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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

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>



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