from Hacker News

I broke IKEA (2023)

by jcurbo on 2/19/24, 11:59 PM with 58 comments

  • by twothamendment on 2/20/24, 2:30 AM

    Long ago I got a Psion Series 5. One feature was that it could dial a phone number (output the DTMF) for you. Messing around I've day I realized a contact could have a very long phone number. This was also back in the day when answering machines existed and many had a 2 digit code you could punch in to get into the menu from the outside line.

    My contact called Answering Machine had a very long phone number that got me into more than one answering machine. Once in, it was fun to change their outgoing message. One friend was convinced that I must have climbed the back of his apartment building to get in the open 3rd story window to change the message. That would have been cool, but a string of DTMF was much easier!

  • by skykooler on 2/20/24, 2:32 AM

    I read the text first, then listened to the audio, and was shocked at how good that transcription is.
  • by wrs on 2/20/24, 3:22 AM

    As someone who’s had some incidents with DSP code, the end of the recording sounds like it may be playing some part of memory that isn’t an audio buffer. I wonder if there’s actually a “DTMF injection” possibility here…
  • by isoprophlex on 2/20/24, 6:24 AM

    That Windows alert sound in between the glitching binary-dump-as-audio sounds was just too funny.
  • by darkwater on 2/20/24, 2:53 PM

    Off-topic but TIL about CoHost and Anti Software Club [1]

    [1] https://antisoftware.club/

  • by throwanem on 2/20/24, 2:03 AM

    I'd love to know how that PBX is set up.
  • by Severian on 2/20/24, 2:19 AM

    Haha, awesome. Would be good to get the uncompressed audio, I bet you could decode that binary stream into bytes.
  • by hoc on 2/20/24, 1:35 PM

    That modem comms sound is IKEA's backhacking attempt. Much more advanced than touch tones.

    Beware!

  • by Kalabasa on 2/20/24, 6:20 AM

    I like how they can animate their posts in this cohost social networking site. (See the transcript section)
  • by jakedata on 2/20/24, 2:12 AM

    ...and I hope you've learned to sanitize your DTMF inputs
  • by apimade on 2/20/24, 8:35 AM

    I wonder if those sounds are they sounds of bits/byte data. There’s some regularity to it so it’s likely somewhat structured.
  • by wackget on 2/20/24, 3:19 AM

    Website doesn't like it if you block third-party content (using uMatrix). It loads and then disappears a few seconds later.
  • by RichieAHB on 2/20/24, 12:01 PM

    The last 15 seconds sounds like it hit the runout groove on the IKEA phone system vinyl!
  • by pavel_lishin on 2/20/24, 2:00 AM

    I'd love to know what actually happened back there.
  • by iAMkenough on 2/20/24, 2:11 AM

    Brilliant. Thank you for sharing.
  • by bowsamic on 2/20/24, 12:10 PM

    This feels extremely legally risky

    EDIT: I'm getting downvoted. I think people have gone to prison for a lot less than this, at least in the US, please be careful and playfulness is not a legal defense