@kagan @mastodonmigration They should shut these things down and fix the security issue. While I thought what the pranksters actually did was a really funny and harmless prank, playing with traffic control devices could result in an accident and could be done maliciously.

@bzdev @kagan @mastodonmigration I think the voice announcement being shut off entirely by the city is possibly more dangerous than the actual prank if there's no other indication for people who have eyesight problems and need it. However yes security flaws in public infrastructure should be dealt with.

@BreoganHackett @kagan @mastodonmigration I suspect what these cities shut off were the fake announcements and that, regardless of what might have been reported in newspapers (and some of our local ones are run by real idiots), they instead simply restored the announcements to what they should be (like "OK to walk" or "Please wait"). I've met people in one of these city's transportation divisions. They are really nice and want to make things work better for everyone.

@bzdev @kagan @mastodonmigration if they leave the default on the vulnerability is still exploitable so my assumption was they cared more about not having anything like this possible to be played. The only way to achieve it would realistically be disabling the audio cues but I'm not even on the same continent so should probably leave it to those in the area to discuss rather than make any more assumptions. IDK why it can't be something like I hear in my country where there's clicking or beeping.

@BreoganHackett @kagan @mastodonmigration The last I saw in the news media is that they put something over the buttons to indicate that the device is out of service. The cities aren't talking about much else, probably because they are trying to figure out what happened. It's possible someone broke into a computer system, but also that someone opened the boxes and added some hardware. More may come out later.