Barbie typewriter (2015)

http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/mehano/barbie/

by rainbowmverse • 8 years ago

123 50 8 years ago

cryptomuseum.com

flyGuyOnTheSly3• 8 years ago

What an awesome informational resource.

I really wish they had a Random Article button like Wikipedia does.

rainbowmverse• 8 years ago

It probably wouldn't be too hard to put something together with a JavaScript bookmarklet and their archive page. http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/list.htm

flyGuyOnTheSly3• 8 years ago

I was thinking along the same lines... but a man can dream!

(I don't like the site THAT much that I would bother with creating a dedicated js bookmarklet I suppose is what I am saying)

Not saying I wouldn't install it if somebody else were to do so... ;)

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

I don’t know anything about cryptography. Would this have been useful for spies? Please tell me spies somewhere in the past were sending and receiving messages on a Barbie typewriter.

DonHopkins• 8 years ago

It's a useful prop for spies posing as little girls. As seen on The Americans.

ConcernedCoder2• 8 years ago

I would say probably not, since there were only 4 variations of a simple substitution cypher, e.g. you could encrypt some text with option 1-4, and to decrypt you picked option 1-4... i.e. anyone could decrypt using the barbie typewriter and a maximum of 4 attempts... not really secure at all.

boomboomsubban• 8 years ago

simple substitution cypher

And for those that are unaware, substitution ciphers have been unsecure for over a millennium now. So relying on nobody guessing you used a Barbie typewriter isn't an option either.

lucb1e4• 8 years ago

It's much worse than that. Simple substitution ciphers are as secure as writing in a custom font: you only have to figure out which letter is represented by each symbol. This is usually not difficult when using frequency analysis or, heck, even brute force with some dictionary lookups to see which attempt contained the most existing words.

kitd• 8 years ago

It's a little like Enigma, except that the substitution is static, not changing on each key press.

lucb1e4• 8 years ago

It's nothing like Enigma: no plugboard, no sequence of rotors that can be switched out, and (as you've noted) no new alphabet on each keypress.

Enigma is not that easy to crack, even today. I wouldn't compare it to a simple substitution cipher as to laymen that sounds like it was some pretty good shit even if it wasn't as good as Enigma.

lucb1e4• 8 years ago

Would this have been useful for spies?

Not in the slightest. If you would rank all types of encryption by strength, this would be one of the weakest ones, right between writing the text upside down and choosing a custom font.

ravenstine• 8 years ago

Mattel sometimes made some really neat Barbie toys. I'm sure a toy typewriter would have been pretty cool, with or without its ability to encode messages!

I remember, as a kid, my sister got a "Talk With Me" Barbie, which was a doll that could be attached to a computer(serial port!) and configured to speak your name with its animatronic mouth. The CD-ROM came with some games that would also trigger the doll to speak. I was a boy, so I really wasn't into Barbie, but I was really wowed by that toy and wished my Star Trek toys could do the same! For its time, it was pretty innovative.

monstormenta• 8 years ago

"As it was probably thought that secret writing would not appeal to girls, the coding/decoding facilities were omitted from the manual".

Back in elementary, my friends and I had an entire word replacement bank to talk about crushes, teachers, etc. in code. Later on, we would constantly make new pigpen ciphers. Isn't it a stereotype that girls love secrets?

Toys aimed toward girls have been steadily improving. I have noticed a great rise particularly in STEM-focused toys and I am excited (and jealous) to see with what the next generation will grow up.

saagarjha• 8 years ago

As a male who is considerably above the recommended age for toys like these, I'm curious what your opinion is on the toys I see in most department stores. To me, they seem to be putting lipstick on a pig: you have things like "engineer Barbie" or "mix your own chemicals lip balm" that involve combining the two packets provided in the box (oh, and designing your own lab coat!). I guess it might raise awareness in girls that STEM is something that they could do, but I don't think it's doing a particularly good job at portraying it. Thoughts?

andai• 8 years ago

"But dad I want to play with Barbie!"

