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"Smart" Billboards Debut in Sacramento
k0osh.CEOofCLIT writes "Remember the billboards in "Minority Report" that scanned your eyes and changed the advertisement based on your shopping preferences? The Sacramento Bee reports: "Soon, this sign along the Capital City Freeway will be able to change its message based on what radio stations motorists have tuned in.""Yeah, Chris can't spell. He and Rob should form a club. *grin*
TWO misspellings of "Sacramento!"
if someone can infer the radio station you have tuned in, trust me: you're going to need more than rf shielding. more like a club to whack whoever's in your back seat listening along. there's no passive way to do this at all. this has got to be some sort of hoax, or the billboards are detecting an external peripheral hooked up to your stereo. uh uh, no way.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Remove the radio antenna. Unfortunately this interferes with your ability to listen to radio stations. You could also design a radio that demodulates the signal in a different way than most other radios do. So that the emissions from your radio will be different than the others.
I drive this section of the Cap City freeway quite often (used to be several times a day, now it's a few a week), and I couldn't tell you how many times I've inched past this spot at about 5MPH. So what happens to this thing when you've got six lanes of traffic inching by, and they're all listening to different things?
:\
Of course, my biggest concern is wrecks. This particular spot is already a popular wreck site, with the Garden highway exit, the CalExpo grounds (location of the yearly state fair and dozens of other big draws), the way too narrow for its capacity American River Bridge and curve, and one of the biggest shopping malls in the region all located off of this short stretch of overcrowded highway. The LAST thing this spot really needs is another visual distraction
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
This is extremely offtopic, but minority report is a very scary movie to me, for this reason: After I got into some trouble w/ the computers at my school (they basically confused me of hacking their network, and I will admit I did some damn stupid things), I get the following phrase in a letter to my parents: "Admittedly, we are not concerned with what your son did as with what he could have done." That scares me. A lot.
So you're trying to tell me the billboard has a receiver so sensitive to pick up on the internal oscillator in my car radio. Not only will it pick up on this EXTREMELY low level signal, past all the noise and crap in the air, it will take an aggregate of all the cars in the area and figure the most listened to station.
No... First off your method of demodulating an FM signal is all wrong. You got the first stage right. The RF is broken down into an intermediate frequency (IF) by mixing it with a locally generated signal. But then you are all wrong. The IF is not rectified and filtered in an FM receiver. That is for AM.
In FM, the IF is run past a discriminator circuit. A change in frequency is interpreted as a change in amplitude and thus produces the audio.
Finally, even if they did have a receiver that was able to pick up the signal on my local oscillator, en-casing the radio chassis in copper shielding would then definitely keep the oscillator signal inside WITHOUT blocking the signal on the air. That's why you have an antenna.
If it was so easy to tell what radio frequency one was listening to, what would I (as a member of the US Navy) do? The enemy would know what frequencies we were listening to. That would get them one step closer to breaking our encryption and listening to our messages.
Next time do a little research before posting.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
Integration of higher and higher technology into daily life isn't one of my goals, bucko. Making each day better than the one before is, of course, and sometimes technology helps that. But the mere technology for its own sake doesn't improve anything, or the people in server rooms would be the happiest motherfuckers on the planet.
This goes double for advertising technology. The point of a billboard is to make you think about something other than what you're thinking about when you're near it. Improving the ability of people with money to distract me from my life might benefit somebody, but it sure as hell isn't me.
and things start to get scary.
People assume they have privacy in their cars. The article above points out that the stations passers by are listening to are gathered in aggregate, and not linked to an individual.
But could the same info be linked to individuals by optical license plate recognition? Tough in a traffic jam, but maybe source of the signals could be triangulated.
A car radio's RF leakage, if you can call it that, could become another criteria for buyers.
If it reaches a point where the possibility that an enemy might act becomes sufficiently real, and the danger posed by that enemy's capabilities become sufficiently great, then the only reasonable course of action is to respond with military force.
In that case, it's time for the rest of the world to declare war on the United States of America.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Methinks the billboard company is gilding the lily a bit. Tools to forecast driver consumer preferences already exist, and they're no less accurate than electronically peeking at your radio dial.
Animated boards are expensive. That means the outdoor company will only be putting them in high-traffic locations.
Hundreds of cars might pass the board in a one-minute period. It takes about four seconds to absorb a well-contructed outdoor display. Obviously, the data isn't going to be targeted at individual motorists. It'll be an average of traffic flow over some given period of time.
That makes the radio tuner data much less useful. All the billboards will be doing is determining localized listening preference. I gotta tell ya: it ain't gonna be much different than the Arbitron radio ratings already available to the industry.
Properly programmed radio stations have very predicatable listener compositions. Take a Classic Rock station, for instance: the typical listener will be between 35 and 49 years of age. He is 70% likely to be male. He is about 45% likely to be married.
You can take this further, computing the possibility he has kids and his approximate ages. More importantly, you can interpolate this data against retail databases which qualify the likely incomes and buying habits of people in these demographic cells. There are plenty of industry tools which do this, such as Scarborough Research's databases.
That's how the billboard companies will pitch their clients. They'll merge the radio listening data against something like a Scarborough study and--boom--we can see that a certain number of drivers during a given hour will make a car purchase within the next month. The billboard chooses a Chevy ad. If you know where most of the traffic is heading, you can even tag it with dealer info. Awesome.
But the billboard company really doesn't need the gee-whiz realtime radio snooping. It's a gimmick. Their sellers can already work out the data with existing desktop tools.
Imagine that: hype from advertising execs. Who would have figured?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I equate it as such. If a formerly convicted criminal, on parole, is running down the street pointing weapons at police officers, must the officers wait until the trigger is pulled to respond, or should common sense be used. This is the situation we are in with Iraq. We have seen his past actions and know that he cannot be trusted. There are many who feel that any potential threat from Sadam could be dealt with via international political pressure. The U.N. has been trying this for over 10 years, with the only result being the suffering of Iraqi people. There are only so many ways to appoach such a situation with most options having been already axhausted.
Great games
Even more incredibly, from the thread you linked to:
Newsgroups: rec.games.video.nintendo, rec.games.video.advocacy, rec.games.video.3do, rec.games.video.atari
Date: 1994-02-20 19:50:41 PST
Oh brother. I remember seeing basically this same post, by this exact same author, a couple years ago before I quit Prodigy and found the 'Net.
You'd think he'd be able to come up with some better material...
Robert
eauu142@rigel.oac.uci.edu
Incredibly, this troll has been working on his thread for *over a decade*, and has spanned three different tech discussion forums (Prodigy, USENET, Slashdot).
BTW, I believe Prodigy was only offered in the United States. So, if we assume that both the Slashdot SG, the USENET SG, and the Prodigy SG are all the same guy, he definitely lives (lived?) in the United States. Still no tack on his age, though I'd still place him as an undergraduate college student in the US.
May we never see th
Did you miss the part where Hussein Kamel Hassan fled that country and told us that Iraq had a crash nuclear weapons program in 1990? Iraq later confirmed it.
Or what about Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza, who defected to the US in '94 and gave us lots of juicy facts about Iraq's biological weapons programs, programs which Iraq at first vehemently denied ever existed, and then admitted to in the face of overwhelming evidence. The stockpiles found by weapons inspectors included over 100,000 gallons of botulinum toxin, anthrax, gas gangrene, aflatoxin, and ricin, and a side order of almost four metric tons of VX gas.
It's just easier for the "Hate America" crowd to set aside the reality of Iraq and simply take Iraq's word on what they have.
--fatboy