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REMEMBER Furby, a furry, gnome-like toy that was all the craze a few Christmases ago? The more it was handled, the more active it got, moving randomly and uttering “furbish”. Now you can actually train Furby to do something useful, such as read your e-mail or scare away burglars—thanks to a Canadian computer consultant called Jeffrey Gibbons. He has made Furby into a programmable device.

This is only the latest feat in an increasingly popular sport among hackers and computer hobbyists: the reverse-engineering of consumer electronics. Whether smart toys, network appliances or personal digital assistants, it is only a question of time before somebody figures out how a device works and finds new uses for it. Unsurprisingly, manufacturers are not amused. But some firms have come to realise that they can benefit from the trend.

Hacking hardware is nothing new. The first devices to suffer from it were probably Hewlett-Packard calculators. Video-game consoles and set-top boxes have also been attacked quite frequently. And in 1997 there was a satirical attack by the Barbie Liberation Organisation, an American feminist group. Members swapped the voice-boxes of talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls in toy stores so that Barbie growled “killer” and GI Joe sang: “Math is hard. Let’s go shopping!”

If the hacking has multiplied recently, it is mainly because more and more consumer-electronics products are in essence small multi-purpose computers with interesting peripherals, such as microphones, light sensors and motion detectors, that hackers feel could be put to better use. Also, hacking toys can be more challenging (and therefore more rewarding) than hacking run-of-the-mill electronics, because manufacturers often use proprietary technology. First, a hacker has to remove the toy’s control circuitry and draw a schematic diagram of its components and the connections among them. Then, using such devices as an oscilloscope or a logic analyser, he can work out how the pins on the central-processing-unit (CPU) chip behave—which, in turn, reveals how the toy operates. Using that knowledge, the hacker can then modify the circuit.

With toys becoming ever smarter, toy deconstructors also have to reverse-engineer the software that controls them. ActiMate’s Barney, for instance, is a toy version of the purple dinosaur of American children’s television fame. It can be controlled by a PC via radio signals, in order to play a role in educational video games. To make it fully programmable, a group of computer scientists at Xerox’s PARC laboratory in Silicon Valley listened last year to the data traffic between the PC and the doll in order to work out the communications protocol.

The project—half joke, half serious research—pretty much succeeded in making Barney a slave, with the exception of his voice. The researchers could not work out exactly how that is encoded. Their modified doll is able to announce, for example, when a computer printing job is done, but it can still use only the words that were originally programmed in, such as “super-dee-duper”. There are, however, rumours on the Internet that somebody has recently turned Barney into a swearing dervish.

Small wonder that manufacturers are trying to make such feats as hard as possible. Furby’s CPU and memory chips are encased in a tough resin shell. Breaking it destroys the electronics. But this did not stop Mr Gibbons (who thus won the “Hack Furby” challenge issued by Peter van der Linden, a Silicon Valley-based engineer). He gave Furby what amounts to a brain transplant, swapping two of its circuit-boards for new ones.

In many cases, trying to frustrate hackers may be the wrong reaction. Often, manufacturers can actually benefit from others modifying their products. When people started playing around with the software for its Mindstorm robotics kits, Lego, a Danish toy firm, decided to accommodate them and even released the source code of the program. Thanks to this policy, hobbyists have vastly enhanced the kit’s possibilities which, in turn, has driven up sales.

Sometimes the interests of hackers and manufacturers are not so neatly aligned, in particular when a business model is threatened. Netpliance, a computer maker, was not pleased when, in March, an engineer added a hard disk to its I-Opener, a cheap Internet appliance, turning it into a fully fledged PC. This allowed owners to skip using Netpliance’s Internet service, thus depriving the firm of its main source of income.

Yet there are occasions when it is a good idea to let hackers go wild in order to revive interest in a “maturing” product—like Furby. The dolls, which once went for hundreds of dollars in online auctions, are now sold in supermarkets for ten. But the Furby hack has already spawned a group of hobbyists who are busy developing new applications for the toy. And an online store has begun selling a “Furby upgrade kit” for $65. Now, there’s a useful Christmas present. Happy hacking holidays.