New logo for Elon Musk’s social network strobes over San Francisco neighbourhood, prompting complaints and mobilising building inspectors
New logo for Elon Musk’s social network strobes over San Francisco neighbourhood, prompting complaints and mobilising building inspectors
In the US, you would get arrested or shot before meaningfully changing the symbol. In the Czech Republic, an artist group did just about that on the president’s residency and faced no charges.
Just bring a clipboard and reflective vest, nobody will bother you. It’s like a cheat code for unauthorized access.
Why the downvotes? It’s true. It does not work all the time (taking down Elon’s “𝕏” is too daring) but you can avoid suspicion 90% of the time. That’s how I stole neodymium magnets from a public noticeboard using a reflective vest, a random timetable printout and a screwdriver. (They had switched to glued-on notices anyway so the magnets were left unused in a corner, and playing with magnets makes my inner kid happy.)
Standard r/ActLikeYouBelong stuff
That’s basically what the artist group did. They pretended to be construction workers on the scaffolding (including hard hats), turning the ❤ into a ❓by adding a lamp and covering the left half.
They also pretended to be electric repairmen, replacing pedestrian traffic light symbols with people in weird positions (peeing or tripping), and as roof tilers at Prague Castle again, replacing the 100-year-old presidential flag with a pair of giant red shorts to caricature our then-president’s pro-Russian views and shamelessness. Very cool and chaotic neutral, which I approve. (Username czechs out)
If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid. Interesting stuff in that wiki article and a ballsy move with the faked nuke video. That’s not something I’d want to have to defend in court, particularly if people think it’s real and injure themselves or others in a panic. Anyone seeking to follow in their footsteps should pay attention to the old advice: Czech yourself before you wreck yourself.
Unlike first world countries, our citizens never received training on how to act in case of nuclear blast. There are bunkers but few people know where they are and how to access one, and nobody has any in their backyard. We have sirens that officials could use to broadcast emergency messages and tell people what to do but they obviously weren’t activated. So the only thing that happened was several distressed old people calling the station.
Tbh the camera was asking to be hacked. Somehow they knew that its broadcast equipment was in an insufficiently secured building and the connection between the camera and transmitter was unencrypted, plain old PAL video. For the hack, they only needed to capture some normal video from the cam or film a nearby location, edit it, store it on a portable video player (they used a laptop with perhaps a video-out peripheral but most digital cameras from back then will do), gain entry to the facility, connect the player, and use a portable analog TV and ordered list of cycled-through locations in the Panorama program to press play at the right moment. About as technically advanced as something I could do if I had the balls, lol. Needless to say, all remote cameras were upgraded to digital soon after that.
Pretty cool, nice to know that it at least gave the people in charge a reason to make some upgrades. As for the panic thing, I was thinking more about the actions of those who would take it at face value and try to “settle some scores” or raid the local
Wal-Martsupermarket before the next bombs fell on their heads. We’ve got a lot of people and there’s a percentage of the population who will choose to do the dumbest possible thing at the drop of a hat.The artists did have the courtesy of including their URL at the bottom of the screen so people who knew about the Internet knew it was fake. Also if the sirens did not activate on their way to the supermarket (don’t say Walmart if you mean a general supermarket pls), they would reconsider. Anyway, not many people actually watch a program that is literally just mountain panoramas and weather information, the geopolitical situation was quite stable back then, and anyone with a bit of common sense would realize that the Giant Mountains would not be a prime target for any attack.