Technology

Yep. Just shell stations around here (so far at least)

They’re super loud and in my experience usually political, think local office smear ads and oil lobbyist propaganda.

Well yeah how else are they supposed to make money? /s

Yeah no it’s real and it’s bullshit. They also have ad signage, but that’s been around my whole life, it just keeps getting worse constantly. I remember boycotting the first company to have gas ads, now I don’t have a no ad choice

Years ago I was talking to some engineers at one of the main gas pump manufacturers. They were venting about their company’s partnership with Verifone. While they used to handle credit card reading themselves in the magnetic stripe days, the switch to chip credit cards and readers in the U.S. meant they were going to partner with an established card reader company and Verifone (at least at the time) was the largest and most established in the new chip technology. Verifone was dominating the partnership and making life difficult for the gas pump company, insisting on all sorts of changes to the devices that weren’t necessary for the gas pump but were going to let them do things like run ads at the gas pump. If the pump manufacturer didn’t go along with it, Verifone seemed to have a very credible threat that they were just going to leave and go to the other main gas pump manufacturer. The gas pump companies needed the card reader a lot more than the other way around.

So, these ads have been a long time coming, but it wasn’t the pump manufacturer that had the idea or wanted to do it.

While I never condone audio speaker violence, I do want to cheer/salute the activism of the person who did the work.

Sometimes it’s multiple presses. Around here for example I find that at my local Shell station it’s the second button down on the right side, two or three times.

If there's an exposed speaker hole, a long enough push pin or coat hangar wire can probably ruin the cone and coil.

Definitely had to resist the urge myself a few times to jam my keys into the speaker when the mute button method didn’t work.

Left side, second from the bottom iirc

I remember when there were a lot more logos on that flag, too

You are a fucking hero. I couldn't figure out why my Roku TVs were still able to get ads after blocking everything.

Make sure you’ve got rules set in your router to redirect Roku’s hardcoded DNS to your custom DNS service.

Some ads can’t be eliminated - for example, if a service delivers ads through the same content servers that the show/movie is coming from.