LinkNYC: Speedtest, The Path To Porn Revisited, And More

The folks at CityBridge, or Intersection, or Sidewalk Labs, or whatever the hell you call the company behind the LinkNYC electronic advertising billboards going up around New York may have finally found a way to make me look twice at their screens: Spelling errors. I spotted this one a few times before I was able to get a picture of it. Like a lot of things on these kiosks the screen changes quickly enough that I am not always certain what I just saw. In this case it was Jello-O, which looks like it could use an exclamation point. Jello-O!

Having said I would give them as little attention as possible I find I have been keeping a close eye on the LinkNYC kiosks these last few weeks, arriving at a series of observations about what rinky-dink devices these truly are.

I had only tried the free Wi-Fi once or twice a couple of years ago when the kiosks first appeared on Third Avenue. At the time the Wi-Fi on those kiosks did not seem particularly fast, but I don’t think I used anything like the Speedtest app, which is considered a reliable and unbiased gauge of an Internet connection’s speed. This time I gave that app a try and found that, like almost everything else about these kiosks, sometimes the Wi-Fi works, sometimes it doesn’t. This was done with a Galaxy Note 5.

I got speeds as high as 309 Mbps down and 313 up on the Note 5. But a number of kiosks delivered speeds from the days of 2400 baud dialup modems, while others had no signal whatsoever. When I got a “Test failed to complete” message I tried to connect at least twice. In every instance I was standing pretty much right in front of the kiosk.

All else I have to say about LinkNYC’s free Wi-Fi, aside from the fact that I never expect to connect to it again, is that of the five or six people I have encountered who tried to connect to it all but one said the same thing: They couldn’t. Obviously plenty of people are able to connect, assuming LinkNYC’s usage stats as published on NYC.gov are not bloated or even entirely fabricated. But my luck with getting signal from these things was mixed. I suspect a lot of people are unable to connect but they choose not to admit it because they don’t want anyone to think they are a Stupid Citizen in the Smart City.

What About The Porn?

I should not be surprised but in my conversations about LinkNYC with almost anybody I encounter the subject of accessing porn is inevitably a go-to subject. Observers of LinkNYC will no doubt remember that during the first 6 or 7 months when the kiosks were being deposited on the streets one could access the Internet using the now infamous web browser. Industry standard content filters were put in place to prevent it but press coverage far and wide reported that “widespread porn usage” was taking place across the LinkNYC network, forcing CityBridge to eliminate the web browser and blame it on the perverts.

I have my doubts about how “widespread” the porn usage really was, or if it was truly an issue at all, but the association of LinkNYC with porn seems like it will never go away.

While connected to one of the kiosk’s Wi-Fi last week I was able to get to porn on my phone. Hooray for the brave new world, and for Verizon-owned Tumblr being such a reliable source for virtually any kind of explicit material. From your own laptop or mobile device you should be able to get to anything on the open Internet through LinkNYC’s free Wi-Fi.

But what about the kiosk’s tablet? CityBridge claimed they got rid of the web browser so that meant no more porn on the tablet screens. Right?

Not quite.

The web browser was not removed altogether. After making this discovery I followed one hunch after another and within a remarkably short period of time I found that access to a limited number of websites on the open Internet still remained. I could not get to Twitter or YouTube but I could get to a random assortment of sites, including some that you’d expect to be blocked by any software that filtered objectionable content.

I am not going to explain how I did this for two reasons. First, it is just too convoluted and obscure to explain. Second, it doesn’t work anymore. But I have to give myself some credit. I am a freakin’ genius for having found this, and I would love to know if anyone else did. I was not thinking about it, I had no intention of getting there. But I followed one hunch after another and the next I knew I was looking at trannie scat porn on a LinkNYC tablet screen out on a city sidewalk.

