What Does the Furby Say?
December 22, 2013 2:10 PM   Subscribe

 
The Furby says horrifying things if it's the one a friend of mine had in undergrad.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:47 PM on December 22, 2013 [2 favorites]


I don't remember if others remember these things, but they triggered off each other, so if you had two or three they had some kind of Gizmo on LSD thing going on that did become quite horrifying. Old meets new.
posted by cjorgensen at 4:07 PM on December 22, 2013




LOL I remember that NSA alert. The thing is it was very obvious from the start that Furbies don't "learn" anything, all that happens is that pre-programmed capabilities get unlocked by codes stored in that laughably tiny EEPROM. Nevertheless there were rumors flying all over the place of Furbies learning Latin and similar crap.
posted by localroger at 5:16 PM on December 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Furies are Satanic.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 5:18 PM on December 22, 2013


Can I just say, I never consented to that reverse-engineering session. And whilst some of it was interesting there moments (especially with the heat gun) where I felt decidedly uncomfortable.
posted by awfurby at 5:18 PM on December 22, 2013 [3 favorites]


awfurby, did you remember your safeword?
posted by localroger at 5:59 PM on December 22, 2013


The marking “GHG554″ may be clearly seen

In an ideal universe, now you just take it to a seedy bazaar, and an elderly Cambodian lady will telll you: "I think it was manufactured locally... finest quality... superior workmanship. There is a maker's serial number... GHG554. Interesting. *Not* fish. *Snake* scale!"
posted by raygirvan at 6:04 PM on December 22, 2013 [3 favorites]


'372' => 'Any suckable tasty stuff (like beans)', #! "ooh!"
No comment...

I remember when the first Furbies came out, the proto-linguist in me was so excited about them and their 'learning' ability. Needless to say, I was very disappointed.
posted by Gordafarin at 6:31 PM on December 22, 2013


My safety word was an undocumented high-pitched whine.
posted by awfurby at 6:34 PM on December 22, 2013 [3 favorites]


Oh dear, well that's not very standard, awfurby. If you can't vocalize it's supposed to be three grunts or "unhs." I mean, did the person who reverse engineered you never take the Armory Tour? This is pretty basic stuff for a person wielding a heat gun against a helpless toy.
posted by localroger at 7:01 PM on December 22, 2013 [2 favorites]


I "read" quite a bit of the article, if you count looking at letters and trying to get a general sense of what the process of reverse engineering circuit boards actually entails as "reading."

The cultural context of these toys played out like this, for me, in 1998, when my girl, now 21, was six. It was THE hot toy of the year. That used to happen more often. The demand was greater than the supply. So I got up at 4 or 5 AM to be one of the first in line at some toy store which has since gone out of business…KB Toys. They only had twenty Furbys. (Furbies?) My daughter was very excited Christmas morning. I think she was a little too young to seriously engage the interactivity of the thing, although it provided us with some fun moments.

It wasn't as devilish as some mechanized doll she had which would spontaneously turn itself on and walk toward her muttering some weird phrase in the middle of the night. I'm surprised she wasn't traumatized by that thing. We laughed about it, mostly. It went into the Dumpster after a few too many attacks. I'm not surprised dolls/puppets have been featured in so many horror movies.
posted by kozad at 7:19 PM on December 22, 2013


He went from poking around to decapping chips in nitric acid awfully quickly. I mean, once you chop up your circuit board and ruin the chips, you're not going to get any more info out of the functioning circuit. I understand the urge to try a new technique (plus, ACID! FUMES! DANGER! Possible EXPLOSION!) but if you're actually trying to learn everything you can about a device, there's quite a bit more you could have done before breaking out the mad-scientist tools.
posted by spacewrench at 8:21 PM on December 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yes, it seems to me he's not really reverse-engineering, more tearing apart. And not really concluding much either. The EEPROM has some data in but what is it? Dunno. He gets SEM images of 3 chips but what do they show? Dunno.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:22 PM on December 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Give him a break, he's an undergrad — the whole point of being an undergrad is playing with the tools with only the dimmest understanding of what it is you're doing.
posted by Vetinari at 11:19 PM on December 22, 2013


Interesting:

I learned that Furbys in fact perform inter-device communication with an audio protocol that encodes data into bursts of high-pitch frequencies. That is, devices communicate with one another via high-pitch sound waves with a speaker and microphone. #badBIOS anyone?
posted by anemone of the state at 11:45 PM on December 22, 2013


I laugh about this but the first time Furby's were marketed I used to get random email from people asking me for prices and delivery schedules. And my mother's PhD webpage on her University's website got more traffic in a month than the rest of the entire University website. Crazy times for a Furby.
posted by awfurby at 2:44 AM on December 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


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