How do they know it was "Skullphone" that did it?

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA Good.

Digital billboard?
Gosh I wish we had some of those in Houston.

I cannot STAND clear channel. They basically have a monopoly on radio and make everybody play the same songs over and over a billion times. To hell with their signs I hope they all get hacked.

He should do a Howard Stern or Bubba the Love Sponge tribute on the boards to really piss off CC.

The police? Er, what law was broken, exactly?

Hnmm, now if I can just get it to output my ps3 then it's time to finally show my guitar hero skills to the masses. \m/>.<\m/

That's some awesome work.

TURK 182!! TURK 182!! TURK 182!!

I got to see the one on Washington and Lincoln, some friends noticed it and it was up for a couple of days, in the rotation with legit ads. Soooo awesome.

@SumGuy: I worked for ClearChannel up until several years ago, and they were always good to me. They are, however, a very large company that has lots of power and I would NEVER want to piss them off. I have a feeling they can really make a guys life miserable if they brought any sort of legal action on a person.

Anyway, to your specific comment on playing music over and over, I'm not sure how you figure that. In fact, ClearChannel had strict guidelines on how often a song was to be played. They even went so far as to limit the number of times a certain ARTIST was played within a given time period. Perhaps your local station is not adhering to guidlines?

@drbles: P.S. - I didn't say I agreed with some of the stuff ClearChannel does...like there feelings about censorship, even on satellite radio. They are threatened...

@Simposons-Movie-ruled
Yeah, Dude I agree I want some of thouse on my drive to work everyday. That would be nice touch for Houston.

@bobdobbs: Most likely, the billboards he hacked were updated with RF modems, or via a standard serial port at the bottom. If he plugged in directly, he obviously broke the law... but a surprising number of these are sent via unencrypted radio.

@lpranal: What law did he break? There's a law against plugging directly into billboards?

This is awesome. These light-polluting horrors are an abomination and I wish death upon them every time I look upon one and have my pupils suddenly contract. Blade Runner might make a cool movie, but it makes a crappy reality.

I've even recently thought that it would be cool to hack these. (Note: I am not Skullphone, I promise!)

@bobdobbs: Natural Law.
Apparently the dude is just a skeleton with a phone!
And that's just not right!

i hope the guy who came out with the "turn any tv off remote" invents a "turn any electronic billboard off remote". hehe

Dude--you been punk'd! The guy PAID CC to show the pix. Worse, the story was planted on a blog hoping it would get picked up and spread. (sure did.) This was no hack, this was commercialism at its best and worst, and you "bought" into it by spreading the false story. You've been had.

thats a pretty sweet hack. its good to know people still do stuff like this.

Thank you skullphone! I've been waiting for those things to be hacked ever since they started installing them. It was only a matter of time. More hacking please!

lol! Only in California...

Looks like the virus ate his face...

@Simpsons-Movie-ruled: that is the LAST thing we need.

zomg, I saw this and thought it was odd, but it never occured to me it was hAx0reD. I knew the skullphone looked familar, but wrote it off as another viral marketing campaign.
This guy is my new hero.

Maybe Skullphone will flash a huge WFMU on the billboards. And then maybe ClearChannel will give a listen to innovative WFMU and learn free form radio which is drawing so many listeners from ClearChannel's oh so typical repetitive format commercial radio stations.

On the radio, online, and on iPhone... WFMU

Digital vandalism is fantastic - whether it is web sites, or billboards on the side of the road. Well, it is fantastic to everyone but the people that 'lose money' when stuff like this happens. Still, as one of the people not losing money, I say we need more of this.

@drbles: I meant the program director of a local ClearChannel station in Detroit (89X) at a festival in Canada. I told him that the station sucks now and that the music being pushed was a pile of crap. It was awesome. ;^P

Damn, should put some 18+ !

D'oh! "meant" should be "met"...

Skullphone? I thought it was a Sprint ad.

skullphone walks in to a bar and orders a beer and a mop...

