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Even if the traffic lights can't be rotsteted it's relatively trivial for an bad actor to break it in some way and hanging up your permanent green light at night and then watch the chaos.

As gp said: The amount of such bad actors is low. And gains from an individual hack are low and there's a chance of getting caught.



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"Relatively trivial" must be relative. Traffic lights where I am require a cherry picker in the intersection to get at.

This is like hacking servers. If you can get all the way to physical access with the device, of course it's exploitable. But that doesn't actually say a lot about how secure something is.

I imagine the quality of the lights around the world differ. If you can climb up and adjust it, these aren't the kinds of lights I'm thinking of.


Here's some photo evidence from Palo Alto, CA, USA: https://imgur.com/a/NxmphG6. Note how both lights are parallel when they should be perpendicular.

Ah yeah I see now. Very cool. Very different! Ours generally look like this: http://i.imgur.com/m9fAs.jpg

So you'd need some equipment to do anything to them. And that equipment would have to basically shut down the intersection. So do it at 4am and hope that nobody drives by for the half hour you're there.


> Traffic lights where I am require a cherry picker in the intersection to get at.

How hard is it to get a cherry picker? (Check your local tool/construction rental place) What about if you climb on top of a van, or a box truck?


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