Pedestrian crossings in several cities of Silicon Valley were disrupted during the weekend by unauthorized audio messages imitating the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk and Meta PDG, Mark Zuckerberg, incited the investigations of the local authorities.
According to the BbcThe incidents, reported to Palo Alto, Redwood City and Menlo Park, which shelters the siege of Meta, involved the replacement of standard pedestrian crossing instructions with satirical and often bizarre greetings imitating the voices of the two prominent characters.
“You know, they say that money cannot buy happiness and … I suppose it is true. God knows that I have tried,” said a message, imitating the owner of 53 years of SpaceX, said, welcoming Palo Alto pedestrians, where TelSa’s operations are based.
Another imitation of musk offered a tesla cybertruck to pedestrians who agreed to be his friend.
Meanwhile, a false message from Zuckerberg presented itself as “the zuc” and discussed the integration of AI “in each facet of your conscious experience”.
California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) confirmed that around 10 pedestrian crossings at Menlo Park and Palo Alto were affected.
Pedro Quintana, a spokesperson for Caltrans, said that the audio features of these passages have been disabled and that the activation buttons have been disabled, returning the systems to an operation based on the timer.
Although it was not yet clear that created the messages or how they ended up being played from level passages, those responsible for the affected areas said that the engineers were investigating the way the crossings were falsified.
None of the two billion technologies commented on the incident.
In addition, the city of Palo Alto reported that at least 12 passages were affected in the city center.
Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, city spokesperson, said the city had been alerted to dysfunction on Saturday and thinks that falsification occurred on Friday.
“City staff have disabled audible functionality until other repairs can be carried out,” she said. “Other traffic lights in the city have been verified and the impact is isolated.”
Local media also indicated that several crossings in the Redwood City region have also been hacked to resemble the two billionaires.
