William Couture wrote:
> I take it this was "fool the dorm machines so you get free laundry"?

Yeah.  They put in new Maytag machines that took these fancy plastic ticket=
s
instead of coins.  That was a pain, since now you needed change for the
ticket vending machine, and find a vending machine that wasn't out of
tickets.

The tickets were transparent red plastic with wide black lines on them.
They looked high tech and were just asking to be hacked.  Once I looked int=
o
it, it was surprisingly easy to hack them.  I suspected that some of the
black lines were conductive and others were just decoys.  This was proven
with a little ohmmeter probing.  Then it was a small matter of cutting
cardboard to the right size and drawing the conductive pattern with a #1
pencil.  It worked the first time I tried it.

The cardboard was thinner than the tickets though, and sometimes caused
jams.  That's where Bill's micrometer came in.  Once we knew the thickness
of the real tickets, it wasn't hard to come up with a way to emulate it,
which in this case was two computer punch cards glued together.


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