vaxvms Posted for security breaching. Please don’t get political. https://www.theverge.com/news/647830/crosswalk-hack-musk-zuckerberg-voices-california Crosswalk buttons in at least three California cities appear to have been hacked this weekend to give them the seemingly AI-generated voices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In videos posted online, the apparent voice of Musk begs listeners to be his friend, or that of Zuckerberg brags about “undermining democracy” and “cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop.”
HELLFIRE Love to know the make/model of these crosswalks. I’m wondering if this is the equivalent of “looking up the manual online, finding the default passphrase is 0000, and some latenight beer-fueled antics.” Case in point – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4518092/Zombies-ahead-warns-electronic-road-sign.html … Authorities haven’t figured out how pranksters access the signs. Mr Gasaway believes the Illinois sign was changed remotely, and Sara Hartley, a spokeswoman for Austin Public Works, said she suspected that hackers there cut a padlock to get into the signs’ computers. Some Web sites, such as Jalopnik.com, have published tutorials titled “How to Hack an Electronic Road Sign” as a way to alert security holes to traffic-safety officials. Jalopnik urges its readership of 2.6 million a month not to put its lesson to practice. … Regards
Rook At the very least, this is kind of funny and a case of hacking that didn’t result in money or identities being stolen.
egeezer Somewhat-Reticent Over-built or over-fancy for crosswalks? For blind people, they can be quite useful. Based on the recordings, the audio to walk/don’t walk prompts were still being sounded.
HELLFIRE HELLFIRE Love to know the make/model of these crosswalks. I’m wondering if this is the equivalent of “looking up the manual online, finding the default passphrase is 0000, and some latenight beer-fueled antics.” Question answered : https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/19/us_crosswalk_button_hacking/ – Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234 … The hacked crosswalks all appear to come from a common source: Polara, America’s leading manufacturer of pedestrian signal systems. When working properly, the signals usually say things like “wait,” “walk,” or “walk light is on.” There are hundreds of thousands of these devices deployed across the country, installed and maintained by municipal governments and contractors. The hardware is built to be simple and durable, while the software controlling it is a basic industrial system accessed via Bluetooth. All of it can be managed using the Polara Field Service app, which until recently was freely available on both the Google Play and Apple App Store. Unsurprisingly, it’s now been pulled from both platforms - almost certainly in response to the recent wave of hijinks. Polara made the app public for convenience and so customers wouldn’t need to buy a proprietary device to configure crosswalk units, which is either a good idea or a lost revenue opportunity depending on how you look at it. But it did make it easy for pranksters to get their hands on it. After installing the app, and linking the smartphone to a nnearby crosswalk system via Bluetooth, the user can configure the spoken messages triggered by button presses, adjust the signal timing, and install language packs - in this case, AI-generated voices, it seems. Noted hacker Deviant Ollam broke down how all this works in a video last year, which you can see below. Youtube video However, getting in requires a password – and anybody who’s worked in security can see where this is going. As Polara’s own documentation states, the default passcode is 1234 and it’s up to the purchaser to change that in production. … Regards
Somewhat-Reticent Put in more capacity than necessary, allow default, publish handy app - ah. Any (future) option to select language on approach/request(s)?
vaxvms Hacking might explain why one of the ones in my area announces “Yellow lights are flashing. Drivers may not stop.”
telcodad broknsymetry Yellow is just a shade of green. When a kid was asked what do the different traffic signal colors mean, from observing his parents’ driving, he said: "Green means go, red means stop and yellow means speed up! 🙂