Zoe Morgan pens this amusing story for local news site Redwood City Pulse (and for Palo Alto Online, Mountain View Voice, Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine…):

Crosswalk buttons along the mid-Peninsula appear to have been hacked, so that when pressed, voices professing to be Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk begin speaking.

“Zuckerberg” and “Musk” say several hilarious and quite unflattering things about themselves (all of which sound perfectly plausible to me) and I applaud the merry pranksters for the billionaire takedown and act of civil disobedience. I initially wondered how the crosswalk signs were accessible to hackers and how long they knew of a vulnerability, only to learn that these crosswalk devices are standard issue hardware, use Bluetooth and a smartphone app to configure them, and can be configured in the app, to quote the marketing site, “from the comfort of your vehicle.”

Mind blown.

My only question now? Why did these pranksters choose to greenlight this droll bit of defiance now, and for this purpose? The backstory on this one will be fun to learn.

Of course, as an inveterate killjoy, I must also note this:

City of Palo Alto spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor said that city employees determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted and have disabled the voice announcement feature on the crosswalks until repairs can be made.

The crosswalk audio helps people—especially those who are sight-impaired—know when it’s safe to cross. Hacking the audio made these intersections funnier, but less safe, and the city’s quick decision to disable rather than fix them reeks more of a concern over the reactions of Musk and Zuckerberg than of a desire to restore safety. To quote one Mastodon wag:

How considerate that the city disabled the hacked crosswalks to save two billionaires embarrassment. I’m sure the larger number of people who rely on those systems for safety won’t mind risking life and limb so that the egos of two billionaires are protected, because that is what’s really important.

I hope the affected cities restore proper audio quickly and patch the access issues soon.

But the prank did make me laugh out loud.