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How Many Keys Have You Pressed?
teardrop.ca writes
"A new project created by Jason Hooper involves the counting and displaying of statistical information regarding the number of keys you have pressed since sign-up to this project. A change from the distributed problem solving projects that have been around for awhile. " Finally
a truly frivelous use of distributed computing! It's a bit thin, looks like it
could be easily gamed, but damn it'd be funny if the whole world did this (never mind
the security and privacy issues). I'm curious how many more times some keys
are pressed then others (perhaps this would explain why my spacebars
always seem to break on my laptops :/)
How many keys then
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The most pressed Slashdot keys...
F-I-R-S-T P-O-S-T
Ironic considering this might be the first post.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I'm supposed to download a program that sits in the tray and records all the keys I press? I mean, to count them, they all have to pass their code, right? And it has network functionality... HELLO? Security?
Am I the only one here who can see the rather hazardous applications of a program like this? I don't want anybody keeping track of how many keys I happen to be pressing when I'm typing.
Among other things...
Sure that isn't statistics recording which keys you have pressed?
Although it *will* be good fun... it's not currently available to download.
:)
Oh well
Pulse is currently not available for public download. It is in its beta phase and is currently undergoing tests by a group of friends on the internet. This will be the place to download Pulse when it goes public.
what the hell is the purpose of this? To release a statistic annually saying how many keys do users press on their keyboard?
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
I knew a long time ago that distributed computing would truly make a difference in humanity's quest for knowledge. But I would never have imagined that we would be able to count and analyze keystroke data from users around the world. It is truly a great day for science! :p
Blatant sarcasm aside, this is moderately interesting. Any chances we'll see a linux client?
Learn to Play Go
Reminds me of the many mice odometers available.
My distances were always disappointingly low compared to my colleagues - I use keyboard-shortcuts much more, I find them quicker.
I can see it now. Instead of KLOCs we will have MOKP (millions of keys pressed). My boss would love it!
Sean.OutaHere()
So, basically, they want you to run a keystroke logger. The logger will then report back the number of times you push each key. Are we supposed to just trust them to ignore the order? I have to really doubt the sanity (or common sense, anyway) of the person who would voluntarily give away his security like that.
Fun stuff. Trivial, but fun.
I have spent most of my life keeping track of the keys i have pressed! a= 3 I= 3 h= 2 v= 2 e= 9 s= 6 p= 4 oy, this was a lot hard then i thought, im going to take a nap
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
How meny inkorrect keys r actualley pressed?
That would be interesting to see. Possible to if you could record and check to see the most popular key pressed right before the backspace.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
I bet it's 1, 2, 3, and 4 this past year since all I seem to do is play D2, drink potions, and die anyway....
No offense teardrop.ca, but ah duh, did you expect any intelligent responses on this story?!
cool! very soon everybody could see how many times i type:
;)
- my credit card number
- my real name
- my address
- my fav. web sites
your personal stats page could be a nice profile.
but wait... they would NEVER do that... wouldn't they? it's even open source! oh wait, it isn't i think
muuuh out
[afx]
Then MAYBE i would consider this a slashdot post.
Otherwise i can only warn anybody not to use such a lame tool for spying on personal data...
cu,
Lispy
What is stopping any other kind of distributed program from recording key-strokes, and sending it back. I wonder if they are reading my keypresses right now.
mnewberg.com
The distributed version sounds dangerous for the security reasons others have pointed out ...
... how about something which popped up every 1000 key strokes (or whatever) reminding you to give you wrists a rest.
But, could a local version help with RSI? I remember obnoxious programs which popped up every hour reminding you to take a break
I wrote:
>have spent most of my life keeping track of the >keys i have pressed!
>a= 3
>I= 3
>h= 2
>v= 2
>e= 9
>s= 6
>p= 4
>oy, this was a lot hard then i thought, im going >to take a nap"
I am sooo sorry.
