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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.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: 7631 of alt.hackers
From: rroberts@hmc.edu (Roy Roberts)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Electronic Highway Signs
Date: 9 Apr 1995 04:47:49 GMT
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont CA USA
Lines: 26
Approved: is it really this easy?
Message-ID: 3m7otl$gpo@jaws.cs.hmc.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: osiris.ac.hmc.edu
Originator: rroberts@osiris
Status: RO

marlowe@io.com (marlowe) wrote:
> The highway near my house in Houston has just installed those electronic
> highway signs that show up all over the country. To be precise, these are
> permanent, tall, and have bulbs as pixels.

Interesting tidbit: for some reason, those signs (at least those on the Long
Island Expressway) don't operate by turning the bulbs on and off, but
instead shutters are used.  I have no idea why.

> 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."

I seem to remember that some signs of this sort were hacked into within the
last few years.  I also seem to remember that another group successfully
phreaked those roadside emergency phones.

ObHack:
Sorry, this one isn't too impressive: I was transferring some files from
Unix to DOS using the ZIP format, but my DOS unzipper choked on the long
file names.  I ended up changed the filenames in the zip file with a hex
editor.

Roy





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