CENTRAL POINT, Ore. – Some pedestrians in Central Point were met with something strange Tuesday when using a particular crosswalk. One of the automated-voice crosswalks, right in downtown, was hacked and led to an odd message.
When pressing the button to cross at North 3rd Street and East Pine Street, instead of a voice letting pedestrians know when to cross, pedestrians heard another message.
“English or Spanish? I hereby declare that anyone who moves within a 100-meter radius is gay.”
Central Point Public Works Director, Matt Samitore reacted to the hack, “there’s the whole spectrum of, ‘oh my gosh. What happened here? How is this happening?'”
It apparently first started Tuesday afternoon with goat screaming sounds but later changed into the strange voice message.
Apparently, it’s a TikTok trend. I showed it to my kids, and they were the ones who told me this is a TikTok sound that has been going pretty viral.
Samitore says those particular poles are new from last spring. They work off of a Bluetooth enabled device and they suspect someone hacked into the system.
“Mainly because I don’t think the password was that difficult to get into. That being said, as soon as we found out that that was the case, our IT department came in, we quickly disabled it. ”
Central Point Public Works wants it to be known that the lights themselves were not tampered with, so if anyone needed to safely cross the street they could have. Nonetheless, the department apologizes as Samitore said, “this is a safety feature; this is definitely [not meant] to offend anybody. And it’s supposed to just really enhance the pedestrian movements in downtown, so we wanted to make sure we got it shut down as quick as possible.”
The department assures the problem is dealt with, there were no other affected crosswalks, and the department will be more prepared if anything similar occurs in the future.
Samitore said, “our IT department and our electrician got together and implemented much more robust safety features that are now in place.”
Public works said at the end of the day, it was a minor issue and wants to remind the public that they can reach out to the city’s non-emergency police department line to notify them for similar situations. That number is (541) 664-5578.
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