Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuck voices | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuck voices

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And is Seattle, “Jeff Bezos” says the crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime and exhorts you not to tax the rich.

At South Lake Union and University District crosswalks earlier this week:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-crosswalk-...

I love that it played the Bo Burnham "jeff bezos" song - such incredible art.

this is fun.

it seems most of these crosswalks can be configured via app from https://polara.com/ . So either the authentication was leaked or got physically flashed/hacked?

Probably factory defaults exposed to the world

Or a mischievous or disgruntled employee did it, or gave the password to someone.

The manual says the default password is 1234

I've got the same combination on my luggage!!

A few years ago all 4 digit passwords got leaked, better change it!

> SIMPLE WIRELESS PROGRAMMING The iNX is easily programmed using our industry-leading Field Service App, available for iOS® & Android® – no expensive software or proprietary devices required! The app allows technicians to configure system settings and sounds, as well as access actionable data on button counts, flashing cycles, and more.

Security not included!

The S in IoT stands for Security.

I thought it stood for a shorter word.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theinternetofshit/

At work we used to say that “security puts the ‘no’ in ‘innovation’”.

H/t Baggott if he’s reading. ;-)

It can be secure.....

Or it can work.

Not both

Choose two from: security, accuracy, and speed.

And what you actually get is the remaining one?

Lowest price

They said "The app allows technicians to configure system settings and sounds"; They never said the app _doesn't_ allow _non-technicians_ to do the same. What's the big deal?

Hoping it comes to the Flipper Zero.

Someone is either guessing the passwords, which may well be the same all over the city given the number of these devices out there, or cities could just be using the default password of 1234. Yes, really:

https://www.polara.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Polara-iN2...

> PASSWORD ISSUES: The iCCU can be connected to thru Wi-Fi. The buttons can be connected to thru Bluetooth. A. Once Wi-Fi is turned on at the iCCU, the Wi-Fi password is DEFAULT1 (ALL CAPS). B. Following power up, each button will say “change password” every 30 seconds, until the default password is changed. There is one shared password for logging into an iCCU and all PBS connected to it. The factory default password is 1234. Using a Field Service app, use 1234 to log into the iCCU or any PBS the first time, and change the password. This changes the password for all PBS and the iCCU. See Section 5.2 in the Manual for details. C. If the password is unknown, a Password Reset requires a call to Polara Tech Support.

Absolutely random thought semi-related to the topic.

This is one of the better voice clones of Musk but it's still really bad because he never lost his whatever accent, and every voice clone I've heard (mostly the ones on fake Starship launch videos) speaks with perfect American accent.

Something to think about I guess :)

South African accent is the one you're looking for.

Souf Êfrican

Diplomatic immunity!

Sorta, he has a blended accent of upper-class south african that has been americanised.

You will be hard pressed to find south africans with his accent.

For specifics of what I mean, the breathy “â” (as in, a posh british person saying bâth) is present, but so is the american hard-R.

He has a lot of stubbed tones in words like “heart” though which is clearly very south african.

What makes you so sure it’s a clone? I see a lot of impressionists doing Elon and some of them are really good.

I wonder how soon it will be before some company starts renting these out from the city for ad space.

That's actually a genius idea in the worst way possible!

I'll take garbage ads over dystopian "the city implores you to <some thing I probably would have done anyway if left to my own devices>" messages any day.

Yeah, PSAs are dystopian, ads designed to get me to act against my best interests are the sign of a functioning non-dystopian society.

I really do not understand people complaining about PSAs. Like learn some emotional maturity? If you weren't going to do the thing they're asking you not to do, then the message wasn't directed at you and you can go about your day just fine.

Different people have different responses to condescension, perhaps? You probably never even considered that. Consider it next time and be better. Hope that helps.

Ironically, this is such a condescending comment.

I think it was meant to be.

not all sarcasm is trollery?

Fifty four percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level. All effective PSA's must primarily target people who don't understand the world around them, and likely never will.

It's not condescending, because it's not targeted to you.

You are implying that people don't understand the world if their reading level is low?

Maybe your literacy level is high, but perhaps your level of understanding people could be higher.

