Moscow traffic grinds to a halt as porn plays on public billboard

Surprised motorists were treated to a 20 minute X-rated film along Moscow's Garden Ring Road, one of the city's busiest streets. Authorities blamed hackers for the insertion of the pornographic video on two giant public video billboards that feature advertisements and product endorsements.

“This was an attack by hackers on the computers, as a result of which one of the commercial video clips was swapped for an indecent video,” Panno.ru commercial director Viktor Laptev told RIA-Novosti. He speculated the attack could have been linked to competition on the advertising market, or simply “hooliganism.”

Witnesses said traffic ground to a halt as stunned motorists craned their necks to stare at the x-rated clip that ran for about 20 minutes on the oversize screens.

The Garden Ring, also known as the "B" Ring, is a circular avenue around the centre of Moscow in Russia. The Ring consists of 17 individually named streets and 15 squares. It has a circumference of 16 kilometres. At its narrowest point, Krymsky Bridge, the Ring has six lanes; at its widest, Zubovskaya Square, it has 18 lanes.

The Ring emerged in the 1820s, replacing fortifications, in the form of ramparts, that were no longer of military value.

(original article appeared @ Digital Journal )