[108299] in Cypherpunks
Risks of Furbies: NSA was right! (RISKS-20.14 and .16) (Risks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Thu Feb 11 12:25:40 1999
In-Reply-To: <199902110203.SAA09518@chiron.csl.sri.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 12:02:50 -0500
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
At 9:03 PM -0500 on 2/10/99, risks@csl.sri.com wrote:
> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 13:38:58 GMT
> From: Pete Mellor <pm@csr.city.ac.uk>
> Subject: Risks of Furbies: NSA was right! (RISKS-20.14 and .16)
>
> A friend of mine (Malcolm) related an alarming tale this lunchtime.
> He was helping a friend by driving her daughter to school. As they
> pulled up at the school gates, she took a Furby out of her bag.
>
> "You'd better not take that to school." said Malcolm. "Leave it in
> the car." As he explained over lunch: "The worst decision I ever made.
> The <expletive deleted> thing talked to me all the way to the office."
>
> As he pulled up in the office car park, his mobile 'phone rang.
> His secretary said "Where are you? Sam's been on the 'phone five
> times trying to get you. Weren't you supposed to be at that meeting?"
>
> "<expletive deleted>" said Malcolm.
>
> "<expletive deleted>" said the Furby.
>
> As Malcolm said at lunch, "Well, at least it's going home with a slightly
> enhanced vocabulary!"
>
> Risks to the US taxpayer: The NSA are spending a lot of their dollars
> stopping Furbies betraying how often <expletive deleted> is heard in top
> secret meetings.
>
> Peter Mellor, Centre for Software Reliability, City University, Northampton
> Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK. Tel: +44 (171) 477-8422
>p.mellor@csr.city.ac.uk
>
> [There are of course all sorts of potential covert-channel problems
> that NSA undoubtedly foresaw. One extreme example might be a normally
> inaccessible memory recording an entire day's worth of conversations that
> could later be unleashed by speaking an obscure unnatural-language secret
> phrase. A simpler example might be preprogrammed counters that merely
> tallied the frequency of occurrence of certain spoken keywords, which
> could subsequently be interrogated. PGN]
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
