The pedestrian crossings of pedestrians in several cities in Silicon Valley were interrupted during the weekend by unauthorized audio messages that strive for the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk and the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, which caused research by local authorities.
According to him BBCThe incidents, reported in Palo Alto, Redwood City and Menlo Park, home from the finish line, involved the replacement of standard pedestrian crossing instructions with already strange satirical greetings that imitated the voices of the two prominent figures.
“You know, they say that money cannot buy happiness and … I suppose that is true. God knows that I have tried,” a message, which is made by the 53 -year owner of Spacex, said, welcoming pedestrians to Palo Alto, where Telsa’s operations are based.
Another Almizcle impersonation offered a Tesla Cybertruck to the pedestrians who agreed to be his friend.
Meanwhile, a false message from Zuckerberg was presented as “El Zuck” and discussed the integration of AI “in each facet of his conscious experience.”
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) confirmed that approximately 10 pedestrian crossings in Menlo Park and Palo Alto were affected.
Pedro Quintana, a Cottrans spokesman, declared that the audio characteristics at these crosses have been disabled, and the activation buttons have been deactivated, which returns to the systems to an operation based on the timer.
Although it is not yet clear who created the messages or how they ended up being played from the crosses, the officials in the affected areas said the engineers were investigating how the crosses were manipulated.
No technology billionaire has commented on the incident.
In addition, the city of Palo Alto reported that at least 12 crosses were affected in the city center.
Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, a spokeswoman for the city, indicated that the city was alerted to malfunction on Saturday and believes that manipulation occurred on Friday.
“The city staff has disabled the audible function until more repairs can be made,” he said. “Other traffic signals in the city were verified, and the impact is isolated.”
Local media also reported that several crosses in the Redwood City area were also pirated to sound like the two billionaires.
