* * * * *
                                        
                                 Clickity-click
                                        
> Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and Doug Tygar have an interesting new paper [1]
> showing that if you have an audio recording of somebody typing on an
> ordinary computer keyboard for fifteen minutes or so, you can figure out
> everything they typed. The idea is that different keys tend to make
> slightly different sounds, and although you don't know in advance which
> keys make which sounds, you can use machine learning to figure that out,
> assuming that the person is mostly typing English text. (Presumably it
> would work for other languages too.)
> 

Via Robot Wisdom [2], “Acoustic Snooping on Typed Information [3]”

I may have to rethink the keyboards I use [4] … 

[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_Emanations
[2] http://www.robotwisdom.com/
[3] http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=893
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/08/26.4

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.