Moscow motorists got quite a surprise on Thursday evening when a giant electronic billboard began showing a two minute clip of hardcore porno. You can see a video of the video here (adult content warning for the prudish). The video looped for about 20 minutes, causing a traffic jam on the busy Garden Ring road near Serpukhov square. Motorists reported that they couldn’t “believe their eyes” when the saw a video which featured “a dark skinned woman having sex with a white man.” Alyona Porkulatova, who drove by the billboard, told AP that she was “so shocked that I couldn’t even shoot video or take a picture of it.” Luckily someone had the constitution to whip out their mobile and start filming.
According to Viktor Laptev, the advertising director of 3StarsMedia, the company that owns the billboard, hackers were to blame for the skin flick. “There was a hacker attack as a result of which a commercial was replaced with an obscene video in the control computer,” Laptev said. “It is unclear whether it was an act of hooliganism or competitors’ intrigues.”
Moscow authorities are looking into the incident and vow to track down the dirty hacker, but I wouldn’t expect them to exert to much effort. When asked about the incident the Prosecutor’s Office told Moskovskii komsomolets: “Pornography? That is administrative issue, a police affair. Call the GUVD (regional internal affairs). What is discussed on the Internet isn’t our concern. According to the law, we have a duty to react only if a citizen submits a complaint.”
But some are questioning whether the prank was really the work of hooligan hackers or just a media virus planted by an advertiser. In an interview on Vesti FM, Irina Matysyak of the Moscow Advertising Guild said that “It is entirely possible that this was some kind of provocation. . . It could have been a virus. Maybe it was marketing. Such things are used in marketing to draw attention to the advertiser.”
Whether it was a hacker prank or a media virus, having a porno loop on a billboard is pretty damn funny. Far better than the usual crap they bombard us with. Plus, I could image a few drivers needing a good scene of the ol’in-out-in-out to ease Moscow’s nightmarish traffic.
