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1995; any technical information is probably outdated.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