Firmware Prank Causes LED Curtain In Russia To Display 'Slava Ukraini'

Alexander Martin reports via The Record: The owner of an apartment in Veliky Novgorod in Russia has been arrested for discrediting the country's armed forces after a neighbor alerted the police to the message 'Slava Ukraini' scrolling across their LED curtains. When police went to the scene, they saw the garland which the owner had hung in celebration of the New Year and a 'slogan glorifying the Armed Forces of Ukraine,' as a spokesperson for the Ministry of Internal Affairs told state-owned news agency TASS. The apartment owner said the garland was supposed to display a 'Happy New Year' greeting, TASS reported.

Several other people in Russia described a similar experience on the AlexGyver web forum, linked to a DIY blog popular in the country. They said at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, their LED curtains also began to show the 'Glory to Ukraine' message in Ukrainian. It is not clear whether any of these other posters were also arrested. The man in Veliky Novgorod will have to defend his case in court, according to TASS. Police have seized the curtain itself.

An independent investigation into the cause of the message by the AlexGyver forum users found that affected curtains all used the same open-source firmware code. The original code appears to have originated in Ukraine before someone created a fork translated into Russian. According to the Telegram channel for AlexGyver, the code had been added to the original project on October 18, and then in December the people or person running the fork copied and pasted that update into their own version. 'Everyone who downloaded and updated the firmware in December received a gift,' the Telegram channel wrote. The message was 'really encrypted, hidden from the 'reader' of the code, and is displayed on the first day of the year exclusively for residents of Russia by [geographic region].'

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