If your attitude to learning is wrong in a particular way, then reading will only make you more steadfast in your beliefs.

I know what all of these words mean, but not in this particular order.

How does reading make you more steadfast in having a "wrong" attitude toward learning?

If your attitude towards learning is "learning why I'm right", rather than "learning what is true", then you will tend to discard information that conflicts with your preconceptions, and distort all other information into supporting them. Most people do this to some degree, but some people elevate it to an art form.

Sure, it's easy to fall into a trap where accepting new information is hard, and I think most adults are aware that as we age it's important to try and keep an open mind. However, our society currently has an even bigger problem with people who do the opposite. People were taught to "keep an open mind", but haven't been taught what a good source is.

Like everything, you have to find a balance wherein you can accept new information but are choosy about the sources of that info. Otherwise bad data and hidden agendas will have you avoiding basic healthcare because vaccines give you autistic 5g and drinking bleach to kill the imaginary parasites makes more sense than smearing a little cortisone cream on.

A great man once said: "We do our peers, countrymen, students, and children a grave disservice by admonishing them to think for themselves without also giving them the critical thinking tools to do so, for in so doing we foster a culture where "independent thought" is equated with "contrarian thought". This gives rise to an anti-intellectual, anti-science paradigm that supports an idea not because it meets a basic standard of evidence, but rather simply because it opposes established thought. This is worse than the intellectual calcification that stagnant "herd thinking" would give rise to, because it doesn't simply halt progress — it puts it in full retreat."

> You are implying that people don't understand the world if their reading level is low?

I'm not implying anything. I am directly stating that people who can't read well do not, and can not, understand the modern world.

For example, how would someone that reads below the sixth grade level understand the tariff situation, Artificial Intelligence, or Cryptocurrency? Can they make good healthcare decisions, or manage a 401k properly? Can they choose an elected representative who has their best interests, and the interests of our nation in mind? I think not, and furthermore, they will spend their lives as financial prey animals to those who are more capable.

Do you seriously believe something different? Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Perceiving a PSA as condescending is the emotional immaturity being critiqued.

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You probably never even considered that. Consider it next time and be better. Hope that helps.

Well at least you nearly got the point of my comment

Maybe if you tell us what the point is we'll know what the point is?

PSAs earned their dystopianess in every Mao Village where some politic got to rile up the masses to kill the other.

Some British right wing journalist/politician made a splash complaining about health and safety announcements and signs on the underground recently. I think the issue they have is that it's a tacit admission that we have a responsibility to other people, individually and collectively. And not just to those who pay us or who we can benefit from, but to humanity as a whole.

The “see it say it sorted” messages have been fodder for left wing comedians for years. Everyone hates them. Most people ignore them by donning headphones.

This is completely out of touch with my worldview. I've lived in and around London my whole life and, while "see it say it sorted" is a common joke, I've never once heard someone say they dislike them

It's pure noise pollution for the people who don't need to hear it. The rest wont listen anyway.

Remember: Pick up that can!

Did you say thank you today? - A message from VP JD Vance

Reminder: Vandalism of Tesla vehicles or properties is an act of terrorism and is punishable by deportation

Can you de-nationalize and deport American citizens now?.

(that is a thing in at least one country close by)

Apparently so if the executive identifies you truthfully or not as a gang member.

The thing is it doesn’t get across to the bad offenders. My train has adverts imploring you to not graffiti. I bet that has swayed literally zero people to stop marking up the traincar. And yet, someone had to make the useless sign, someone had to print it, someone had to install it on all the trains, and then someone has to replace it when that sign is then defaced.

I think it's because it alters the moral context of the act that you're going to take anyway. If I pick up a piece of litter on my own initiative, that's an act of virtue. If I pick it up after a petty authority tells me to, that's an act of subservience. People get upset at the existence of PSAs because (in this view) they rob them of the ability to act virtuously. Which is not at all a small thing!

Yes, emotional maturity can help, and it also depends on perspective (whether I identify with the author of the PSA). But when the situation gets more complex than picking up litter, I think people forget that this dynamic exists and is important.

I think these PSAs are for kids and people who might not be familiar with the norms (such as tourists), and for that purpose, they’re worth having.

