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Furby Bounty Paid
donpardo writes "The Furby has been successfully hacked and the money has been paid. (Here is the original /. story.) By Xmas a modified Furby should be on the way to the autistic child who inspired this. Kits are on the way."
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that if you make it hard to hack, the hackers will try harder. Then when they succeed they will exact revenge in the worst possible way.
I'm reasonably confident that the "potty mouth Furby" the original designer envisioned would have been created straight away without the hackproofing, but would not have received the wide coverage that this contest is sure to garner.
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E_NOSIG
"Hampton wanted to prevent owners from creating "potty-mouth Furby" and Tiger Electronics (the Furby distributor) wanted to frustrate competitors from copying the design. As a result, the cpu and memory of each Furby are encased in a tough shell of resin. There is no practical way to break through to examine the electronics without shattering them in the process."
It would seem unlikely that they made the code available after going that far to make the thing unhackable.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Hack Furby Challenge Won!
LOS ALTOS, Calif., Nov 13 2000. The "Hack Furby" Challenge has been won.
Furby [TM Tiger Electronics] was the smash hit toy of Christmas 1998 and after. Furby is a small furry doll with an electro-mechanical interior that lets it run through a pre-programmed repertoire of speech and movement. Furbies gradually let out more speech and
actions the more you handle them, creating a powerful illusion that they learn. In fact the customer has no ability to make a Furby act
in a way different to the way it was programmed at the factory. Up till now...
The Hack Furby Challenge
In January 1999, Silicon Valley-based engineer Peter van der Linden issued a challenge to the computer engineering world through his
website http://www.afu.com "Make Furby re-programmable!" Author of several books on computer programming, including the best-selling
Just Java 2, van der Linden explained his challenge thus: "Being an inveterate gadget lover and tinkerer, I bought one of the first Furbies
available and dismantled it.
The potential for Furby to become a general purpose computing device was immediately obvious. The thing already has a CPU and is
bristling with peripherals including infrared I/O, several motion detectors, eye and mouth movements, a loudspeaker and a microphone. All it
needed was a little encouragement from me to get a great set of Open Source community engineers working on it." If Furby could be
re-programmed by its users, it would become a much more interesting and educational device. Instead of listening to your Furby talk
"Furbish", you could play chess with it. Instead of pressing your Furby's beak, you could have it announce your email or calendar
appointments. You can have Furby record voice memos or phone calls for later replay. You can program Furby to solve mathematical
puzzles and equations, to look for Mersenne prime numbers, or simply to act as a speaking clock. Rework the mouth servo with hydraulics to
open beer cans, have the only speaking garden gnome on the block. Heck, it doesn't really matter, the point is to create individual
conceptual art from mass-produced ephemera.
Furby designer Dave Hampton strongly opposed allowing sophisticated users to customize the device. Hampton had seen earlier toys like Microsoft's "Barney the Talking Dinosaur"
product subverted by graduate students, who put colorful expletives into the mouth of the purple behemoth. The Redmond monopoly provided the software for the talking Barney toy.
Tough Work
Hampton wanted to prevent owners from creating "potty-mouth Furby" and Tiger Electronics (the Furby distributor) wanted to frustrate competitors from copying the design. As a
result, the cpu and memory of each Furby are encased in a tough shell of resin. There is no practical way to break through to examine the electronics without shattering them in the
process. Furby hacking contrasts with the Lego Mindstorms toy, which embraced and co-opted the freelance development community, selling a lot more product in the process. The
active opposition of designer and manufacturer made Furby hacking significantly harder. But the development community views Furby's lack of programmability as a design flaw or
bug, and all bugs (no matter how tough) yield in the end.
"I knew it would be quite difficult to crack Furby security and create a user-programmable version of Furby, so I offered a cash prize as an incentive to try" said van der Linden. Prizes
of this kind were often staked by industrialists in the early days of aviation, to encourage new designs and faster progress.
And The Winner Is...!
