So have you seen them fancy LED lit digital billboards in your neck of the woods as of yet? They started popping up around the Detroit area over the past year or so and as of today there’s at least four of them that I know about. They’re basically really big computer monitors and they rotate ads once every couple of seconds and can be seen a mile or so away. Apparently it’s also possible to update them in real time as one of the ads was for a local radio station in which it listed the song playing on that station at that very moment
This got me to wondering if the boards use a wireless or wired connection for the updates and how long it would be before someone got around to hacking one of them. Apparently I wasn’t the only person to have this thought cross his mind:
An entity simply known as Skullphone has been altering Clear Channel digital billboards in Los Angeles, by hacking into the computer that runs the billboards and inserting the Skullphone images between the ads.
Click to embiggen!
You just know as soon as something goes digital that someone else will find a way to hack it. What’ll be interesting to see is what happens if this sort of hack ends up being easy to replicate. If anyone manages to hack any of the boards I see regularly here in Michigan I’ll be sure to grab a picture of it.
Posted on 03/26/2008 at 04:19 PM 
Normally I can’t condone hacking but damn, I hate those digital signs. They’re like AOL popup windows on the commuter route. Someone should do a study on how many auto accidents are caused by them.