I once parked my car on a street with no parking restriction signs anywhere. I went back to the car to get something a few hours later and they were placing signs down the street. As soon as a sign was placed, they would ticket the cars nearby. I moved my car just in time.
With this tech, they could do this at will. Probably correlated with whenever the people running the city want more money.
Give it 6 months and someone will have modified these signs. Probably in a crude, old Nokia phone cabled to the back of the sign, method.
Hopefully it will be seen as a useful signpost (no pun intended) for the ongoing challenge of distributing digital info to an, on average, trusting public.
Don't be surprised if you see some unlimited parking in Sydney next April 1st.
Rule of thumb: If there is no Hollywood film where a terrorist attacks your target, probably neither will a real terrorist.
Also obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/
http://jalopnik.com/5516635/the-secret-of-las-10-year-old-fa...
This is a bit more complex than a regular micro-controlled LCD. There are a number of ways you can drive an e-ink display. Then there are a number of ways you can choose to control such a display remotely. Last but not least, a sizeable chunk of the stack powering these displays is proprietary technology, and has been in development for more than 3 years.
Almost everything is hackable when you have physical access to the system. That's why such systems should detect and report tampering. Something regular traffic signs never did in the first place.
And "more than three years". Oooh. OpenSSL was in development for what, 16 years, and heartbleed happened anyways.
I have no doubt it's a little bit harder than a few weeks with a USB cable and a traffic sign, but assuming they will not be tampered with at some point is not born out by any facts we know about software.