For those of us who were paying a modicum of attention to the part of the news around 1999 which did not involve the imminent demise of humanity due to the Y2K issue, a certain toy called a ‘Furby’ was making the headlines. In addition to driving parents batty, it also gave everyone’s favorite US three-letter agency a scare, with it being accused of being both a spying tool and equipped with an advanced artificial intelligence chip. Courtesy of a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we now have the low-down on what had the NSA all atwitter.
In a Twitter thread (Nitter) user [dakotathekat] announced the release, which finally answered many questions about the NSA’s on-premises ban of Furbys (or Furbees if you’re Swedish). The impression one gets is that this ‘Furby ban’ was primarily instated out of an abundance of caution, as unauthorized recording devices of any kind are strictly forbidden on NSA premises. With nobody at the NSA apparently interested in doing a teardown of a Furby to ascertain its internals, and the careful balance between allowing children’s toys on NSA grounds versus the risk of a ‘Furbygate’, a ban seemed the easy way out. Similarly, the FAA saw fit to also make people turn their Furbys off like all other electronic devices.
The original Furby toys did not have anything more complex inside of them than a 6502-derived MCU and a Ti TSP50C04 IC for speech synthesis duties, with the supposed ‘learning’ process using a hardcoded vocabulary that gradually replaced its default gibberish with English or another target language.
Once got a Furby in a Yankee swap at Christmas. It sat on my PC monitor for a while, gathering dust. One day I happened to scan the Computer History Museum’s “wanted” page (as I am an old fart with all kinds of old hardware stuffed in my attic). They wanted a Furby. I had one…and they were happy to give it a home.
So, now the Furby rests in all its glory at the Computer History Museum. Say “hi” for me when you see it.
Hmm…do they still have that page? I can’t seem to find it (at least, not in a brief search).
At least the NSA story ended up bringing us “Mitchells vs the Machines”
Fast forward a couple decades. How many people walk around the CIA and all our military bases and all our government facilities carrying covert devices with 2GHz multi-core processors 8+GB of RAM and sophisticated multi-band radios and listening devices and cameras constantly connected to the Internet?
Do you know what the regulations look like for such sites?
Maybe you have to lock your “covert device with 2GHz multi-core processor , 8+GB of RAM and sophisticated multi-band radios and listening devices and cameras constantly connected to the Internet” in an RF shielded box while at work and retrieve it on your way out the door.
Um you can just turn it off. Or other options like a locking metal desk drawer. Nothing like being in a secure meeting when somebody has a phone ringtone sound.
I used to do legal reproduction. I saw some files/servers for some…. secure clients. They had passwords that expired after a short period of time, limited login, you were highly restricted to what you could do on said servers…. and this was well over a decade ago. I’m sure their security protocols are fiercer now.
Of course, if you read Hackaday enough, I’m not sure if it being government-linked inspires confidence. xD
how is hackaday goverment linked
The government has its grubby hooks into everything!
B^)
I too was confused, but I believe the implication might have been that at least some of the secure clients were government-linked. And that as hack-a-day readers we might realize that government-linked usually means “security provided by the cheapest bidder” rather than “unbreakable vault with state secrets” :D
As someone who works at one of these facilities I can assure you they are not permitted within sensitive buildings. Many of these buildings have lockers outside for exactly this purpose.
Without explicit authorisation and device audit, they usually ban any device with a camera, transmitter or storage capability. Violation is considered a criminal offence with some pretty hefty jail time
I still have a couple of these ‘Furbees’ as we called him here in US. Original and a Star Wars Chewie. Batteries are out as my wife doesn’t like them waking up and talking. I thought they were kind of neat. Always thought I’d maybe ‘upgrade’ them some day….
We have a few, the wife had them someplace as decoration. They were kind of neat, and it was cool the way they interacted with each other. Neat for their time.
A thought that crossed my mind….
I wonder how many younger members of HAD’s readership responded to this article by saying, “Alexa [or Siri, if you prefer] What the hell is a ‘Furby’?”
