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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

>"Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations."

Oh god no. If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity.

>"While Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations, Singolda says the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation to ensure that every piece of content on its site is approved."

I use uBlock Origin religiously, but from what I can tell most Taboola recommendations are the same 15 or so clickbait topics repeated ad infinitum. Woman mid shout, guy holding credit card, lotus fruit, some weird berry that's supposed to cure something, skin disorder, etc.

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It seems this is the natural endgame, every refrigerator will come with an LCD screen on the front that advertises at you.

I just hope that my new fridge will continue to keep my food cold after I smash the screen with a hammer.

Don’t do that. Use it as spare parts for a new project. When the screens do come out they’ll probably run some flavour of android so it might be flashable.

I've just never connected my smart tv to the wifi to avoid that fate.

Don’t, they’ll add some routine that makes you tap on some “agree” button and shut down the whole darn thing otherwise... I have an idea: under the perverse excuse of delivering firmware updates for your own network safety!!!

Hmm, the plot of Brazil becomes every day more realistic. Ah, what times were living!

Well hopefully we can figure out ways to integrate advertising so deeply into every aspect of our lives that you can no longer escape marketing with pi holes and hammers. Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business. Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it! Imagine glasses that show augmented-reality ads based on your current location and what you are looking at, that would be incredible. Any place people rest their eyeballs should contain ads. Digital picture frames that show family photos in your home should occasionally flash ads, etc. Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations so that hikers and campers can get the urgent advertising they need to be aware of the latest survival gear while out in nature. Basically, we need to prevent people from having quiet time and thinking - we need to come with as many ways as possible to aggressively interrupt and intrude thoughts with gentle reminders that the economy needs stimulating and that the only way to truly be happy is with more stuff.

The urinal and gas station ones are right up the street from me and I don't visit either of those facilities anymore for that reason.

My corner gas station just rolled out new machines that start playing advertisements on the LCD screens as soon as the pump starts dispensing gas. It made me irrationally angry. One, that I have to deal with even more mental pollution in my daily life. And two, that the person who created this business model realized that pump-goers are quite literally a captive audience and that's the best way to force someone to watch an ad.

I complained to the manager and I've never been back. Sadly, part of me knows it's just a matter of time before other gas stations gets these new machines.

Most of the gas pumps with ads I’ve seen are the kind with 4 arrow buttons on either side. If you push the 2nd button down on the right side, it’ll mute the audio, and you can go back to listening to traffic and breathing fumes in peace.

https://imgur.com/a/D7ZIR

Phew. The last thing I wanted to associate with the sweet sweet gas fumes was an ad.

Let me get mildly intoxicated in relative peace, thank you.

Unfortunately, some gas stations have already disabled the mute button; in my personal experience, Speedway was the first in doing that. It's only a matter of time 'til all stations do that.

Better fix: switch to an EV!

Now you get to listen to ads for 15mn instead if 2!

Spend $40k to avoid some ads at a gas station? I hate ads but come on...

Plus you're ignoring how privacy invasive most EVs are, especially Tesla. They track everything you do.

Buy a Chevy Bolt or a Hyundai/Kia, pretty easy to remove the modem from those.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but most new gas cars are the same. New Toyotas have it, GM has had it for quite a while with OnStar, Ford probably has it, and if I bothered to dig more, almost all of them have it somewhere, cellular modem included.

It's an industry problem at this point, and I really think some day we will have a mass terrorist disaster where some psychotic hacker group would hack all the badly secured cars everywhere, link into the CAN bus (because that is a GREAT idea for some braindead synergistic middle manager reasons) and cause run-away accelerations simultaneously everywhere on some clock script, killing millions and destroying trillions.

I'm 50/50 hoping someone makes a popular movie about that, to scare governments world wide to force cars to have a fucking no network mode and no connections to the CAN bus and terrified if it would inspire said teenage psychopaths to do so...

You could stand there and be the captive audience you complain about, or you could choose to do something more productive with your life. Take the time it takes to fill up your tank to clean the windows, check the oil level in your car, check the air pressure in your tires, or just inspect the tires for wear patterns, etc.

Where I live you need to hold a trigger on the nozzle. You can't wander off and do something else.

That's what a tube of chapstick is for. My dad's been doing that for >50yrs, and I have continued the tradition at gas stations that remove the trigger lock.