It will be just like the gas pumps.

(Just to be clear, this is sarcasm.) If you're in a city that relies significantly on parking fees for revenue, this might help subsidize a shift away from cars...

I've come across several of these that if you press them enough say "Change Password". I'm guessing they've never had their passwords changed from default.

Great video on how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvVSTlbqEI

Very nice. Totally harmless prank and it clowns on jerks who deserve a good clowning! Hope the pranksters continue and keep it lowkey so they don’t get caught.

The targets of this deserve every bit of shade that can be thrown at them, but unfortunately, this fucks with crosswalk accessibility for the visually impaired.

Not by much though, since "wait" and the tones still play. I suspect most visually impaired people will enjoy this as much as the rest of us.

You can not override the sound feature for the blind

As someone who is moderately visually impaired, I'd be very suspicious of a prompt that had obviously been tampered with. There's one post already in this submission suggesting a "prank" of sending people out into traffic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43670396

All of these machines loudly shout to begin walking before they tell you which intersection is safe. It’s really weird.

That's a fair point, but what is surprising is that - unlike 99% of exploits one has heard about, over the years - these hackers:

• had some civic-mindedness - enough to leave in the initial 'wait!' audio

• chose messages that, while falling short of comedy genius, are amusing and above the level of an adolescent

• didn't include any extremist nonsense

Grading on a curve, that's a lot to be thankful for.

This HN post is seven days old but displayed and ranked as if it was posted 9 hours ago, with all timestamps falsified. The déjà vu effect is disconcerting and an absolute mind fuck. Please stop doing this, ffs. The person who thought this would be a good idea is a madman.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%20crosswalk%2...

How is it technically possible?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (specifically, this post can be found on page 8: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43673425)

Can confirm. Once dang pinged me directly by email saying that my story was re-upped. The story went again to the frontpage and the date was adapted (IIRC), but the comments were kept:

---

Hi denysvitali,

The submission "PostmarketOS-Powered Kubernetes Cluster" that you posted to Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352075) looks good, but hasn't had much attention so far. We put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page some time in the next day or so.

This is a way of giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Let us know and we won't do it again.

Thanks for posting good things to HN!

Daniel (moderator)

Wild! I definitely remember commenting on this last week and sure enough my comment shows below as “8 hours ago” (while I was asleep). What kind of sorcery is going on?

HN has a "second chance queue" for posts that the powers-that-be believe could've/should've gotten more attention but didn't. Happened to one of my posts once, which was confusing as all hell at first but made sense once I learned about it.

Feature in search of a problem

Not really. Interesting posts can get buried easily just because they were posted at a bad time and people don't delve that far into the second or further pages. It's been going for almost 9 years now. I think it's a good idea.

Ok but why do they falsify all the comment timestamps?

Probably a limitation of the hotness/sorting algo.

To complete the illusion of freshness I guess. I don't see a big issue with doing that as part of the feature.

The big issue is you reply to a comment from an hour ago but never get a reply, because that comment was actually made two weeks ago and the original commenter is not reviewing those old posts for new replies. This leads to a silencing of discussion in the worst way where one party has no idea they aren’t getting heard and the other party has no idea they are being spoken to.

Without changing the timestamp, you couldn’t reply at all, and the upvotes/recency ranking wouldn’t work appropriately for old comments vs. new ones.

I was wondering about that not knowing exactly how age affected the ranking of comments. Does seem like it'd be way easier to just fake the whole thing. I wonder if they show up as newer in the individual users' comment views too?

Deliberately putting bogus timestamps on user actions seems fraudulent. I do not want this website to say I did something minutes/hours ago even though I wasn't even here in a week's time. I think this should be illegal, and it probably is in parts of the world according to some GDPR statute. You can't display made-up facts about a user. It's insane in any case and it triggers unpleasant psychological effects when it happens.

Everyone here is obsessed with putting the correct year in post titles for some reason, but falsifying the timestamps of entire comment threads is okay and defensible?

The fact that previously undiscovered posts sometimes get upvoted and make it to the front page after getting their "second chance" demonstrates the feature's utility.

