TV-B-Gone

The fight-back begins: a device for turning off any TV in the vicinity (via ArtsJournal):

The idea for TV-B-Gone was born at a restaurant in the early 1990s, when Altman and his friends kept paying attention to a TV in the corner, not to one another. They chatted about how to turn off all televisions, and he wondered if it would be possible to string together a series of "power" commands.

After that, the project would have disappeared, but Altman's friends wanted the tools. He said about 50 people volunteered to help design, package and even name the TV-B-Gone. [...]

The European model, which uses different codes from the American-Asian one, was field-tested at EuroDisney, where anti-TV activist and computer programmer David Burke was waiting with his 6-year-old daughter to get on a ride called Honey I Shrunk the Kids. A wall of TVs in the waiting room showed a loop of constant Kodak ads. Burke had prototypes in his bag and made a bank of screens go off with one click. [...]

Altman said people who hear about TV-B-Gone start thinking about other nuisances. Friends have asked for ways to jam cell phones, shut down vehicle subwoofers and kill car alarms.