m pretty sure these will be hacked quickly, and I don’t mean by the possessors (I refuse to use “owner” for this. You don’t own them). At best, they’ll be showing porn and other undesired content, more likely they’ll be a botnet. As a side it might even trigger the $1000 charge, making it even worse for the person signing the contract.