I am not a porn-in-public weirdo with a hunger for viewing obscene materials out in the open. When I played these videos through the kiosks I made damn certain no one else around could see it. I filled the screens with porn not to be a purveyor but to make a statement: I consider LinkNYC kiosks to be vulgar intrusions of unwanted corporate overreach and unearned municipal privilege. The clearest way to expand on this was to use the kiosks to display vulgarity itself. I put porn on their screens to fulfill my image of what I think LinkNYC kiosks are: Corporate vulgarity.

My longer-term intentions were different. I was far more interested in using this access to bring something beautiful to a piece of street furniture that gets uglier and uglier to me any time I see it. But I felt I had to capture the vulgar images first because I suspected the ability to do so would not last long. Once I got photos and video of all types of porn coming out of the tablets I moved on to what I had in mind from the start, which included filling the screens with fractals, my photography, the sound of myself playing piano, etc. (I got back to my roots with that last one).

Here is a still shot from a video of me playing. I had this playing on infinite repeat on one kiosk for hours.

Here is one of my poetry blasts that sat on this particular screen for I don’t know how many hours:

Here is what I meant by summoning something of beauty out of a piece of street furniture I find ugly:

When I first described this to my cohorts the first suggestion was, inevitably, that I should leave porn running so others would encounter it. Sorry, Charlie. As easy as it would have been to leave that above-mentioned trannie scat porn playing on infinite (and unstoppable) loop that is just not who I am. When I think of leaving a porn video running on one of those things my first thought is “Who cares?” Others will disagree but to me plugging pornography into a context such as this has become an obvious banality. What’s more I think that pornography on these screens would draw the kind of attention that would force CityBridge to immediately close this path to the open Internet, which remained open for about two weeks after I found it.

I did not think this path to the Internet would be available forever, and I was right. As of last week, and since when I do not know, it is no longer possible to get to the open Internet via LinkNYC in the way I’d been doing it. That path has been cut off by the scolding overlords of CityBridge, leaving me to speculate how and why this happened, and if it was blocked upon discovery of anything I or anyone else was doing. Did someone at CityBridge notice weirdness in their network activity from when I was doing this? Monitoring web traffic like this sounds like something CityBridge would claim not to do but it wouldn’t surprise me if they do it anyway. The Link.NYC FAQ states that they do not record web traffic that passes over their free Wi-Fi, but it says nothing about what activity they monitor on the tablet devices. It’s also unclear what CityBridge does with the data they collect of the phone numbers people are calling through these kiosks.

My assumption is that the Path To Porn, as I jokingly described this to my friends, was cut off as a result of something routine like a software upgrade of the ever-present web browser’s content filters. But who knows, maybe the path will open again.

As intrigued as I was for as long as I could get away with it I am relieved that the Path To Porn is no longer open. I don’t think CityBridge would deign to interact directly with rugrats like me so I won’t waste my energy asking them why I can’t get to my porn anymore. You have to either worship and adore LinkNYC or you have to be a social media “influencer” — a very last year thing, by the way — for CityBridge to care who you are or what you think of their half-assed product.

As a broader observation I think the only way to successfully make the WWW available to the public from kiosks such as this is to make access pay-as-you-go, like TCC Teleplex did with its payphone of the future back in 2002; or else make access to the web available for a limited time. But given LinkNYC’s reputation for being virtually synonymous with porn I think any path to the open Internet would be seen as a challenge for people like me to exploit.

Let There Be News, Weather, The Sun the Moon and the Stars…

I don’t remember if I wrote about it on this website at any time but in the early days of LinkNYC I recall thinking that useful bits and bytes to pad the giant advertising platters could include weather, MTA bus arrival times, stock market snapshots, etc. I did not know at the time that zoning rules prohibit putting the kiosks too close to a bus stop, or that the MTA’s API for bus time data is enough of a byzantine mess to render building anything around it prohibitive. And also, not for nothing, the MTA is implementing its own bus arrival time system at what will eventually be every single bus stop. I think I’d trust the MTA to get this right before handing it off to LinkNYC.