> Sadly, part of me knows it's just a matter of time before other gas stations gets these new machines.

I'm so looking forward to home EV charging.

Fareway, a grocery store headquartered in Iowa with stores in Iowa and all surrounding states except Wisconsin, has tablets in the checkout queue area with a camera to show ads. I'm not sure if they just use tablets as a low cost device with a screen and internet connection, or if they're determining demographic info from the video (and possibly correlating it to transactions at the POS).

Regardless, it bothered me.

It was one of these?

https://getpopspots.com/

If they’re not tracking your demographic data yet, they’re trying to...

They definitely are or will be soon. From their own blog:

>Thanks to the computer vision technology built into every one of our displays, we can track metrics previously limited to online advertising. For example, impressions are the standard currency for online advertising, but they aren’t yet the norm in the DOOH industry and when they are provided they’re a rough estimate. Unlike most DOOH displays, Popspots displays only run content when consumers are physically present, which means there’s a direct relation between plays and impressions. Popspots displays also count the number of consumers present and whether they’re watching the advertisement on a second-by-second basis. Using this data, marketers can understand exactly how many consumers they’ve reached and assess the effectiveness of their creative.

https://getpopspots.com/blog/measuring-consumer-engagement-i...

Yes, I believe it was.

I'm all too familiar with Fareway. Knowing their budget ethos, no way they are spending $$$ to gleen demographic info.

I met one of their VP's and had a good 30 minute chat once. Budget ethos is definitely there. Outside of advertisements during the Iowa high school Athletics events, they didn't really spend on TV ads until ~2-3 years ago when competition with ALDI and Hy-Vee seemed to dramatically increase.

No idea on the business model for the ad tablet system, but I could see a model where they pay an amount to the store on a monthly basis. Perhaps they would pay more if the store would turn over transaction data, or the transaction data and demographics would be traded as mutually beneficial.

They're very much not on the cutting edge of technology. I believe she said they didn't have email until ~2010. Store orders were submitted via fax to their distribution center.

In some ways they're saving money (only looking at mature options in the market and absolutely avoiding snake oil salesmen), but even an Excel based ordering system on a dialup connection would have been a major labor savings for 2000-2010 compared to faxes.

A lot of gas stations have started doing this, as well. Ads while you pump gas.

I don't know if it's just a UK thing, but we already have screen showing ads at many of our petrol pumps

> Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business.

Munich Mathäser cinema already has this, there's an LCD screen embedded into the urinal.

Let's just say that if I were on a jury looking to convict someone who vandalized these screens I'd ignore all the evidence and let them go scot-free.

Hard not to suspect that a giant display + embedded PC would also have a camera... "it was for eye-tracking, honest!"

Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it!

That future is now, and has been for many years in NL. The logical next step is personalized ads based on the number plate.

Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business.

It’s the obvious next step from existing paper ads, and I’m surprised that it has taken this long.

Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it!

Shell was doing that 30 years ago.

Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations...

Not yet, but the state of WA has already sold ad space on their outdoor (camping/hiking permits and the like) web sites.

Your dystopian future is already here.

ThatsTheJoke.jpg

I believe the joke was that all of those are already happening or at least close to it.

Regarding LCDs at urinals, I remember seeing those for the first time, maybe 10+ years ago in Las Vegas.

I mean, that's one way to get fairly good targeting…

Some public schools sell as space on their students' lockers.

Remember, any moment of attention can be monetized through advertising - and therefore it should be. Any tine a person is thinking their own thoughts is a wasted opportunity.

You joke but I can see the hiker thing with one click purchase and instant drone delivery becoming a popular service. You won’t even have to prepare or carry anything with you to go into the wild.

Then you have the buzz of delivery drones all over the wilderness? What's the point of going there anymore, then?

I never said I liked it

> Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it!

Shell gas stations already do this where I live. There is an LCD panel with blaring audio above the pumps.

I no longer buy Shell gas.

Most pumps around here will mute the sound by pressing the right button, second from the top, beside the screen. Some pumps require a different button to mute so I just spam all the buttons around the screen if at a new station. They are incredibly loud and obnoxious sometimes.

We will also have AR glasses that automatically cover all screens around you with a color or your own photos.

Of course these glasses can be free: for the glasses to project other ads on those screens ;-)

You just described the world of Max Headroom, where TVs were everywhere, and having an off switch would get you prison time.

