Obscene prank causes traffic jam in Moscow
A video panel over one of Moscow’s major roadways streamed a pornographic video clip instead of commercials on Thursday night. Amused drivers, who took pictures with mobile phones, blocked the traffic.
The company owning the panel blamed unknown hackers for the incident.
“It was a hacker attack on the controlling computer, in which one of our commercials was substituted with the obscene video,” a spokesman for the firm said in a statement.
Read more An police investigation is underway into whether the attack was a pure act of hooliganism or one commissioned by competitors, he said, adding that the operators shut down the screen as soon as they were informed about what it was showing. Earlier version suggested that the company’s own engineers may have been involved in the prank. Dozens of eyewitnesses managed to take pictures and video of the offensive panel, and Russian blogs were soon full of comments on the incident. The episode is far from being world’s first case of obscene material displayed on the street. Even Iran, a country highly intolerant of piquant pictures, faced such a display in 2007 much to the outrage of the authorities and the public. Read also: Russian male prostitutes considered valuable assets
Drivers in the Russian capital, Moscow, were given an unexpected show courtesy of a 30-by-20 foot electronic highway billboard when an explicit pornographic video was played for nearly twenty minutes in place of the paid advertisement clips that are usually shown. The incident happened near the entrance into Serpukovskiy tunnel on Sadovoe Ring Road, about 2 kilometers south of the Kremlin.

"Within three minutes we found it out, and within fifteen minutes the screen was shut off," the deputy head of the Moscow city advertising committee, Alexander Menchuk, said in a statement to Interfax. A passerby told the Associated Press that she was "so shocked that I couldn't even shoot video or take a picture of it."

The display screen's owner, the Three Stars Advertising Agency of Panno.ru, said that computer hackers attempting to execute a practical joke were likely to blame. Viktor Laptev, commercial director for the firm said, "They were either acting out of hooliganism or were from a rival company." 

Although a city official has been quoted as telling local media that Moscow would increase security of data transmission in light of what happened, local police say they have yet to receive a single complaint about the incident, and thereby have not opened an investigation. Nudity on television is officially banned in Russia.