Karotz

» see karotz.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

France produced an internet rabbit and then produced two more, and none of them ever made it to a Turkish shop I walked past. Karotz was the last one. It went on sale on 1 April 2011, priced as a consumer gadget and shaped like a white plastic bunny about the size of a wine bottle, with ears that turned and a belly light that changed color. There was a speaker and a microphone in it, plus a webcam you could aim.

Under the shell was an ARM9 processor, a Samsung S3C2440, running Linux with 256 MB of storage. It joined a home Wi-Fi network over WEP or WPA. In the nose was an RFID reader on the ISO-14443-B standard, which is the part people forget: you could tap a tagged object against the rabbit's face and have it do something. Mindscape sold little tagged figurines for exactly this purpose, so a child could put a plastic thing on a rabbit and hear a story.

Mindscape had bought all of it on 20 October 2009 out of the wreck of Violet, the Paris company founded by Rafi Haladjian and Olivier Mével that had invented the format in 2005 and then gone bankrupt on the technical difficulty of shipping it. Mindscape was a video game publisher. On 6 October 2011, six months after Karotz went on sale, Mindscape was itself acquired by Aldebaran Robotics, the French company then best known for the NAO humanoid. Aldebaran said the adventure would continue.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rabbit that came before ~

The Nabaztag arrived in 2005 and is the one people remember, partly because it was first and partly because it was genuinely strange: an ambient object that sat on a shelf and reported the world at you through light and ear position rather than through a screen. It read out your email and it wiggled when the weather changed. About 150,000 of the whole line were sold across all generations.

Karotz kept the silhouette and added the camera and the tag reader, which made it a more capable object and a stranger one. A Nabaztag was a thing that talked to you. A Karotz was a thing that could also watch you, and it was sold as a baby monitor on that basis.

~ what the ears did ~

Everything, and nothing without permission from Paris. The rabbit had no useful local mode. Voice commands went to a server. Applications, which Mindscape called Apps and sold through its own small store, were fetched from a server. Even the ear positions were driven by a service you did not run. This is a normal architecture for 2011 and it is the reason the whole product has an end date rather than a slow decline into obsolescence.

At DEF CON 21 in 2013, researchers presented the security consequences of that design. Connections were unencrypted. A device with a steerable camera and an always-listening microphone, addressed over the open internet by a company that was in the middle of being sold, is a surveillance object whether or not anyone intends it to be.

~ 18 february 2015 ~

Aldebaran gave notice in October 2014: the Karotz servers and the customer service line would both stop on 18 February 2015, and that would be the end of it. Four months of warning is more than most connected devices get, and it changed nothing about the outcome, because there was no offline fallback to fall back to. Owners who had bought a rabbit in 2011 or 2012 had it working for three or four years.

~ free rabbits ~

In 2016 a group of owners in the Netherlands stood up their own servers and an English-language API, under the name Free Rabbits, and got the hardware talking again. They are still at it. That is the reliable pattern for connected objects with a small enough install base and a devoted enough remainder: the company leaves, and some number of people who liked the thing keep a replacement service running out of their own pockets for longer than the manufacturer ever did.

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