The prize of two hundred and fifty dollars was won by Canadian computer consultant Jeffrey Gibbons, who submitted the winning prototype by Fedex. The design is being published
to the public under the terms of the competition, and orders are being taken for a "Hack Furby" kit over the Internet.
"The cash prize is just a token," explained van der Linden, "The real prize is the bragging rights to the accomplishment, and the benefit of sharing it with the world. Computer Science
departments can now base their real-time programming courses on this very low-cost equipment."
One of the first re-programmed Furbies will be sent to the mother who contacted van der Linden early in the challenge. She noticed the speech of her autistic son improved greatly
when interacting with the Furby. But she was despondent about the gibberish that the standard Furby talks. That mother was anxious to find a Furby that could be upgraded with
normal speech, to help autistic children relate to the the real world. Her son's Furby will now be delivered in time for Christmas, thanks to the "Hack Furby Challenge" (subject to kit
production). Parents of autistic children everywhere will value the chance to transform Furby from a trivial amusement into an educational aid.
A Challenge For Software Folks
There is always a higher mountain to climb, and van der Linden plans to issue a new challenge. "Now that the original problem has been solved, I plan
to stake a new prize for the first person to port a Java Virtual Machine to this architecture. The Java 2 Micro Edition is wonderfully suitable for driving
the embedded Furby processor, at the same time allowing programmers to write high-level portable code." The first Furby challenge was for hardware
folks; this new challenge allows software experts to show their skills.
A Java virtual machine has already been ported to the Lego Mindstorms computer. TinyVM is an open source JavaTM based replacement firmware
for the Lego MindstormsTM RCX microcontroller. The RCX is a programmable brick that comes with Lego's Robotics Invention SystemTM. For further
details on the Java/Lego system see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/. If Java can run on a Lego block, it can definitely run on a Furby.
What of the original prototype, the world's first user-programmable Furby? "It's standing on my kitchen table right now, being eyed warily by my dogs"
laughs van der Linden, "I think I'll offer it to the Smithsonian in due course".
Help!
I can't find any reference to the story mentioned by CmdrTaco about the Furby challenge being inspired by the mother of an autistic boy. I would dearly love to learn more about this--I work with a couple of children with autism in an Easter Seals program, and the son of some friends has autism. All three sets of parents have the same limitation: zero programming skills.
Can anyone provide a link (or just point in the right direction) to more information about the boy with autism?
Thanks!
Have you gutted it yet? Maybe the sounds will be on something easy like a PROM. Too bad they didn't just make it so it would accept microcassettes from answering machines. Then again, if there is space in there, maybe you could bypass the stock sound by splicing the speaker wires to the guts of an answering machine, with a switch triggered whenever he moves.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://wy1d.yi.org/~josh/furby.html
(grabbed it right as the clock striked midnight, not enough time to grab images though)
500 Server Error
The hard transfer limit for this user has been reached
The story's been up for 20 minutes and their server's been slashdotted already. Maybe their should add an extra potato or something...
It's been done. At XEROX Parc no less.
The could get it make arbitrary movements and speak at arbitrary times. They now how the speech is encoded, but not the specifics. (As they said, "It was outside the scope of the project. Plus it ensures that Barney is constantly in character.")
...is so simple: just remove the batteries
...would of couse be the furby virus.
using that IR port, potty-mouth-itis would spread like wildfire....
Put a few of these infected rats for sale on ebay, which are then snapped up by collectors who place the potty-mouth furby into their vast collection. The rest would be history.
Mirror Here - The main site's slashdotted.
The first thing I thought when I saw a Furby was cool new Gremlins.
Considering the similarities I always wondered why they never had legal problems with the 'look and feel' of a gremlin being so close.
They look a little alike,do Furbies sound like Gremlins ?
