Long Term Effects of Gizmodo CES Prank

theodp noted that someone from Gizmodo brought a TV-B-Gone to CES and used it to turn off a wall of monitors during demos. Funny yes, it earned him a ban for life and may have repercussions to other bloggers struggling to be treated as equals with traditional journalists in the future. But also this might lead to a future with encryption on remotes.

Comments

Re:First Post!

[dpete4552]

How did he get caught? Are you kidding me? He posted a video of himself doing it, proudly stating his first and last name in the intro to give himself credit.

Re:Encryption's going a little too far

[FuturePastNow]

According to the story, Gizmodo was there under actual press credentials, not the second-class blogger pass. And I haven't heard of any other pranks, so don't go blaming a whole "underclass."

This was no big deal. They should ban the guy who did it and move on.

Re:Oooo, you just gave me an idea

[fyonn]

to be fair, apples allow you to pair the standard apple remote with the computer, so only that one remote will control it, precisely to avoid that issue...

dave

Re:Yes...but how many people have serial cables?

[0xygen]

It is normally not a PC though, there are dedicated AV control systems out there (AMX, Crestron et al).
Being a control systems programmer, I happen to know many of the sets at trade shows, especially AV trade shows, are under RS232 control!

Often this is because of the impracticality of the remote - many only have a single on/off button on the IR remote.
You press it, half of the displays turn off.
You press it again, some of the display toggle from on to off, some toggle from off to on.
You end up using a rolled up sheet of paper to go around each one to set it on / off.

Unfortunately not many of the models have the ability to lock the IR out via the serial port!

Be careful with this

[name_already_taken]

Try moving strong magnets across your c.r.t. displays, its fun!

This is only safe with weak magnets.

Neodymium magnets, such as those you can salvage from hard drives, can not only magnetize the shadow mask, they can permanently distort it. Degauss cycles will not fix that - the only way to repair a monitor damaged in that way is to replace the picture tube.

Do this in a retail environment and you may find yourself talking with the police.

Re:Be careful with this

[name_already_taken]

No, sorry, that's incorrect. You don't understand the problem that needs to be repaired in this case.

You are correct that it is possible to hand-degauss a seriously magnetized shadow mask, in fact there are degaussing coils sold specifically for TV repair people to do just that when the built-in degaussing coil around the picture tube is not strong enough to remove severe magnetism left in the shadow mask. I've done it myself back when I used to repair television sets in the 1980s.

You cannot degauss out a bent shadow mask, because the problem is not residual magnetism left in the shadow mask, the shadow mask is physically deformed by a neodymium magnet. You can't fix that with a magnet, you can only make it worse.

And here's a link to the video

[Kabuthunk]

To save people a few seconds of having to google stuff or whatnot, here's a link to the video in question on Youtube.