So I noticed a couple of months ago that the kiosks started including weather snapshots on the big screens, something I seem to remember being done for a period of time last year. There had been (and continues to be) a weather blurb on the tablet screen, though it often does not work and earlier this year weather conditions reported on the tablet screen were sometimes entirely wrong.

The weather conditions on the big screens now provide a three-hour forecast, the data of which appear to be accurate. I, for one, do not care if the temperature is going to change by 0° in the next three hours. I’d be more taken by current conditions and a three day forecast and a presentation that is not so drab. I have already become blind to the weather snapshots on LinkNYC kiosks. A weather-aware graphic that communicates current conditions could make the presentation less static. Yahoo Weather does this effectively, culling images from its Flickr users, though photographs probably would not work effectively on these kiosks. But a graphic of the sun rising at sunrise, of rain clouds when it is raining, of a harvest moon on the night of a harvest moon, stars on a starry starry night… things like would break the monotony of the current format.

Is “Here’s your weather later” grammatically correct? Maybe “weather for later”? Meh, I am not the grammarian I used to be.

A recently-added feature I’ve found to be utterly beguiling at times is the injection of breaking news headlines from the Associated Press. Some of the headlines make sense (when I already know the story that is supposed to rest underneath it) but for the most part I think these headlines are a demonstration of what my corporate brethren and I used to call penis waving. They put something in front of you, you are teased by its intrigue, and then what? In this case nothing but an empty feeling that somebody behind these LinkNYC screens thinks they are smarter than you and they are letting you know it by sticking something in your face without letting you touch it. Penis waving. That’s the Smart City for you.

I have seen a number of these stranded headlines but they go by too fast for me to get a shot of them. This one left me with an especial feeling of WTF. Headlines on LinkNYC kiosks are like clickbait on which you cannot click:

It would be something if there was a LinkNYC app that let you connect to some of the things that fly by on these billboards. I see an event listing for a movie, but it disappears before I can see where and when it was to be screened. Bzzt, why don’t I check a LinkNYC app on my phone, which through the magic of unbridled and unregulated corporate surveillance knows I am standing next to a kiosk that just displayed an ad for an event at Town Hall in Flushing, then providing further information? I see an Associated Press headline and I don’t know what the hell it is in reference to. Maybe a LinkNYC app could connect the dot, since both the kiosk and the app know exactly where I am standing and which headline just passed me by.

A scannable barcode was my first idea but the screens change too fast for those to be anything but a chase after wind.

A headline is, essentially, an advertisement. The AP writes quality headlines but they are like icing on a cake, existing within a context that assumes the reader will travel from the hed to the dek and, if still interested, to the first graf. The given presentation on LinkNYC kiosks actually makes the AP look kind of stupid, which is very hard to do. Headlines on their own, such as seen on these kiosks today, serve as a reminder of what these 55″ digital billboards were designed for: Advertising. Period. Nothing has been done to implement interactive features that would connect passers-by to the sometimes mystifying content put before them.

If social media postings are any indication then the folks at LinkNYC seem to be giving themselves a lot of credit for posting bright yellow screens announcing severe weather alerts and school closure notices. I would not expect to turn my attentions to advertising billboards in a time of crisis, especially when the alerts simply direct you to visit Notify.NYC for more information. Why not make Notify.NYC directly accessible from the tablets? You can get to Notify.NYC on the tablet through the NYC.gov link, but not easily. Direct access to Notify.NYC should be available from the tablet, since it would actually contain more than just a headline, with timely and useful information in an emergency or non-emergency.

Alright, you tech trolls can relax, I’ll stop. I have a lot more thoughts about LinkNYC but I don’t work for anybody, least of all the Smart City. If half the ideas I just spewed are bullshit then that’s just how creative thinking works. You heave out the bad ideas before articulating the good ones. It looks like LinkNYC does more heaving than articulating.