Hacking NYC MTA Kiosks

by enbyte

Unfortunately, the technology described in this article is no longer around, possibly because it is hackable.  I didn't know 2600 existed when I found out about this, but I would've written in if I knew it did.

A couple of years ago, the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) started putting kiosks inside subway stations.  These would do various things, such as find the next train coming to the station, show you how to get to a station you keyed in, display a map, etc.

The way it was laid out, the bottom half of the screen was an ad, presumably to pay for the kiosks, and the top half had the thing you wanted to see, along with some buttons that changed if you were looking at the maps, directions, or whatever.

One of the buttons was "Wheelchair Accessible," which meant that the top of the display became an ad and the bottom showed the user interface.

Anyway, one of the tabs was the "Maps" tab, perhaps the seemingly least hackable.  All it displayed was an image of the subway map for the five boroughs, with the train lines running through them.  However, on the side of the map box, was a little tiny "Microsoft Gray" rectangle, maybe 3 by 10 pixels.  If you tapped on this, a tiny box with a stylus a Post-it appeared where the rectangle was.  Pressing on this opened a yellow box at the bottom of the screen where you could scribble and the computer would try and fail to guess what you wrote.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the notepad was, but that wasn't the interesting part.  On the top of the little box with the writing pad was a keyboard icon.  This put a touch keyboard where the pad was.  I typed all kinds of random stuff, but nothing happened.

A week later, I was with my dad in the same subway station, and was showing him how to open the keyboard.  He suggested that I should try to press keyboard shortcuts and see if that did anything.  I discovered that upon pressing "(Fn) + Ctrl + Shift + F12, the kiosk would open Intel Graphics Settings!

Shortly after opening the settings, the user interface behind the graphics settings (and the ad) would change to a screen that said "There was a problem with this kiosk, maintenance is coming."  However, the Intel Graphics Settings window didn't disappear!

Inside the settings, you could mess with stuff like saturation and the color profile.  All this accomplished was changing the maintenance screen from gray with white text to slightly lighter gray with white text.  After messing around with settings for a while, I discovered a help menu with links to Microsoft for support!  Clicking on one of these opened some browser window at the given link.

The browser wasn't locked down at all, though.  You could type in a URL, and do whatever you wanted.  I discovered it could play web games perfectly fine, despite being something like Internet Explorer 2 on Microsoft Windows Kiosk.

Unfortunately, I was eight when I found all of this stuff, and so was content showing my friends and playing various web games while waiting for my train.  I didn't do anything like trying to type in a drive letter, trying to open other applications, or messing around in the browser settings.

The new kiosks were installed maybe a month after I did all of this, so the MTA probably knew what I was doing.  Despite many attempts, the new kiosks did not conveniently have a "Hack Me" button like the previous ones did.  They also had a much slicker user interface, and showed you things like the MTA's Twitter feed, or whatever.

So unfortunately, I haven't hacked these yet, and probably won't, since I haven't been on the subway in two years.

Shouts: dexrey4 and spaceman.