It's cool but obviously fake. Why the hell would a video signal be coming out of the headset port?
Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
61–70 of 70 posts
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#62I just confirmed that it's a hoax with someone at a company that owns screens in Times Square.
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#63I dont buy it, a Giant screen a'la times square is not just a scaled up TV. The "repeater" would need to be where the video controller hardware was housed. I'm guessing here, but I doubt that its directly behind the display like it is on the flat screens in a sidewalk kiosk. I also agree that the multi screen displays are controlled by external signal sources that handle splitting the source up.
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#64We would have heard of this here in NY if this was real. Gimme a break....
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#65Several comments on the Youtube page say it's fake, chiefly because the iPhone jack cannot output video. Is this true? If so, is it possible he wrote an app with special drivers to pull this off?
Yes, it's possible. See project HiJack: http://eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/
Looks like Square (http://squareup.com) to me.
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The odds of it being real are not looking too good. Apart of all the handwaving on how the override work, there's many others technical issues with it. For example, videos played from the camera roll wouldn't be outputted to the audio jack.
Also, the digital "interference" shown during the transitions is pretty, but it's not technically feasible... Sometimes it has horizontal scanlines, sometimes vertical, sometimes scaled chunks, etc. There's no codec or transmission method that would have artifacts like that. This is just someone showing off their After Effects skills.
This is the part that instantly convinced me it's fake.
While I'm no codec expert, pretty much any real-world transport stream I can think of would either start losing macroblocks or, most likely, drop to black, and the new stream would start with the first full keyframe. The effect shown in the video appears to be the product of imagination fueled by a conflation of digital artifacting (rectilinear dropouts), analog artifacting (flickering, crosstalk, snow), and even CRT physics (lateral distortion).
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#6799% chance this is just a Photoshop. The blog is about "visuals", not hacking or computer security, and I doubt that being a graphics designer is the key to figuring out how to transmit video to a Times Square video screen.
Is the video stream even accessible via the headphone jack? That would be news to me.
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The odds of it being real are not looking too good. Apart of all the handwaving on how the override work, there's many others technical issues with it. For example, videos played from the camera roll wouldn't be outputted to the audio jack.
Also, the digital "interference" shown during the transitions is pretty, but it's not technically feasible... Sometimes it has horizontal scanlines, sometimes vertical, sometimes scaled chunks, etc. There's no codec or transmission method that would have artifacts like that. This is just someone showing off their After Effects skills.
for me, the tell was that at some point, the video was stretched horizontally and a bit later, stretched vertically.
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds fake to me, this is not possible with the iPhone through default software and even with a jailbreak there is no way you could ever cram the video through the headphone jack, you would have to play it back through a very specialized app, that would need to compress it down to an unrecognizable mess and you still would have to figure out a way to push it to the screens. Not possible IMHO.
I know on the old iPod's with video out you could get an RCA cable that went from 3.5 mm to AV cables: http://www.macworld.com/article/149335/2005/11/apple_ipod_av...
That looks to be because the jack is an AV jack, not just a simple headphone jack, where the connectors are arranged such that when you plug headphones into it they only make connection with the audio part but when you have the right cable (with a much longer connector with more segments) it would make connection with both audio and video out, but each have their own separate physical connectors.
Re: Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the digital "interference" shown during the transitions is pretty, but it's not technically feasible... Sometimes it has horizontal scanlines, sometimes vertical, sometimes scaled chunks, etc. There's no codec or transmission method that would have artifacts like that. This is just someone showing off their After Effects skills.
This is the part that instantly convinced me it's fake. While I'm no codec expert, pretty much any real-world transport stream I can think of would either start losing macroblocks or, most likely, drop to black, and the new stream would start with the first full keyframe. The effect shown in the video appears to be the product of imagination fueled by a conflation of digital artifacting (rectilinear dropouts), analog…
The irony, of course, is that if he didn't have those transitions -- if, for example, he had actually built such a device -- the video would be much less convincing because it would look too good. Instinctively, we feel a small, hacked-together device should have visible difficulty commandeering a giant screen.