Hackers hijack Egypt highway billboard and Malaysian screens to show porn

Egypt is one of them. There is value in most of the value being in the shock value. Egypt has already done the sorts of things you suggest. It doesn't work. Putting up porn actually makes a lot of sense from a decision matrix perspective here. First of all despite the pretense otherwise Egyptians watch a lot of porn (like most countries). It's sort of a great "in your face" mirror to a country rife with hypocrisy.

It's not like the authorities give much breathing room for more nuanced protest anyway. They're already in for a very unwelcome visit to the slammer if they are caught. Might as well go as transgressive as possible while you still can.

I find it far more offensive that you wouldn't even be able to post this headline without self-censoring in the major social media apps for fear of The Algorithm. How far the internet has fallen.

– for observers on the road, make them more likely to film this and share on social media;

– for news agencies, make them allocate as much coverage as possible for this incident;

– for regular readers, simply to more likely grab theirs attention.

That’s why across the world we should ban blanket advertisements like these. They’re a dumb eyesore.

Porn just exposes what is obviously annoying. But advertisements themselves are a sort of mind-virus you can’t opt out of. I can choose to not buy cable TV. I can’t (reasonably) choose to not walk outside in the public space.

Showing a nice animal or a 'you're welcome' message achieves the goal of removing the ad, but falls short of fixing the root of the problem: the billboard existing. As long as it exists, the temptation and incentive to put ads on it also exists.

> – It was clear what had been done. The media player's cord had been ripped out and its own content had been played.

To me, it's more an act of vandalism than hacking.

We did the same thing back in the 80's.

The scenario was usually "Oh, wow! We got access! What do we do before someone notices in the next ten minutes?!"

Political people want to make statements. Hackers just want their hacks to be noticed.

Currently the yearly global death toll for cars is at 1.16 million and climbing

Ask any cowboy. The fastest way to move a cow is slow.

The trade-offs are worth it and humankind continues to accept those trade-offs. Yea 60+ people died in a train crash. So what? Tens of millions ride high-speed trains on a weekly/monthly basis without any issues. So why would we overreact to anomalies when by and large the technologies we’ve invented are pretty awesome?

I’m no opponent to the “slow life” and I have a lot of critical comments regarding modernity (cars, social media, modernist art) and overpopulation but we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water here.