What you need to know
- Currently under construction, the Hotel Fontainebleau has a large LED sign to advertise on the Las Vegas Strip.
- The LED sign displayed a Windows Desktop on the night of October 21st.
- Technical issues like this show the ubiquity of Windows and offer free advertising for the operating system.
As we move closer and closer to a future where Bladerunner meets Cyberpunk 2077 and these corporations invest in enormous LED signs to captivate and advertise to the masses, it's always funny to see the cracks in the corporate visage show through.
X (Twitter) user @ShawnTempesta posted some images of the humble Windows operating system powering this enormous and expensive LED sign and thanks to this post from @MaximumVegasYT on X (Twitter) we know this isn't the first time this sign has displayed a Windows desktop either.
Are large LED displays the future for city skylines?
It's hard to argue against the effectiveness of displaying a large advertisement for the city of Las Vegas to see. Just last week, Xbox effectively advertised some of their newest and most popular games on the Las Vegas Sphere. This advertising choice had a large effect online, reaching far beyond the geographical location that the Sphere occupies. When looking at the Las Vegas Sphere and now the quite large LED sign being tested for the under-construction Fontainebleau hotel, it's exciting and a bit worrying as the comparisons to dystopian sci-fi movies such as Bladerunner and Minority Report come to mind.
With the success of the Sphere in Las Vegas, MSG announced a second Sphere is being built in London. These types of buildings and signs offer great spectacle but as we see from the Windows desktop showing on the Hotel Fontainebleau, we still have quite a way to go before we catch up to flying cars and personalized advertisements as we see in a lot of sci-fi movies.
The cyber-security side of my brain immediately jumped to the fact that if this sign is running Windows, it could be a lot more susceptible to vulnerabilities and defacement by hacktivists than if it was a more secure operating system. Even the fact that the world now knows what operating system it is using makes it more of a target. Who knows maybe we will see a Just Stop Oil defacement on the Fontainebleau sign in the future.
Would you want a Sphere or large LED sign in your city? Do you think these billion-dollar corporations should use a bespoke operating system for these signs? Let us know in the comments.