--"Not until you break the cipher!"

Freak_NL3• 8 years ago

It does sound a lot like STEM-washing (cf. greenwashing).

vidarh2• 8 years ago

A lot of STEM toys have been dumbed down to the extreme irrespective of gender.

Growing up in the 80's there was a lot of ads for e.g. chemistry sets that at least allowed for some proper experiments advertised even in comics books targeting relatively small children (I grew up in Norway; I remember ads like that even from comics like Donald Duck & Co which mostly targeted pre-teens), but I instead got handed my dads set from when he was growing up in the 60's, with full set of suitable glass ware, and the books he had, which outlined full sets of experiments "for young boys" that included making gunpowder and assorted proper fireworks, and stuff that included (genuine) warnings of what to avoid to prevent the experiment from exploding.

Nothing outrageously dangerous, but some of them were the kind of things you might expect the teacher to demonstrate in a high-school science class with appropriate care and safety equipment, rather than the kind of stuff you'd even in the 80's expect a hobby chemistry set to actively encourage the way the 60's books did.

And indeed, my main limiting factor in carrying out many of the experiments was that in the intervening years it had become a lot harder to buy a lot of the chemicals listed without being 18 or buying via a business. Though there were still other fun things to do with them. For example, I did find it very amusing when I managed to add a layer of lead to one of my moms silver spoons via electrolysis (the books did have appropriate warnings, so I did know that continuing to use said spoon afterwards would not have been a particularly good idea; but not sufficient warnings to make me consider that perhaps I shouldn't have used the silverware) - my mom was less amused.

Move forward to today, and the 80's children's chemistry sets looks fantastic compared to most of the stuff on sale.

mmjaa2• 8 years ago

Yeah, I personally think this feature-removal is just plain sexism. Lots of girls enjoy learning new and interesting things to do with math and science, and crypto is an especially great way to introduce kids to abstract thinking.

Not to mention there's the whole "if you remove the feature, how will they ever learn about it" factor .. just plain sexist, imho.

A better, more "pro-girl" approach would be to include the feature and let girls figure out for themselves, if they like it. Also, the boys who might play with these same toys.

Freak_NL3• 8 years ago

Yeah, I personally think this feature-removal is just plain sexism.

It probably had nothing to do with sexism per se; rather it probably was a business call made by people who suspected that while some percentage of girls would like that feature, a certain percentage of parents wouldn't find that feature appropriate or scary or simply not something they would consider as suitable for a toy. These people are paid to know their target demographic and to make choices that maximize profit for any given product.

Their assumptions might be rooted in sexism, but I suspect that most of their frame of reference consists of simply knowing how parents and relatives view these products, their sexist attitudes included. That is to say, if these people suspect that a significant percentage parents want to stimulate exact thinking and problem solving skills in their girls, they will translate that to market decisions (which is slowly happening now).

dfxm122• 8 years ago

FYI, they didn't remove the feature. I thought the article made this clear.

ryanmonroe• 8 years ago

Any toy designed specifically for one sex is sexist by definition.

vidarh2• 8 years ago

Indeed it seems weird - search Amazon for "secret diary" and you'll find a whole lot of products aimed almost exclusively at girls.

I think the question is whether it was seemed to "cross over" into "spy gear" - while secret diaries are very much a "girly" toy category, spy gear is very much focused at boys.

dole• 8 years ago

In 2016, Mattel/Barbie ran (or still runs?) a "Barbie Spy Squad" series of toys and merchandising complete with movie and McDonald's promos, so while rather late (and obv better than never), the toy manufacturers are at least aware of the market segment.

msl09• 8 years ago

Yeah a coworker told me she had developed a super sophisticated encryption technique to write in her diary because her brother would keep decrypting it lol

GuB-42• 8 years ago

I don't think it is the intended idea but the fact that the coding/decoding facilities are not in the manual but still on the device actually make it even more exciting. It has a secret feature for writing secrets, you can't get more secret than that.

