A bad way to protest

In the big cities, crosswalks are equipped with those little buttons pedestrians can press to request a light change, and that also have speakers to announce which direction is safe to cross, a safety feature for blind people. Even little Morris has a set of these at one intersection, at 4th and Atlantic, if you’re ever in the area and want to gawk at our advanced technology.

It turns out that some nefarious people have figured out how to hack the message that comes out of the speakers.

On April 12, 2025 the top story on the Palo Alto (California) online news site was “Silicon Valley Crosswalk Buttons Apparently Hacked to Imitate Musk, Zuckerberg Voices” It told the story, covered by other media too, of how someone hacked into audible pedestrian signals so they broadcast messages such as “From undermining democracy, to cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop, to making the world less safe for trans people, nobody does it better than us – and I think that’s pretty neat..”

The Palo Alto Online story continued by sharing 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.”

There’s a glaring hole in this story and in all the reporting I’ve seen about this “hack.” The missing piece is this: Those signals have a voice announcements (and capability for audible output) because they are accessible signals that the blind community across the country have advocated and fought for for decades.

Can you tell which street is safe to cross from that message?

I’m ashamed that that sounds like an anti-Zuckerberg message that a Leftist might make. Don’t do that, people. It’s insensitive and hurts the innocent.