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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
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!
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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.")
...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.
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.
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
That pic looks like a Furborg to me... I wonder if it does assimulation?
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*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
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