Nowadays, adding a not-so-secret feature could be used to generate buzz.

bluefox• 8 years ago

According to David Kahn's The Codebreakers, the Kama Sutra lists secret writing as one of the 64 arts that women should know and practice.

jedimastert• 8 years ago

Toys aimed toward girls have been steadily improving. I have noticed a great rise particularly in STEM-focused toys and I am excited (and jealous) to see with what the next generation will grow up.

My daughter just turned 1, and I'm super duper excited to see this as well. And if we can't find the kind of toy we want, we'll make it.

amelius• 8 years ago

Something like this with a built-in tablet stand would be cool.

vanderZwan• 8 years ago

I'm reminded of "Barbiephonic (redux)"[0], although it's only related in the sense that through this story I found yet another story involving Barbie and crypto[1].

And the other thing lying around on those open shares were recordings of names. To reach a wide audience they’d recorded some unstoppably perky young woman reciting kids’ first names, Aaron, Abbot, Abby, Abigail, Adana, Adena, in an upbeat barbie-girl voice, every single one. And there I was with a pile of free disk space, university bandwidth, wget and why not.
There were seventeen thousand of them.
After a bit of experimentation, I figured out how to stitch them all together with .4 seconds of silence between each. The resulting audio file was almost five hours long; four hours and forty five minutes of relentless Barbiedoll voice reciting seventeen thousand first names in alphabetical order.
To my knowledge, nobody has ever listened to the whole thing.
Of the six attempts I’m aware of, four were called off when the death threats started, one due to the near-breakup of the couple making the attempt, and one person drinking themselves to unconsciousness at about the 90 minute mark. I’m not saying that to make a joke. I’m telling you because this is real and it’s an SCP-grade psychic biohazard. No highly esteemed deed was committed here; this is not a place of honour.

The "SCP-grade psychic biohazard" is not that much of an exaggeration, by the way.

[0] http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2015/12/05/barbiephonic-redux/

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/inter...

LeifCarrotson• 8 years ago

> To my knowledge, nobody has ever listened to the whole thing.

The Youtube mirror [0] has 1,890 views. What is a "view"?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_s7GL6ZdG4

CharlesW• 8 years ago

A YouTube "view" means that someone played the content for ~30 seconds.

userbinator• 8 years ago

I wonder if this feature came about not because it was originally in the "requirements", but because the layout of the hardware key matrix/wire routing may have not been decided completely, and it was easier to include several selectable lookup tables in the masked ROM than have to change the mask (at great cost) later. Then someone thought of adding the ability to change it at runtime, perhaps for testing, and the rest is history...

...and in case the alternate lookup tables don't seem to map to any keyboard layout, here's an example showing that a typical keyboard more often than not does not have the rows and columns in "physical" order: http://map.grauw.nl/articles/keymatrix.php

paulgerhardt• 8 years ago

One of the more unusual bits of Barbie Typewriter lore was that in at least one instance, an ultra-right wing terrorist cell based in Northern Ireland was using these for communication[1].

No indication if the cell was utilizing the "encryption" capabilities of the Barbie typewriter or just putting it to work as the cheapest, most disposable means of conveying demands but the Barbie logo makes an amusing juxtaposition to the operator's violent history (including 72(!) prior convictions). Every time this story surfaces, part of me wants to believe that someone somewhere is still using substitution cyphers for serious ends.

[1] https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/jai...

satsuma• 8 years ago

and now i have the mental image of a stereotypical terrorist, with a black ski mask and a kalashnikov on a strap on his back, hunched over his pink-and-purple barbie typewriter. amazing. thank you

kazinator• 8 years ago

Or maybe a Hello, Kitty AR-15:

https://www.cnet.com/news/a-hello-kitty-assault-rifle-that-a...

Barbie typewriter (2015)

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