A number of Silicon Valley crosswalks were hacked to sound like U.S. big-tech broligarchs, according to reports published by local media this weekend. Palo Alto Online reports that folks pressing crosswalk wait buttons in Redwood City, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto areas heard messages featuring Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sound-a-likes. It isn’t just the voices that have been changed - instead of the possibly useful warnings about traffic, vocal caricatures of these famous tech leaders deliver messages laced with satire.
A spokesperson for the City of Palo Alto indicated that the crosswalk button hacking was limited to 12 locations downtown, and probably occurred sometime on Friday. Meanwhile, officials from Redwood City and Menlo Park (the two other areas known to be affected by the hacking) confirmed they were aware of and were working on fixing these voice hacks. However, we don’t have any indication of the number of crosswalks hacked in these other two areas.