Slightly offtopic I know, but I'm too curious too worry about kharma burn
Now they need to hack "Barney the singing Dinosaur" from Microsoft and make it sing "time for kink and sodomy", at the end of which he would mutilate itself.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
So the hack furby kit includes a Philips 89c51rd2 a 20Mhz 80c51 core, a RS232 port and whatever else. What they left out is the jackhammer you need to break through the resin core to get at the insides of your furby and use your hack furby kit :)
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
At least one person who did a Furby Autopsy was not very impressed with the construction of the system.
Some possibly nicer robot kits are available in a number of places, including the Robot Store, Probotics, and Arrick... Of course, there are also the cool Mindstorms, the relatively expensive Aibo (Some hacking info on it can be dug up from the Aibo Site), and the companies listed in this part of the robotics faq
However, Hacking the Furby does give you a relatively inexpensive talking robot with IR input, etc. and ought to be fun... While not the most well constructed system, it does give you some decent features (detects light & sound levels, tilt/inversion of the furby, Infrared and RS232 comms (when upgraded), and some touch sensors on the back, front, and mouth) - especially nice if you get one used, cheap...
It is nice that the reprogrammability kits are being made available, particularly for parents of autistic children (since children can relate to a Furby better than a "regular" hobbyist-grade robot)...
Also, check out the open-source Rossum Project
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Does this Furby hack include the ability to equip them with firearms? I'd like a Furby with a high-voltage taser attachment and the ability to fire lasers out its eyes.. and hell, while I'm at it, I'd like it to breathe fire. Be a surprise for the first person that tries to tickle its tummy.
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
I'm certain that competing toy manufacturers have already deconstructed the whole Furby, but the basic thing is not so much hardware and software, it's more about the general idea of an interactive artificial pet. Given the advance in electronics in the last couple of years, they could build a better Furby-emulator by now, but it would still be just a copy.
But hacking is not just reverse engineering. Even assuming that hackers could buy the appropriate chemicals (they can) and dissolve the resin, they could damage the chips in the process. And how would a hacker replace a ROM chip inside a resin block? The problem seems to be more about chemistry and mechanics than about software.
Hacking coffee pots is enough of a problem ;-)
Mr. Coffee on the web
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That pic looks like a Furborg to me... I wonder if it does assimulation?
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Imagine burglar put to flight by a barking Furby...
www.furbyupgrade.20m.com
Hands in my pocket
*NEWSFLASH*
In the greatest achievement in history, a Furby has been hacked so that it can communicate with you Palm Pilot! This means that by pointing you Palm Pilot at it and pressing the hot-sync key, your Furby can give you information on people in your Palm's addressbook, just by asking it! (continued on page 3 - Furby)
Furby
The downside to all this is, however, that you must first teach it to be multi-lingual. This is because you will need it to be able to talk your language, and you'll need it to talk Palm Pilot. Rumor has it that this will be made easier by a new dictionary from Websters that has English and Palm Pilot translations.
The next day...
*NEWSFLASH*
For those of you who remember yesterday's story about the Palm-Pilot/Furby mix, you'll want to keep reading this. Nerds all over the world have discovered that the Furbys retain their information, and have developed intelectual reasoning as a side-effect of the hack. This has resulted in Furbys telling random passerbys off. (This part is real...)This was noticed by members of a highschool robotics team participating in the Texas BEST competion when the Furby cussed out the teacher of their class and stated "This is boring." (end real part.) It also told the students about information from his calendar on his date with a mistress - just as his wife walked in.
And they say technology isn't dangerous...
SIG: HUP
Unfortunately, it seems the site in question will be down for a while -- the user has hit their hard transfer limit -- if anyone has a copy of this cached, please upload it somewhere for everyone else to read.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Is this really a hack? He's basically replaced the core electronics (the microcontroller).
I would have thought that a hack would involve running custom code on the original controller.
Not to play down the effort or anything, but I don't see what this has to do with a Furby. It's not like you can run to the store, buy a Furby, hook it to your serial port, reprogram it and let it yell 'fart', or something.
Anyways, if anything it shows that the makers of the Furby have done an excellent job in making something that is _really_ hard to reverse-engineer.
Breace