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Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

> Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card? Genuine question.

The sheer number of people in here espousing great volumes of text to explain the ulterior motives of a shitty OEM android control panel on a vending machine crashing out of kiosk mode is utterly unbelievable.

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> shitty OEM android control panel on a vending machine crashing out of kiosk mode

This spot in Seattle has a digital dot matrix sign (says "Surface Mount Technology" in the street view) that has been in factory reset mode, cycling through a demo of its fonts and specs for its serial port, for at least five years.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/87wymvx6kxKToacq5

I've always wondered what the store was behind it. Maybe some defunct business?

Sigital marquees, especially old ones, are hilariously expensive to fix or replace. A client of mine has one like that and was quoted over 300k to replace it when a control software failed.

Luckily, we fixed the controller (which is IR based) but I fully understand why one of those signs would stay in that state now.

I am not sure if this comment was directed at me, but the "genuine question" was a genuine question, not rhetorical :) And the answer I was looking for was "the payment cards probably use QR codes instead of magnets/IR/RFID/etc."

There's probably a nicer way to say this.

On the other hand, maybe a broken vending machine wouldn't be a national talking point if even one person in this entire chain of events had simply accepted that the machine was malfunctioning and might not actually be an instrument of the surveillance state.

Amazon is well known for surveilling its staff. Why act surprised that staff think the worst when they find another piece of surveillance gear in the breakroom?

This is a good point. Many are in glass houses on this issue as who amongst us can say that they have bought a vending machine that doesn’t come with a built in camera

Don't necessarily disagree, but also there's a lot of conspiracy theorist nonsense here for something that could well simply be explained away by "Cheap Android off-the-shelf tablet used as a UI for something". It would've been useful to see some screenshots/pictures of the UI before writing a scare-mongering article about it.

gorkish's comment does at least bring things back down to earth.

I agree with that, but I'm also surprised the vendor didn't go through the process of custom-ordering the off-the-shelf tablet in an MOQ so they could shave cost off by flagging things like the camera as a DNP part.

Not sure if anyone has been to shake shake with self order screens lately but those device still have the 'new note' shortcut still enabled. I would leave random notes and come back to see if anyone ever discovered it.

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