Hacking the cuteness out of Furby

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

Ok, its a kinda slow news day, and I am not posting this because the
yet unnamed bawt I have looking for security news found this because
"hacking" was in the title, (Well that's part of it, and I would have
an entirely different list if I posted some of the other hacking
stories the bawt finds) But the fact that the United States own
National Security Agency banned the stock Furbys because of a
percieved national security threat.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9901/13/nsa.furby.ban.01/

Anyone that has ever played with one of these for any amount of time
knows this to be pretty much the exact opposite, and that the Furby
just sits there and babbles gibberish while your cat tries to figure
out how to bury the thing in the backyard.

So in a little under two years, Someone has now hacked the hardware of
the Furby, and is now offering upgrade kits, I wonder if my nephew
will notice his Furby missing under the pile of other forgotten toys
in his toybox?

Enjoy!

William Knowles
isn () c4i org



http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2000/00187397.html

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 12/04/2000

Cute is something that should be firmly stamped out with unremitting
savagery. Perhaps the definitive and best-known example of cute is the
appalling song that accompanies that most horrific of " entertainment
" rides at Disneyland. Of course I refer to " Its a Small World. "

The ride is disgustingly cute but is eclipsed by its accompanying
song. Just 30 seconds of that nonstop, saccharine ditty is enough to
have me grinding my teeth and cursing Robert and Richard Sherman
Academy Award-winning composers who penned the song in 1966.

Which all leads nicely into this weeks topic: Furby.

Furby, for those of you who have managed to avoid it by dint of not
being parents of young children, not watching popular television and
never going into any toy shops, is a robot doll. It is a marvel of
engineering, and it retails for as little as $20.

Anyway, this robot (and it really is a robot, not just an animated
toy) not only moves its mouth, its ears and its eyes (although the
device doesnt move from wherever you put it), it also bounces in
place. Add to that sensing the light level, being tilted or anything
touching its mouth, belly or back, as well as audio input and infrared
sending and receiving (for communications between Furbys!) along with
sound generation, and you have a pretty amazing package (check out the
Furby autopsy at www.phobe.com/furby/).

Cute enters the picture as, true to its name, the thing is covered in
hideous synthetic fur and it babbles in a grating, sing-song "
language " that the manufacturer, Tiger Electronics (part of Hasbro),
is pleased to call " Furbish "  see the remarkable LangMaker site at
www.langmaker.com/furbish.htm for much more than you might expect on
Furbish in particular, and invented languages in general.

In January 1999, Peter van der Linden, an engineer in Silicon Valley,
issued the " Hack Furby " challenge (see

www.afu.com/fur.html)  a challenge to make Furby reprogrammable with a
prize of $250. Needless to say, the winner wasnt going to retire on
the basis of the prize, but that didnt stop Jeffrey Gibbons, a
Canadian computer consultant, from trying.

Of course as you might imagine, hacking Furby doesnt exactly delight
the toys creator Dave Hampton or Tiger. The last thing they wanted was
a " potty-mouthed " Furby (something that was easily done to
Microsofts Barney robot toy).

Gibbons solution (see www.afu.com/furby/winner.html and
www.furbyupgrade.20m.com/) was not to actually get inside the Furby
electronics a rather difficult task, as they are custom chips encased
in epoxy but to produce replacement circuit boards to substitute those
inside Furby.

Voila! A programmable Furby with an RS-232 interface, much enhanced IR
communications and all code that will be eventually open source. You
can buy the upgrade kit (http://canada-shops.com/stores/furbyupgrade/)
or at least you can try at the moment its payment system is down, and
it suggests you use PayPal (www.paypal.com). I tried to use PayPal,
but I will now be sending Gibbons and Co. a check . . . and I bet you
can guess what next weeks topic is.

Be that as it may, it turns out that the Furby Hackers have loftier
goals. They plan to create an operating system for Furby based on
Philos (a freeware multitasking kernel that I cannot find anything
about) that they refer to as FurbOS.

Of course, Tiger may yet take them to court, although as Gibbons et
al. point out, to modify a Furby you have to buy a Furby. Plus there
is a potential public relations windfall here for the product see the
story about the autistic child at www.afu.com/furby/winner.html.

So Im off now to send a check for my upgrade kit so I can hack my sons
Furby. You can bet that when Im finished, therell be nothing cute
about it.


Noncute comments to nwcolumn () gibbs com

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