I'll never do anything that dumb ever
mikey
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
Funny, if you replace 'keystroke logger' with 'Microsoft product' in the previous post it still makes sense.
Fight The Power: Overthrow Slashdot Editors!
is this the same crowd that gets the willies anytime Windoze XP calls home? Picture this!
Sending in every single keystroke on your keyboard...lol...now thats what i call hypocrites.
cu,
Lispy
Several years ago, a friend of mine analyzed his keypresses, and came up with a keyboard layout optimized for his particular usage.
If he were to extend that, and have the daemon running all the time, it could optimize his keyboard layout in real time, to keep him most efficient.
Eventually, he would need only one key.
blog
I don't need a program to tell me which keys I type the most, I just have to look at the numbers and see which ones are worn the most.... (or in some cases which ones have had a marker used to draw the letters again)
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
the key that always broke on my laptop was the fucking tilde.
I guess going to too many user porn sites back in the day.
http://porn.com/~pornking/
Wow, I'm amused about how many people replied to this article without actually having read the site. Jay's a good friend of mine, I know he wouldn't log the actual keys. Besides, when you go to the Privacy Policy on the page (Yes, you can visit the mentioned sites! What wonder!), it mentions what Pulse will and won't do:
It is the intent of Pulse to transmit the following information to dolphin.bitdevil.com on a basis whose periodicity is decided by the user through Pulse's configuration menus:
- user's account name as provided by user
- user's password for Project Dolphin as provided by user
- one integer that represents the total number of keys typed since last contact with dolphin.bitdevil.com for the same purpose
- the current time (represented by the number of seconds elapsed since midnight, 1 Jan 1970 UTC), according to the system clock on the user's computer
What it is guaranteed Pulse does not record, collect, or transmit to this server or any other destination:
- which keys the user types, with exception to the analysis of the very last key hit, in order to decide if it is a key that "counts" as a key being hit
- the contents of the user's hard drive or any other attached or internal or external storage device that may hold any type of data
- anything on the user's screen
So, for the benefit of the lazy people who can't be bothered to actually read the important information on a product's website, there you go - the important bits of the privacy policy. Oh, can I get your addresses? I'd like to send you a hard-copy of the link on a big fscking piece of clue-by-four. Jesus.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
Generate a script that writes "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", it uses every letter in the english alphabet, over and over just to throw off their stats.
On a side note the keys at the support center here would be EU does not RTFM.
Imagine at the end of this project a huge database containing usernames, passwords, etc. posted on the web. If it were used like that, one user running the client on a corporate net with access to sensitive material could inadvertently take down the entire network.
On the flip side, it would be cool to see how many keys are pressed by x number of users in x number of days. They should release the source so people can make sure it's not sending the actual -key- that is being pressed rather than the number of keys that are being pressed.
Make the code open source. That way, we'll see exactly what's being sent back along with what isn't. I'd like to see it done with key frequency, reporting every twelve hours or so, as opposed to sending complete logs of what you type, which I highly doubt they're stupid enough to try...
Here's a wacky idea. Read the pages before you comment. They don't keep track of which keys and how many times. Just how many keys total. The return ONE integer to the server periodically and that is: Number of total keys pressed since last contact.
Despite the dubious value of this little enterprise, there is one solution that would appease the fears of all the paranoid security people out there: Open source. If any random C-literate individual is concerned about the keylogging capabilities of the system, he can just check the source code and see that it's just keys_pressed++; inside a loop.
The people who run this really ought to consider opening the source, otherwise privacy concerns could cause their project to fail.
Learn to Play Go
well, what if it doesn't record the actual key pressed, just that there *was* a key pressed?
You can almost count the number of keys pressed by parsing /proc/interrupts...
_That would explain why the spacebars always break on my laptops._
For me it's always the left shift, cause of all the < and > neccesary for HTML tags.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
but that doesn't make me trust them. While it's all well and good that they have this privacy policy, do they actualy follow it?
Without running a packet sniffer how would you know?
