The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “Change Password”

Re:The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “C... by jerf on Monday March 14, 2022 @03:47PM (#30677283)

Unless they are located in the stairwells at Hogwarts, it does not seem like those names would change often enough to necessitate adding a network connection as a point-of-failure for this sort of technology. (Which I consider the most important aspect. This is life-or-death tech for a subset of our population, and networks are fundamentally unreliable even if you get the security 100% correct.)

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Re:The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “C... by SweetLlamaMyth on Monday March 14, 2022 @03:51PM (#30677343)

Is there an actual indication that these are connected to a network? Depending on how these devices work, some failure may have caused them to get reset to a factory default, requiring a password to be set before accepting settings like a message.

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Re:The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “C... by pessimizer on Monday March 14, 2022 @03:57PM (#30677416)

Why would they all fail at the same time unless they're networked? Exactly the same bug triggered by the system clock?

They shouldn't even know the time. All they need to do is count to the same number over and over.

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Re:The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “C... by SweetLlamaMyth on Monday March 14, 2022 @04:09PM (#30677567)

> Why would they all fail at the same time unless they're networked?

Because temperature swings in the area over the weekend caused some physical issue in the devices? Because someone figured out how reset them, and reset a bunch for laughs? I agree that network is a likely root cause, but it's also an assumption.

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Re:The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “C... by thesh4d0w on Monday March 14, 2022 @04:06PM (#30677525)

Cities do all sorts of syncing / timing of lights in order to optimize traffic patterns, to do that they need a network connection.

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Re:The walk signs in Crystal City, VA are just repeating “C... by pessimizer on Monday March 14, 2022 @04:23PM (#30677765)

Makes sense, but I'm replying to a comment that wondered if the assumption that the lights were actually networked was a good one. I thought it was, because they all went out at the same time.

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