Why United Does Not Allow You To Use In-Flight Screen As Extended Display
For more than a decade, I have traveled with an extra monitor. It is a life-saver for productivity on the go. Plus, if you keep an HDMI cable, you can use
Confidentiality. Or porn. One of those things.
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If it’s wireless someone will be sent porn by the creep 2 rows back.
yeah this whole article was an unnecessary rant which the author realized only after publishing.
Update: A reader writes in with an obvious comment that did not occur to me:
The obvious reason not to let people put things on the screens you own in public is that invariably people will put porn on them, and then you'll have other people complaining that the united screen system is showing porn. They don't say this because no corporate PR hack is going to talk about porn when it's not necessary. But it's definitely the real reason, and it's one they will not and should not budge on.
Ah, the times when all phones and laptops in Tesco were unlocked for testing by customers and playing porn every day.
During the early days of Android phones, when most of them shipped with open bootloaders and still had microsd card slots, I've seen so many store display phones that were flashed with cyanogenmod by random people
Reminds me of the time when I was living in Phoenix and picking up a friend from the bus station. The bus departures came in one big door and right next to the door was one of them new standing internet kiosks that allowed you to browse the internet. This was back in 2003. I was checking it out to see what you could do and where it allowed you to go, when my friends bus came in. I was on goatse.cx and saw my friend and left the kiosk open and we went to leave and noticed many older Hispanic folks freaking out, or laughing as they entered the bus station. The timer ran out on the internet access, but it was a lot of fun with open monitors in public.
Then you'll still have people screencast porn to their own screen, photograph it and post it on social media with a title like "United's in-flight entertainment".
It would be pretty easy to require accepting a screenshare with a button press on the target screen. So I don't think trolling other people's displays is the main concern.
Seems you don’t understand how often people just click ‘OK’ without thinking.
I don’t like how we have to limit everything to the lowest denominator at the punishment of everyone
This is one where it isn't just that though. You know there would be people who'd wait for someone to go to the bathroom or fall asleep and then walk past and hit the OK button for them.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
To be fair, that IS the consequences of their own actions kinda
There's no reason they couldn't expose an HDMI port, or even provide a cable that runs down the seat to the tray table.