How do I know they won't change their policy once things get going without telling me? (like thats never happened)
This is way to big a security risk to even think of installing on my box, not to mention a waste of precious CPU cycles
I expected maybe after a few years this project would gather up enough popularity to get slashdotted, and after enough time perhaps even be the frist page hit via a "project dolphin" google search (rather than the actual page about actual dolphins being studied). But it's not even gone public yet and suddenly I'm worrying about bandwidth running out :)
The trust complexes start today I guess...
Of course it is too late (there are many studies demonstrating that), but, eventually, it could give us the statistical framework for how to develop an international keyboard!!!
6000 languages? Small step for a man, but a great step for mankind. Join the International Keyboard Foundation! (joke, unfortunately...)
What an original way to capture passwords from everyone around the world. Maybe now I can get the administrative account for the microsoft.com domain. :)
incorrect.
Can't wait for keyboard designers to take the input from this program and remaps 'A', 'W', 'S', 'D' to a "more convenient" place to accomodate it's heavy use by gamers! ;-)
(for those who don't play First Person Shooters (and I know you are out there) those are the keys used for basic movement and are probably the most used keys on my system)
To all you people who haven't read the web site, it DOESN'T send the actual keystrokes, just the number of keys pressed since the last update. If you are really wary, you could just grab the packets that the program sends out, and look for your own-dumb-self to see that it doesn't contain all of your keystrokes(or any, for that matter) nor is it large enough to contain any confidential information. What...it should be 4-10 bytes at the most, BIG security risk.
And on the horizon... New, improved Magic Dolphin, which keeps track of the words you type and the order in which you type them in! A product of Future Business, Inc.
I wonder if it will reveal *any* use for , or is this meaningless key just on UK keyboards?
after a few years this project would gather up enough popularity to get slashdotted
Then what do you call this story?
and after enough time perhaps even be the frist page hit via a "project dolphin" google search
Too bad "Project Dolphin" is already taken. It refers to the project that produced the GameCube video game console.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It only runs on Windows anyways - it can't hurt the security that much :)
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Is this a hoax? Am I on Candid Camera?
Now why would someone want to perpetuate this when we just heard about keyboard wiretaps? Certainly not a SlashDot reader!
How long before someone: (1) cranks up the repeat rate on their keyboard and (2) tapes down the space key.
rm -rf /*
nuff said
Stephen King should sign up and dominate you all.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
Useless, but apparently someone's having fun doing it. I'll file this program in the same folder as my mouse odometer program and SimStapler.
Being how moronic the general computer using population is (AOL -is- the largest ISP), I have a feeling if this did catch on, it would spawn a slew of trojan key loggers.
They should have it be digitally signed or something, the secutiry risks alone are outrageous.
If every unique piece of text out there was added together and divided by the number of people on the planet, I wonder what the average number of keypresses per person would be...
"Our research has confirmed that three keys are used most frequently by computer users: ctrl, alt, and delete."
Do you like German cars?
Assuming that it is counting which keys as well as how many - the little web page seems to indicate how many, and his friends seem to be having a race - I bet you could figure a way to tell good spellers from bad, using that information.
My guess would be that people who spell correctly would use uncommon letters with a certain relative frequency, but people who spell things wrong, frivelous [sic] for example, would use less uncommon letters and more common letters.
You'd need to do a lot of training - I'm sure that many poor spellers would "look like" people with good spelling and unusual word choice.
I don't want to be a spelling Nazi, I make occasional mistakes myself, but the editors of Slashdot need to start spellchecking their comments/articles. It isn't like any of your editorial comments are hand written, guys! Real journalists come on here and judge your entire readership, hundreds of thousands of people, based on the degree of professionalism you display.
Stop slouching! It's two O'clock in the afternoon, PUT PANTS ON!
Here's a java spellchecking applet. It certainly seems to work; I for one like to spell things correctly, I understand that other people don't and in a post I certainly have no business complaining, but I would like a little button, "spell check" next to Preview.