1949

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

Welcome to your future past... :-)

Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business.

This exists. I've seen it in Las Vegas. There's also a video screen on the faucet, and in the mirror for when you wash your hands.

Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it!

I've also seen this. Also in Las Vegas. I remember that Cheddar provided the content.

> Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business.

This would tempt me to aim very high...

A few years ago Delta started force-feeding adverts to me pre-takeoff on the seatback screens. Pressing the off button turned it off for a moment, then it turned back on to continue the advert.

That happened once, I haven't flown with them since. I don't look forward for the day when I will no longer have that option.

> Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business.

Paper ads at the urinal are already common in some countries, because advertisers know that you have no choice but to look straight ahead. Now that you mention it, it is surprising that LCDs haven't been installed yet.

I remember seeing video screens above the urinals in a parking garage in Maastricht, Netherlands some time between 2004 and 2006. They primarily showed ads, but also had a camera pointed at you, so you'd be watching an ad and then it would switch to showing your face. The camera also tilted and would begin tilting down. It would get your heart racing, but it only tilted down a few degrees before it tilted back up so it never showed your dangley bits.

> Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it!

This exists in the United States. Good thing EVs don't have this problem.

I was shocked to see ads at gas stations and in cabs in the US. Truly dystopian.

You sir, more than my introversion and social anxiety, more than COVID-19, have convinced me I should never leave my house again. Ever.

The hacker part of this website would investigate taking the LCD screen out, and repurposing it. We all know that DIY robot that goes to the fridge to bring you a snack will need some sort of LCD screen to act as an interface for you to choose the snack. It's not like we're going to use an iPad for that. We're too busy putting those in our cars.

It will make people like us look crazy! People will walk into our homes and see smashed and covered ad-screens

My experience with modern refrigerators tells me that the fridge will likely _not_ continue to keep your food cold after the crappy display fails, whether by hammer or otherwise.

It seems this is the natural endgame, every refrigerator will come with an LCD screen on the front that advertises at you.

Child's crayon drawing + magnet = problem solved.

The ad industry is prepared for this. DNS-over-HTTPS will ignore your PiHole, and lovingly bring you ads anyways. While you can turn DoH off in your browser, your IoT device will not be so configurable. And will most likely fail to work entirely if you block access to Google's DoH endpoint.

DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic, and by and large, the majority of tech enthusiasts have cheered for it.

It'll be an arms race. DNS-based blackholes would give way to IP-by-IP firewall rules.

I remember when personal firewalls were mostly about blocking threats coming in through incoming connections. Now, I use mine more to block threats already on my network from exfiltrating through outgoing connections.

1. DoH is a user configurable setting, it cannot be dictated by ad vendors or websites.

2. DoH fails back to standard DNS.

3. DoH is hard to filter, just like other TLS encrypted traffic.

4. DoH is a user FRIENDLY technology meant to increase user privacy and reduce DNS hijacking.

5. Don't like it? Turn it off. Only you have that power to enable or disable it.

DoH can be enforced by user-hostile devices and applications.

Including Internet-of-shit infested appliances and devices.

With 5G SIMS embedded and financed at rock-bottom mass-contract data-dribble rates via advertising, other revenue flow, or up-front / ongoing purchase revenue streams, WiFi LAN egress controls --- PiHole or other DNS blocklists, or IP and protocol firewalls --- simply won't be effective.

You're confusing DoH in "friendly" browsers like Firefox, where you and I might deliberately turn it on to thwart ISP shenanigans. In that case, it's good that DoH is hard to filter and looks like all other TLS traffic.

But the parent is correctly describing DoH as a double-edged sword. The same properties that make it good for you and me when trying to safely access domain data make it a weapon for rogue IoT devices who want to do the same.

Your smart fridge could easily include software that allows it to acquire its own secure DNS info from a DoH network run by the smart fridge manufacturer. This would allow them to find the domains behind the chumbox ads that they want to show you in spite of your PiHole. Since the manufacturer would be doing this to get around a user's desired network configuration, it'll be configurable for them, not for you. You will not be the "owner" of this device.

I don't see what any of that has to do with DoH. A device could just as easily use its own private dns service and bypass network filtering as well.

On a properly-configured network, all DNS requests are intercepted and routed to the desired DNS server. I do this to make Google devices respect my DNS preferences (send DNS through PiHole) instead of using their hardcoded setting.

