UPDATE: Slides

Major Malfunction’s infrared hacking is considered a “must-see” talk. His interest in IR was piqued when he bought a new car and could no longer replay the IR remote code with his Palm III to unlock the doors. So he started investigating rolling code remotes and other IR based devices. Modern hotels usually have the room services system built into the tv. Maintenance and house keeping can use specialized remotes to perform administrative functions. There is no security so you just need to find the specialized codes. He read one code and found out it was 14bits. It would take nine hours to check all possible codes by hand. Of course not all 16,384 possible codes do something. Major took the “ON” code, started flipping bits and testing to see if the code still worked. If it still works it means the bit is ignored. It turned out that only 10bits were actually being used. Testing that many codes only takes 35 minutes. Once completed you can do things like modifying your room bill or someone else’s even view all of the pay-per-view movies. The “read” link goes to a recent Wired interview.