All you kids in the US

Have you ever tried to do something like this?


And by "this" I mean reprogramming sign as the one above? Apparently it's quite easy. All you need is get your hands on the controller, write default password (if it's changed, resetting it takes 2-3 seconds) and be creative.

Today (and yesterday, for the record) at my University takes place Infoshare conference. Long story short - bunch of geeks meet and talk about new, cool things that happened in the last year and what new features are in the business. I won't bore you with tech stuff like Glassfish, web apps for mobiles and disputes about creating Silicon Valley in our local playground, but in the schedule there's one lecture for normal people - "Hacking ATMs." But advices how to hack those poor machines wasn't the only subject of the 1.5h talk. Apart from that we had some advices on social engineering and how to get free stuff this way.

For sure most of people just want to use ATMs, phone booths (if such still exist in ones country), but there are always those, who think "what will happened if I push this button." It's a kind of challenge, to see if you're able to get that free can of Cola (unfortunately the most you can do is change the welcoming text; but there's always brute force) or open a padlock. As for the latter... I know, which laboratory has laptops and that kind of protection. So next week I'm taking a pen or toilet paper (yes, this also works) and we'll see if I have spare notebook after classes. Opening padlocks is also tempting. Unfortunately skeleton keys are kind of illegal here, so I have to stick to other things to satisfy my curiosity.

ps. I know it's Friday, but people wearing paper bags with "502 Proxy Error" and "No Image" is just too much.

ps2. English punctuation is weird. However there two other languages, which are even more creative - Norwegian and Spanish.