Unencrypted DNS can be redirected or inspected and selectively blocked. DoH cannot, and whereas you can selectively tamper with DNS requests to remove advertisers, devices may fail to work at all if you block their DoH provider.

DoH removes the agency of the network provider. This is great if you can't trust the network.

If I used my ISPs DNS resolver it wouldn't allow me to access sci-hub. I can trivially use Googles DNS, but if that where to change DoH would save me.

The other problem is solvable by not buying an IOT device with a screen. I can't buy a dumb TV, but I do okay with my current one and my computer monitor.

This is only partially true: You are also, more than likely, your own network provider too. So unless you have full control over devices on your network (including closed source IoT devices), it takes away your agency as well.

So it's terrible, unless you can trust every device on your network.

> DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic

I view it as more of a double-edged sword. It can be very handy if you have a hostile ISP playing shenanigans with DNS or logging your queries and selling the data, but as you point out, it's also useful for bad actors as well.

I'd say on average, tech companies pushing DoH like Google, Cloudflare, and Mozilla, are using the excuse of hostile ISPs, knowing that the primary goal is to defeat enterprise security and ad blocking.

I mean, sure, Google's worried about your ISP logging your queries and selling the data... because that would compete with Google's business of logging your web activity and selling ads based on it. DoH isn't a privacy technology at that point, it's a anti-competition play.

> If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity.

I tend to think of something like this as more of a “move to a cabin in the woods” scenario, but I suppose that could be a workable compromise.

In all seriousness, I’m morbidly curious as to how chumbox “technology” would apply to TV show and whatever kind of “content” recommendations would go on a smart fridge. Viscerally unsettling thumbnails that have tested for maximum conversion? Perfect for the kitchen!

I thought it was an obscure regionalism for a refrigerator... that definition makes far more sense grammatically.

FYI: pihole does not block taboola ads because they are not served from a separate network that can be filtered.

You need to use a non-dns method of filtering them out

The vast majority of these ads are rendered by JS from a third-party domain so they can be filtered out easily with DNS.

Oh yeah for sure you can block it using PiHole. Just add (^|\.)taboola\.com$ to your blacklist.

Bonus: add (^|\.)outbrain\.com$ too while you’re at it.

Thanks for the reminder, just added it to my house-wide blocklist.

One step closer to 15 million merits [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

Who the hell would want clickbait ads streamed to their fridge? This is awful idea

We're inching closer to the episode of Black Mirror where everyone is forced to stare at ads all day

The day my god-forsaken fridge presents me with a Taboola chumbox is the day I go full Amish and retire to a hut on my farmland in southern Illinois.

I bought a Pi Zero W awhile back and it sat in my desk for like a year. While going through my desk about a month ago I decided to take 10 minutes to set it up and regret not doing it sooner! The little thing is pretty amazing. I've since moved the Pi Zero W to my travel bag paired with my travel modem and upgraded to a regular Pi at home!

Just don't buy IoT devices that have ads (or period)?

It'll eventually become the default. Every single new fridge will have a display. And that display will have ads.

"Kids, that ugly, old refrigerator without a screen sitting in the garage is worth a lot of money and is your inheritance."

Aftermarket in old fridge doors. Unless they put DRM in to stop the compressor from running I'm not sure how they'd prevent it.

My fridge uses DRM to check the filter. I’m sure they won’t forget the doors. And I bet they’ll be attached via some obscure proprietary screwdriver head that’s unavailable to the public.

People like nice clean looking kitchens. A kitchen with a display flashing crap does not fit into that.

I'm sure some percentage of fridges will have displays flashing shitty adverts all day long, but there will be a large number of fridges that are just decent looking boxes with stainless, black, or white doors.

With TVs I'm afraid we're screwed though. Adding a brain and wifi to a TV is super cheap now and manufacturers have already figured out how to monetize having a smart TV in your house even without advertising.

My Samsung TV has built in ads, which I HATE. I want a dumb TV. Apps built into TVs generally suck because to keep the BOM cost down they put in the cheapest SoC that will function, leaving the apps sluggish, jerky, and frequently cut down in features. On my previous LG TV I couldn't turn off motion smoothing on the bui8lt in video streaming apps. With the Samsung TV I just don't connect it to the network because there are ads that you cannot disable.

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