December 2004 Archives

The New York Times Magazine reports that an American scientist with a Russian name has developed a method to acoustically analyze an audio recording of typing, and determine what was typed.

From the abstract: We show that PC keyboards, notebook keyboards, telephone and ATM pads are vulnerable to attacks based on differentiating the sound emanated by different keys. Our attack employs a neural network to recognize the key being pressed.

They use a learning computer to hear what you're typing? This is one step away from HAL in 2001 reading those guys' lips! What about when it "learns" your voice mail password, ATM PIN, eBay login, etc?

It's $19 to buy the full research paper.

I gathered these items from the alley behind my house.

Vera spoke, and I wrote about it on MetBlogs.

Being unemployed, I spend a lot of time in my home, or in cyberspace. Today, I explored the outdoors, and brought back these samples of decaying life.

I always have a hundred tabs and windows open in Safari. I know, it's a sickness.

You can imagine how AWFUL it feels when instead of hitting cmd-w to close an individual tab, I accidentally type cmd-q and quit the whole application. AWFUL! DEPRESSING!

But I found out that you can remap any keyboard shortcut in OS X. I set it so cmd-Q does ... wait for it... NOTHING!

Try it at home:

1. Bring up the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane.
2. Hit the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
3. Click the + icon.
4. Select Safari from the Application menu.
5. In the Menu Title box, enter the exact text "Quit Safari".
6. In the Keyboard Shortcut box, enter a new shortcut (for instance, Command-Option-Q).
7. Click Add.

Now you no longer need to suffer as I have.