Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The NSA Furby Documents

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 129 posts

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#101

Post by CuriousCosmic »

crmd wrote: post #81
halJordan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA is not a military agency. It is within the dod, it provides combat support. But it is emphatically not a military agency.

Emphatically? The director of the NSA is required to be a four star general and concurrently serves as commander of US Cyber Command. Ostensibly non-military, perhaps.

The director is required to be a commissioned officer (and upon taking the role gets the O-10 grade) because they also head Cyber Command and the CSS (Central Security Service) but they don't really "run" the NSA like you'd expect say the director of the FBI or CIA to. Their role instead is mostly to coordinate the interaction between the NSA, CSS, and CYBERCOM on top of running CYBERCOM itself.

When it comes to actual day to day operations however the deputy director (who is required to be a technically experienced civilian) actually runs things and reports directly to the president. The director isn't actually in the deputy director's chain of command however one of their job roles is to provide advisory support to the director when needed.

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#102

Post by dmix »

crmd wrote: post #81
halJordan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA is not a military agency. It is within the dod, it provides combat support. But it is emphatically not a military agency.

Emphatically? The director of the NSA is required to be a four star general and concurrently serves as commander of US Cyber Command. Ostensibly non-military, perhaps.

The assistant Secretary of Health is also a commissioned 4 star admiral but they have never seen been the inside of a Navy ship. The last one was a pediatrician before joining. There's a lot of symbolic and tradition based commissions like that through the US gov.

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#103

Post by gumby »

patrickmay wrote: post #51
yorwba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course some people really wanted to teach it to say new things, and figured out how to swap out the audio files (among other modifications): https://github.com/Jeija/bluefluff Fun fact: If you mess up and need to reset the furby, the procedure is to turn it upside down and hold down the tongue while pulling the tail for ten seconds.

Instructions unclear. Toddler still not speaking clearly, but appears upset.

Repeat until it works, or discard and produce another.

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#104

Post by huppeldepup »

IAmLiterallyAB wrote: post #94

Fun fact: the 2016 model Furby uses an obscure ISA you've never heard of (and if you have, let me know!) called µnSP. I managed to get Pong running on a Furby a few years ago and by far the hardest part was figuring out that completely undocumented instruction set. Wrote added support for it to Ghidra which was a cool learning experience

is this documented somewhere?

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#105

Post by gumby »

ljf wrote: post #28
RajT88 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company infosec training actually advises you don't have voice assistants or cellphones in your work area. They even make light of it in the video: "I know it sounds crazy, but it's not". Google and Amazon as the biggest voice assistant makers are, of course, our competitors. But they are competitors to I would say most software companies in some fashion.

We have been told that so many times at work, but I know most snr people seem to leave them and their smart watches in listen mode as they occasionally go off in video calls.

Once in a zoom call my watch said “sorry, I didn’t understand that”… and simultaneously the watch the other person on the call was wearing said the same thing!

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#107

Post by moi2388 »

Seems sensible. Even if the furbie by design weren’t spying, they definitely could have been used as such.

No non-agency bought assets or assets which are not screened completely should never be in their offices. Toy or not.

For the same reason you’d expect them to ban USB sticks within the premises

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#108

Post by [deleted] »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #64
gnfargbl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA dealt with cases of espionage via the introduction of simple electronics into secure areas decades before [1] [2], so awareness of the risk was likely widespread. The issue here seems to have been that in 1999, it was a relative novelty for random consumer devices to have a recording functionality. Hard to imagine now, but there we are. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) [2] https://ww…

>in 1999, it was a relative novelty for random consumer devices to have a recording functionality. Hard to imagine now, but there we are. For added context, the plot of the movie Charlie's Angels from the year 2000, was about stopping an evil guy from using some evil software he developed to ... track people using their cellphones. (ㆆ _ ㆆ)

[deleted]

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#109

Post by [deleted] »

callalex wrote: post #99
halJordan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA is not a military agency. It is within the dod, it provides combat support. But it is emphatically not a military agency.

It’s important to remember that “DOD” is a pathetic rebranding attempt of what it was originally founded as and continues to operate as: the Department of War.

[deleted]

Re: The NSA Furby Documents

#110

Post by hoseja »

jabyess wrote: post #60
pnw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practicality has never been an issue for spies. Look at the lengths the Soviets went to for surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

the craziest thing about this is: > The Thing was designed by Soviet Russian inventor Leon Theremin,[7] best known for his invention of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument.

Huh. Makes sense actually, both are induction-at-distance audio devices.
Post reply on HN