This honestly made me laugh. For about 24 hours a newly activated LinkNYC device in Astoria sported an earlier version of the tablet’s user interface. This version included the infamous LinkNYC web browser, which caused so much trouble for LinkNYC and possibly permanent damage to the program’s reputation. For 6 or 7 long months in 2016 CityBridge allowed the public to use the LinkNYC web browser like an entertainment center. Groups of people were seen comfortably sitting on sidewalks in plush easy chairs watching porn and YouTube videos all damn day. Much could be said about the tasteless and even cynical manner in which CityBridge dealt with that situation but we’ll let it go for now.
This particular Link device must have been misprogrammed as a result of human error by someone at Alliance Field Solutions, a contractor hired by CityBridge to maintain the Links. It was fixed within 24 hours. But it’s intriguing to know that the earlier user interface and the web browser still seem to lurk within these devices, ready to emerge at the whim of a badly coded curly bracket or semicolon.
I have seen similar problems with a number of other Link devices around town. For some reason their user interface reverts back to the original “Beta” version, before social services apps were added and before the web browser was removed. But in those instances the web browser never actually worked, at least as far as I could tell. Those devices seemed to suffer from general bugginess, and were caught in an endless loop of rebooting. This time the browser worked, though a bit of know-how was required to get around the open Internet. Access to www.link.nyc was allowed but the top page of The Payphone Project web site was not. Subpages to all sites I tried were accessible if you know the URI. I got to the old format version of this site just fine, and clicked around the place with impunity. Watch the video below to see what I mean.
The web browser, we were told, formerly used industry standard filters to prevent access to objectionable content. I don’t know what kind of filter this iteration of the browser used but all it did was prevent access to the top page of any site I attempted (except link.nyc). So while top pages of virtually all sites were blocked you could access pretty much anything if you knew its full URI.
The web browser, for those of us with an interest in such things, identifies itself as this in the user_agent string it sends out:
“Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; park Build/v1.1.2-rc5-provisioning) AppleWebKit
/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/39.0.0.0 Safari/537.36”
My access_log shows that requests from this LinkNYC device came from the 132.235.27.0/24 range of IP addresses.
I did manage to get some porn out of this thing, but not from a regular smut site. I did not bother with that since the filters on this thing would (I assume) at least be able to block those sites the name of which I might happen to know off the top of my head.
Instead I found a “big boobs” picture somewhere and dropped it onto my humble site. I posted this to Twitter but took it back, assuming the social-media obsessed folks at CityBridge would report it and get my account suspended. I used the Content Reveal plugin for WordPress to make access to this image optional. It is not safe for work (NSFW) and is provided solely as a snapshot in memory of what accessing porn from the streets of New York using LinkNYC used to look like. p.s.: She’s cute.
