Update: It has come to our attention that this project was, regrettably, a hoax. We figured as much when we first came across it—it just seemed too good to be true! But the video looked impressively convincing. Turns out it was just a viral trailer for the film Limitless, which we refuse to link to out of principle.New York City’s Times Square could be considered one of the most overwhelmingly intrusive places in the country. It is a glob of flashing, neon advertisements that tower over mobs of tourists and natives alike, assaulting their senses and overloading their minds. It’s the kind of exhausting superficial flashiness that we daydream about replacing with something a little more sensible. Before today, we thought the only solution would be avoidance, but hacker “BITcrash44” on YouTube has come up with a more devious solution: complete takeover.BITcrash44 has devised a way of hacking into Times Squares’ enormous screens using just his iPhone and a homemade transmitter and repeater. Plugging the transmitter into the headphone jack of his phone, he records a message using the camera. To ‘hack’ into the screens, he holds up the repeater and replays the video, disrupting the original content and replacing it with his own. As his magnum opus, he ties the repeater to a red balloon and floats it next to a screen playing movie trailers, broadcasting his image over the streets of New York. BITcrash44 humorously flouts what he calls one of the “most monitored and secured areas in New York City” in his description of the video. We wonder how many people actually noticed, or if at this point people are so desensitized by the bright lights of Times Square that nobody even looks up anymore.Since the tech seems so simple we wonder how easy it would be to replicate, and if one day we’ll see armies of hackers taking over each of the screens in Times Square—a proper response to the seemingly impenetrable invasiveness of such aggressive marketing?