4 ms·
pfff, root, back in my day we hacked a vending machine with a lighter and got free coke. No idea who discovered it, but the machine back at my school had an in
by nom 7mo ago
pfff, root, back in my day we hacked a vending machine with a lighter and got free coke.
No idea who discovered it, but the machine back at my school had an infrared interface for servicing, and you could trigger an interrupt with the flash of the flintstone of a lighter. Because it's just some 90s microcontroller, it would simply reset after failing to receive a valid command and forget what it was doing previously.
All you had to do was order a coke, and right when it drops out, before it subtracts the amount, you flash the lighter in front of the IR port like a magician, say the magic words and bam - free coke!
- limit35 7mo agoI used a saline glitch trick in the 90s. I cannot remember the exact sequence of events, but one injected saline into the coin or bill receptacle, which made the sensor believe money was being continuously inserted into the machine. This method had the benefit of clearing the machine of change after purchase since it registered the candy bar was bought with a substantial amount of money.
- thatguy0900 7mo agoClearing the machine of money it already had sounds way more likely to get you into trouble than getting a free coke, I'm not so sure that's a benifit
- chrisBob 7mo agoWe just unplugged our vending machine with similar timing.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoWow. We were like cave men in comparison shaking the machine with 2-3 people to knock a can out of the racking.
- bdjdjdndndb 7mo agoBrave ... Those things can kill
- jibal 7mo agoWe used to get free phone calls in phone booths by sticking an unwound paper clip into the earpiece and touching the other end to the coin box.
- devmor 7mo agoYou could do the same by wearing wool socks and shuffling around for a minute before touching the coin slot!
- ssl-3 7mo agoThat doesn't work very well on a humid day outside in the summer. And the payphones in the city I grew up in didn't operate using ground-start signalling, so the paper clip/safety pin/pull-tab/static trick didn't work there at all. But an innocuous walkman with a cassette tape that had some red box tones on it, with a bonus of having the rest of the cassette available for music to listen to? That worked great.
- jibal 7mo agoThis was in the late 1950's for me, in the San Fernando Valley where summertime humidity was very low. But a few years later the phone company put shields in the headsets so you could no longer puncture the foil.
- ssl-3 7mo agoFair. I'm old enough to remember payphones being completely ubiquitous (with whole banks of them inside of each entrance for one large department store, usually with one or two more outside), but I'm not old enough to remember the 1950s. :) I did find one old phone at a state park not too far out that could be tricked by grounding it, but that was in GTE territory instead of the Ohio Bell BOC that I was more familiar with.
- charcircuit 7mo agoThat is not free, that is stealing. It's like going to a grocery store and calling it a hack that you can walk around the registers and leave without paying.
- 12_throw_away 7mo agoTrue. So sad to think that hackers are exploiting - and yes, there can be no doubt, this is EXPLOITATION - weaknesses in coin-operated services. I weep to think how far has this once-noble vocation has strayed from its roots ...
- Cpoll 7mo agoJohn Draper and his fellow hackers were EXPLOITING coin-operated payphones and switchboards in the 60s, so I'm not sure how far back you have to go to reach the noble vocation you describe.
- 12_throw_away 7mo agowhoosh
- Cpoll 7mo agoOh, yeah, I see it now. Excuse me for being extremely dense. Upvote for you.