If data provided by CityBridge is accurate (and I’m not saying it is) then it appears there has not been a single new installation or activation of a LinkNYC kiosk since August, this after as many as 100 machines a month were sprouting up on New York’s sidewalks since late December, 2015. If this stagnation of installations endures it might become mathematically impossible for CityBridge to meet its ambitious revenue goals. Not only have installations stopped but it appears the number of active kiosks has actually decreased by a dozen or so.

According to CityBridge’s LinkNYC Locations dataset the last kiosk installations were in Manhattan on August 23, with a single kiosk activated in November. The LinkNYC Kiosk Status dataset, on the other hand, puts the date of the last activated kiosk as August 2 and the last installation on August 1. Either way, assuming any of this data is more or less accurate, the timing of the apparent stagnation of new installations would seem to align with LinkNYC moving out of its manufacturing plant on 31st Avenue in Astoria over the summer. That plant has been demolished and will be replaced with an apartment building. If manufacturing of LinkNYC kiosks is expected to continue in the five boroughs then a new location for this has not been announced.

Also unannounced, and which remains intriguing as hell to me, was the switch in VOIP provider from Vonage to RingCentral. Among other surprising oddities about this change is that dialing 611 from a LinkNYC kiosk connects you to RingCentral’s customer service, where CallerID identifies you as “CityBridge, LLC”. Why this vulnerability is left up for grabs is anybody’s guess, but for now it seems that all anyone would need to manipulate or mess with the LinkNYC network’s phone call feature would be their PIN number. A rogue employee from CityBridge, or anyone who in some way is able to get that PIN, could conceivably cancel the RingCentral account or play other games with it. I would think there are safeguards in place to prevent the RingCentral account from being cancelled altogether with just a PIN but lesser forms of account management from the kiosks seems possible.

Another little detail involves the use of the eyeball icon on the phone call app. Until now the icon did nothing, and was reserved for future use to activate video phone calls. (What could possibly go wrong with allowing uncensored curbside video phone calls?) If the change in function of the eyeball icon is any indication it would seem that a future where video calls from these machines are possible might be in doubt. The eyeball icon is now used to reveal the phone number you are dialing. Voila:

It remains to be seen if LinkNYC will be once again set up to allow kids to make free phone calls to Santa. I’m also interested to see if CityBridge continues to make the bogus claim that New Yorkers can register for health insurance at the New York State of Health website using only the tablet screen on the kiosk.

The calls to Santa could be scotched because inviting children to use the kiosks would seem to violate the company’s own terms of service. According to the LinkNYC Privacy Policy “The Services are not directed toward children under 13 years of age” and anyone under 13 is “not permitted to submit any Personally Identifiable Information to CityBridge.” Leaving a voicemail for Santa would probably not be considered submitting anything to CityBridge but given the policy’s assertion that little kids shouldn’t be using “The Services” to begin with you have to ask why they encourage that to happen.

As for inviting people to use the tablets to register for health care it has to have become clear to someone at CityBridge by now that it is physically impossible to accomplish this. Even if the user interface of the New York State of Health website was not so recalcitrant to begin with – making the task of navigating it in the dead of winter with no physical keyboard through a small curbside screen all the more ludicrous – it would never have been possible to upload things like tax forms and proof of income through the tablet. It just cannot be done but the alleged ability to do so has, in years past, been singled out as some kind of bridging-the-digital-divide feature of these machines. I will be stunned if even one single individual successfully creates an account and registers for health coverage entirely through a LinkNYC kiosk.

While it appears no new kiosks have been erected since August it does look like CityBridge has been removing payphones, perhaps signaling that kiosks are coming soon to those locations. Or maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Maybe they’re just getting rid of payphones and saying to hell with them, offering no replacement, or else replacing the phones with LinkNYC kiosks that are not activated for months or even a year.

I was particularly annoyed at the recent removal of a payphone I had used regularly for one of my payphone-related projects. I encountered this orange bucket yesterday where a trusty payphone used to stand.

For years I used the phone that was here (and countless others around town) to feed content into what I’ve come to call Payphone Radio. It’s not my idea of a podcast because it’s too weird, and I prefer the live feeling of streaming formats to downloadable MP3s, making it not a podcast. Payphone Radio is a Shoutcast stream, and in substance it is what I guess you’d call a phone blog, one where almost all the calls are made through payphones.

Originally I used Pamela, a Skype add-on that tried to do everything I wanted it to but failed too often for me to rely on it. Its primary feature was that it could answer the phone and record voicemails then automatically upload them to a website or FTP drop. But for one reason or another this often did not work, and my correspondence with their customer service was uninspiring. Pamela software proved useful in other ways but not in the primary function I had in mind for it.

Other options, available at one time or other at least, included Tumblr’s Dial-A-Post and similar functions at WordPress.com and Livejournal. But I wanted everything hosted on my servers, and it looks like the Tumblr and Livejournal voiceposting gateways are gone.

But even if Pamela worked flawlessly I would have confronted the obvious reality whereby any endeavor that relies on a functioning and dependable public pay telephone network is imperiled from the start. I’ve wasted a lot of quarters putting Payphone Radio together, but when the calls connect they tend to sound pretty decent, unlike calls made through LinkNYC, New York’s unproven “payphone of the future”.

The goal of making calls from payphones and having the audio automatically uploaded to my website gave way to the more pedestrian reality of making the calls and processing them later. This gave way to numerous calls piling up before I got to processing them, and other forms of accumulation that made this project seem immune to my usual ability to find efficiencies in all things.

At present the calls on Payphone Radio start from April of this year, but I started collecting payphone calls like this in 2010. I decided against making them public, stashing them instead into nooks and crannies of my semi-public websites.