4 ms·

Google did find some clever way to stop it working. The article says within hours of the commercial being reported on, it had stopped activating the device.

• jacquesm 10y ago
  Easy to make an exception for that particular pattern but that doesn't stop someone else from doing this again. The more successful a medium is the bigger the chance that it will be abused for the equivalent of spam. Burger King is acting like those two lawyers that wrote a how to spam guide ('How to make a fortune on the information superhighway').
  • afandian 10y ago
    Don't know what you mean by "that" in your comment, but fingerprinting all requests (which they probably already do) and then looking for elevated rates is surely a generalisable pattern?
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      Good one, the simultaneous hits should trigger a block. Hadn't thought it through.
      • afandian 10y ago
        Makes you wonder what else they could do (in theory). cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator
  • vlucas 10y ago
    Actually I think this is quite effective at stopping companies from doing this in the future. Why dump millions of dollars into creating an ad and paying for TV airtime when Google can just shut you down within hours?
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      Well, I didn't hear that ad and yet, we're talking about it. That's got to be worth something. Likely only because it is the first time though.