This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in
1995; any technical information is probably outdated.
Parent
Re: Electronic Highway Signs
Article: 7646 of alt.hackers From: jwa@ecosys.nbs.nau.edu (James W. Abendschan) Newsgroups: alt.hackers Subject: Re: Electronic Highway Signs Date: 12 Apr 1995 17:20:01 -0700 Organization: Northern Arizona University Lines: 54 Approved: Hi Gail :-) Message-ID: 3mhqnh$e7n@ecosys.nbs.nau.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: ecosys.nbs.nau.edu Status: RO
In article <3m2i6g$c6b@anaxagoras.io.com>, marlowe <marlowe@io.com>
wrote:
>Still it has got me wondering, is there anyway to hack one of these? How
>are they programmed. Others in town have highway conditions on them.
>How to the official types communicate with the sign? Radio? Phone? Direct
>connect?
>
>Hacking one of these puppies would be a tremendous feat. Can you imagine
>the sign printing, "Honk if you like to kill Bill G...General
Protection
>Fault."
Ah, to be young and foolish again..
Back in "the days", I was um, wardialing a the prefix owned by
Arizona State University. While going through the scans, I
found a strange system answered at 300 baud, and answered
to single-letter commands. One of them was "L" .. and the output
looked something like this:
>L
1: .........GO TEAM GO............
2: ...........GO SUNS.............
3: ......ARIZONA STATE............
and so forth. So, being the silly bastard that I am, I did some
creative editing:
1: ..NANCY REGAN DROPS ACID.....
2: ....KILL THE FACISTS.........
Oh, the fame. Made the local paper. When asked to comment about
possible perps, the local police had this bit o' wit to say:
"Anyone with a phone is a suspect."
Ah, to be young and foolish again..
But that doesn't really count as an ObHack. Maybe this will, kinda:
ObHack: writing my own list server. Someone I work with wants
to be able to send out information via email, but doesn't have
a list of addresses to send them to. The solution, obviously,
is to get them to subscribe themselves to a listserv. However,
having no inclination to go install some majordomo thingamabob,
I figured I'd just write my own up. Seems to be working well--
plus, it saves the subscription information in a colon-deliminated
field, making it easy to import it into their DOS-based databases.
Just stuck the file on our PC-NFS server, and "viola," data ripe
for mass-mailing. (But at least it's to *interested* parties!)
James
--
james abendschan jwa@nau.edu back to your quiet nightmares
<a href="http://www.nbs.nau.edu/~jwa">Zero Funk
Kick</a>
Parent