This is the very definition of irony– reading about the panic and fear of spy agencies over a primitive electronic toy, with an 8-bit processor, no connectivity, with no meaningful intelligence…. on a modern, internet-connected device, coupled to a real AI which, if it doesn’t already collect data and spy on you 24/7, can easily be enlisted to do so by any of the same “scared” 3-letter agencies.
You’d be just as unwelcome in an NSA office with an Amazon Echo as you would with a Furby… it’s not ironic that the NSA uses technology to spy on people, and fears the use of technology to spy on themselves… that’s their job.
I read the assembly source code online once. It is interesting, bc like a great many things people made huge assumptions as to the complexity of the Furby (or Sim City). In reality very simple assembly code was used to achieve something that was similar to a Tiger handheld game, or a 1950s arcade machine.
My wife used to tell me off for manually moving our robot vacuum between rooms. She said it would mess up its map of the house.
Took me months to convince her that it’s algorithm boiled down to “follow walls and turn in a random direction at random intervals”.
Non technical people tend to assume these devices have much more intelligence than they actually do. Nobody is going to that effort for a cheap robot vac if they don’t have to – development time costs money
Funny how it’s hardest to convince non-technical people about the way you can tell something has been programmed, when they’ve dug into an often overgenerous mental model, even when they know you know what you’re talking about.
And even funnier now with AI, seeing how this even affects the ‘experts’ who sometimes trick themselves into thinking their guess-the-next-character program is literally alive… ah the wonders of our squishy monkey brains
When reading this story everyone that has a clearance is saying well of course.
To the people wondering about military bases and CIA buildings, guess what? Those are almost never completely classified. You have classified areas. When you enter them you dump all your electronics, cameras, audio recorders and so on in a locker and grab the key Or you throw them in your desk drawer or you just leave them on your desk. No I do not worry about anyone taking my stuff. If I left a 12 pack of monster or some snakes well maybe some one will grab one which is fine, but theft is just not something we worry about even in the unclassed spaces near the classified spaces. And yes I really like what I do. The people are great.
The FAA example really highlights the “abundance of caution” approach.
When the FAA used to ban electronics on planes, people dont realize that this was primarily at the discretion of the airlines. The FAA didn’t have the manpower or staffing to investigate every electrical device, if memory serves they tested 3 devices(one was an electric razor) and then told the airlines that they would have to decide on all other devices. The airlines, of course, didn’t want to waste any time/money testing anything so they just banned passengers from using any electronic devices.
Now flight crews had a lot of mythology about what was causing weird readings on their instruments and constantly blamed laptops/phones/etc. In every instance, the FAA would go so far as to buy the original device from the owner and then try to recreate the problem by having the same plane fly the same route with the same device. They could never recreate it and it mostly seems to be the pilots just attributing every problem to passenger technology.
Note: The one exception to this rule was the cellphones being in airplane mode. That was a requirement of the FCC because early cellphones on planes could cause towers to crash because of the multitude of rapid handshakes.
I have personally seen interactions between consumer electronics and General Aviation navigation equipment. By far the biggest offender was a plain old cheap FM radio. Sometimes you’d be on an FM station that happened to be 10.7 MHz below a navigation beacon you were trying to receive. Why 10.7? Because the Intermediate Frequency (IF) was 10.7 MHz for most of these radios. So the local oscillator was often 10.7 MHz ABOVE the IF, meaning it is smack in the middle of the Aviation band. In a poorly shielded radio and a distant VOR or Localizer station, this can spell trouble.
Yes, you’ll get a flag on the indicator. How do I know this? I used to own an airplane with a few friends and he put a cheap walkman receiver on a spare port on the intercom system. Sometimes, we’d see problems. I put two and two together and realized that it was the walkman. And since it was mostly a distraction, I just turned it off. Note that this was during VFR flight under Part 91. No regulations were broken.
Now imagine that you’re in a small airliner screaming down an instrument landing system in poor visibility, and some goofball decides to turn on his crappy FM receiver… Maybe the pilots will catch the problem, and go for the missed approach, and then again, maybe they won’t. Either way, the investigators may not ever have enough tools to find the source of the problem, especially if there was a crash.
So for those of you who say “this has never been an issue” –you’re sort of right. The problem is that few people can put the cause and effect together to reach this conclusion. That’s why we have this rule.