NYC, NSFW: Graffitti Artist Uses Public Wi-Fi Terminals For Publicity; Porn

New York City is a haven for artists, and not all of their mediums are conventional ones.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of "street art", the sometimes destructive but often clever ways artists make their mark on the very architecture of the city itself.  Now, with the city offering computer terminals in places where payphones once lurked, it was only a matter of time before someone put the internet's favorite pastime into the public eye...

An un-pornographied wifi portal in NYC.
(Image courtesy fastcolabs.com.)

According to Vice magazine, the artist/miscreant known as KATSU availed himself of one of the city's free wi-fi terminals to stir up some scurrilous sexual content.

As KATSU explained, 

"They definitely have keywords blocked out, like PornHub and those places, but I start searching and I’m like, holy shit I can still do full-fledged Google Image searches for rowdy ass shit. So there’s like crowds of people walking by and I’m looking at galleries of dead insurgents, and pulling up pretty aggressive pornography, and then I’m displaying images of my tags zoomed up, and stepping back, and people are just walking by gazing at them, a bit confused as to why there are big 'KATSU BTM' tags glowing out of these weird-ass giant iPhones."

And we'd thought the OLD versions of these installations were really dirty...
(Image courtesy dailysabah.com.)

Partially done to raise awareness of the ease with which one can tamper with technology, and partially because it's damn hilarious, KATSU was proud of his prank.  He noted that the cameras on the terminals were likely no deterrent to troublemakers, and that the terminals themselves were a strange and oddly ominous sort of experiment to set loose on the public.

"I guarantee that they’re doing some funky thumb printing," KATSU stated.
In a world where we're monitored constantly and where our online odysseys are valuable, marketable materials in their own right, it does bear wondering if the terminals aren't a sort of high-tech tracker of traffic, interests, individuals' movements throughout the city, and other important info that we might not even realize are contributing to a larger metric.  So if someone throws that curve just a little, maybe we're better off if it helps us stay a little less observed and preserved.

Reports indicate that "Safe Search" settings have recently been enacted on all of the terminals.

The Banksy of former phone-banks wants you to be wary of this newfound 'net wealth.
(Image courtesy thecreatorsproject.vice.com.)