@Simpsons-Movie-ruled: yeah with the way traffic is here (especially the Katy Freeway)it would be nice if the added a tv tunner mod or even a nice Blu-Ray add-on.

@SumGuy: dude - buy an iPod listen to your own music_

@Simpsons-Movie-ruled: they don't have them in Houston? Weird I live in a small city in FLa 200,000 folks or so and LAMAR Advertising has them up all over town here_

Anyway - I think this is awesome! That was the first thing that went thru my mind the first time I saw one of these - how long will it take for someone to hack them?

I think they are stupid anyway_ Yeah more advertisers can be signed up and for different periods of time_ But it's like watching TV commercials while driving and most of the Ads don't stay up long enough to read them_ Also if one catches your attention it changes and then you don;t have enough time to sit waiting for it to come on again_

That's friggin' fantastic. Nice hack.

Yes, they exist in Houston, and they are too frack'in bright at night!

We have a few of these here in Tallahassee too. I always wondered how hard one would be to hack. They're just ginormous flat screen tvs so you really could put anything up there.

I agree too that they are a bit bright sometimes, even in the daytime. I wonder how much one costs...

who the heck is skullphone?

We have these around Cincinnati also. They aren't real popular because they are so bright after dark. Personally, I find them uncomfortable to look at due to a blurry image or lack of focus at a distance. Certain shades of blue are painful to see also, but I'm at a loss to explain why.

The constantly changing message combined with the inabilaty to focus/read at distance makes most of the ads useless anyway. By the time I can read it, the message has changed and unless I picked out a well-know logo or other icon, I have no idea who or what was advertised.

Relevant to the post, I think the hack is pretty amusing, as long as no paid advertising was displaced. That would amount to damages I think, so done right this is almost preferable to the punk with a can of spray paint and too much time on his hands.

I thought skullphone was a brand of mobile phone accessories sold at Circuit City. Are you sure this is a hack?

For the record:

Clear Channel Outdoor != Clear Channel Radio

Separate divisions, different business practices. I worked for CCO and it is a great company to work for (beaucoup company-paid parties ftw). While having digital billboards is pretty much asking for it to get hacked, CCO is a much more benevolent company than Radio is. They just get a bad rap for having the Clear Channel name.

Wow, I'm surprised that so many other Houstonians are here chiming in.

Personally, I don't want anything else distracting drivers from the road. The non-Gizmodo-reading Houstonians can't drive for shit as it is.

Why not Goatse?

@Monty: Yeah, website vandalism is fantastic.

Until it happens to a site you shopped online with, then have to wonder how much information they made out with.

After all, if a website gets vandalized, it would be possible or highly likely someone else got in and tried to steal all the nice juicy customer data. Or it may have been done already and someone else decided to make it public... (or someone discovers the vandalized web page, and hacks it to see if there's any data worth stealing...)

Are you sure that this poster is actually NOT just the latest Nokia creative?

[www.dailydooh.com]

It looks suspicously like it to me

@92BuickLeSabre: @bobdobbs: Actually, probably the law about breaking into someone else's property maliciously. It's not like there's just a serial port on the side of the billboard... you probably have to get into the pylon, which is locked. Billboards are usually not installed on public land so you are technically trespassing.

All that aside, this is friggin awesome. Skullphone, you rule.

@Simpsons-Movie-ruled: No you don't. Those things are getting way too distracting. One of these days there's going to be a multi-car pileup because of those things.

These things are all over the place in Las Vegas.
Distracting as hell.
If you thought NEON lit up the night sky, wait till you see these things.

And, they are probably controlled by *some sort*of computer, so the laws against hacking would apply (along with the several other laws mentioned by others).

How long till someone pulls a Fight Club and posts some pr0n in between ads for local attorneys and 5.99 breakfast buffets?

i got to find out where this kid lives or get his email, i want to know how to do this.....so i can hack the one where i live. HA HA CRAZY BILLBOARD CREATORS BOW AT MY AWESOMENESS!