You see that all the time with social media and reposts though. Sometimes the reposts hit sometimes not. In either case falsifying the record and making it seem like there is active discussion when most of the original comments have moved on already is a bit of a stupid feature.

Second chance queue is basically dang getting unilateral authority to be an empowered reposter and probably looking at internal data when the site is most active to drop the stale post back in.

But this should not change the time when the thing (comment, link) has been posted, should it?

Yea that’s what I found surprising: the re-timestamping of the article and the comments.

The system is described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25061616

I agree that it shouldn't, but for whatever reason (possibly a limitation of HN's underlying software, or for algorithmic/engagement reasons) it does.

It does so that the ranking algorithm still works appropriately, and so that you can still reply, which otherwise you can’t for a day-old comment.

Political satire is the best form of satire, but someone should hack them in the other direction too.

The other direction lacks sense of humor.

"Walk into traffic and be unburdened by what has been."

I guess that's funny because it's a thoughtful statement juxtaposed against the mindless, idiotic rhetoric of the other side? I'm sure she's said things that were actually dumb. it's just funny to me that something actually kind of poetic and deep gets so much hate.

Like what, making fun of poor disenfranchised people instead of rich people with vast power?

What would be an example of ‘the other direction?’

high pitch?

pun intended.

If we could not fuck with accessibility devices which disabled people rely on, that'd be great. Thanks.

Were you severely inconvenienced by this hack? If so, how?

One does not have to be harmed by an action to be able to call out that it would have harmful impact.

No harmful impact has been called out.

Not explicitly, but

> which disabled people rely on

is pretty clear implication. But I'll spell it out for you - people with impairment to senses (primarily vision) rely on this infrastructure to know when it's safe to cross a road.

These devices will also often indicate their location when you hold the button. That can help a visually impared person confirm that they're oriented correctly. That use case is likely why these are field programmable; factory programming would be sufficient for limited prompts (wait, begin crossing, count down, clicks and whistles, etc) but not for street names.

As far as the messages I heard, they still announce whatever they should - just with zucks voice and sarcasticly and extra text. But I haven't listened to everything, maybe they did significantly impact someone's life.

I'd prefer to hear an actual example over broad outrage tho

I don't agree that "If we could not fuck with accessibility devices which disabled people rely on, that'd be great. Thanks." can be classified as "broad outrage".

---

It can be simultaneously true that "this particular incident resulted in no actual harm (because the prank messages still usefully conveyed the required information)" and "messing with accessibility devices has the potential to cause harm, and it would be preferable for well-intentioned pranksters to direct their efforts elsewhere".

In particular, I'd still push back on a claim that these messages were still useful because they conveyed the same instruction. Someone relying solely on this announcement (without the ability to visually verify the situation) might have reasonable cause to doubt whether the announcement is still trustworthy. After all, they might reason, if a prankster is able to change the message, might they also able to change the playback conditions? Or might they be able to switch the "don't walk" and "walk" announcements? Anything which causes the UX to deviate from the known, reliable, trustworthy pattern introduces significant trust-costs.

It sounds like they still make the normal/expected sounds. So kudos to the pranksters for keeping them safe and available for the people in need of accessibility.

The expected sounds are mark Zuckerberg talking about AI for 20 seconds?

No, no kudos to anyone who fucks with safety devices to make some point of theirs.

The expected sound is the "WAIT!" voice, which you can clearly still hear. Anything in addition to that is of zero detriment to the accessibility of the system.

And you know this how? Because your gut tells you?

Because TFA includes videos with sound showing the actual crosswalk signals are present at before the "PSA" plays.

If "your gut" is a synonym for "the multiple videos in the actual article", then sure.

How is it impacted?

Deviant Ollam has a video with clips from the crosswalks. He also mentions the accessibility is not impacted. Worth a watch if you haven’t heard the AI impressions.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=woQEJ_fY8Mw

That being said at least in one case “The pedestrian push buttons have been deactivated and crosswalks are currently operating on a timer”.

Isn’t needlessly disabling the safety device on the authorities though?

SV road signs are constantly covered in graffiti. They don’t just take them down until a replacement arrives.

Don’t be such a killjoy. It still makes sounds.

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