There are at least half a dozen spellchecking projects on sourceforge. I haven't found any Java applets, unfortunately.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This reminds of that little app that has been floating around for years, the mouse odometer.
I would display on screen the number of miles your mouse has rolled. Maybe he could piggyback this functionality... since the whole thing is pretty pointless anyway. (Except for the RSI/take a break after so many keystrokes function.)
Actually it would be an interesting analysis to compare keyboard use to mouse use, per user, especially if it could be compared across platforms.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
And then become depressed to find that the key most commonly used was backspace :P
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
My GOD! Why don't people read the article first instead of making up things? It counts the number of total keystrokes. Nowhere does it ever say it logs *which* keys are pressed, or in what order they were pressed. The only place where logging which particular keys were pressed was in CmdrTaco's blurb, which is generally a bad place to get your opinions and info from.
Save your paranoia for the real security risks. Although I'm not sure how much of your security advice should be trusted, considering how you can't even read a simplified summary of an article accurately.
Just a note for anybody looking to get the program, it is not available yet:
Pulse is currently not available for public download. It is in its beta phase and is currently undergoing tests by a group of friends on the internet. This will be the place to download Pulse when it goes public.
So the FBI's key logger gets announcements on Slashdot now? How much are they paying for this?
Pedro Côrte-Real.
I hit that key about five times a year. And only when I'm playing Quake. YMMV, I guess.
That is such bullshit, I wish I could come over there and kick your ass for being so dumb.
Here's a useful hint: just because something is posted on the Internet doesn't mean that it is true.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
In terms of frequency, here are the percentages (out of _The Code Book_, by Simon Singh, page 19):
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
Someone should calculate how much energy it takes to press a key, and write a program that counts how many calories you've burned. "Mom, let me have that extra desert, I've been playing Quake for two weeks!"
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
How many clicks can a coder click if a coder could surf (cough cough). Um anyways... I wonder what the ratio between keystrokes to clicks is.
Eye, says I.
Here's a useful hint: just because something is posted on the Internet doesn't mean that it isn't true.
Jay's a good friend of mine, I know he wouldn't log the actual keys.
Heh :- /
My ex-wife was a good friend of mine.
She wouldn't tip brake fluid over my car
Besides, when you go to the Privacy Policy on the page it mentions what Pulse will and won't do
And this privacy policy comes under European law also?
Is Jay open to bribes from unscrupulous bastards who will pay for the data he collects?
Can a melicious version of this code be put out there so a clueless windoze user downloads the wrong one? (one without a ''privacy policy'')
Even if your mate has the best intentions, encouraging people to install spyware like this is very bad karma. You are encouraging people to take stupid risks.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
From a usability standpoint this could be used to determine ways to decrease the number of keys pressed to complete a task. If it could keep track of which keys were pressed it would be even more useful to application developers concearned with usablity and design issues.
That's true and a good point. But! Once the program is released it will be the work of a minute or less to see if it's sending a single integer, or one for each key. (I realize it could be compressed or encrypted, but discount it).
I guess my real point was that their stated goal was not to collect single key statistics, but total key statistics. What they actually do is something else entirely.
...when I can just ask the VX2 Corporation how many keys I've pressed?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
what do you mean with 'broken spacebar'? I have never broken or seen a spacebar 'broken'. I have had loads of cheap keyboards wear-out, keys becomming unresponsive and such, or the lettering on the keys no longer readable (but thats not really a problem, as I don't look at the keyboard anyway).
The best solution is to get a quality keyboard such as the old IBM PS/2 keyboard I have. Its indestructable, and just needs a cleaning so now and then.
Nowhere does it ever say it logs *which* keys are pressed,
Of course it doesn't admit to logging keystrokes!!
How many keys could a typing geek type if a typing geek could type keys?
A typing geek could type as many keys as a typing geek would type, if a typing geek could type keys.
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
I mean seriously what advantages does OS/2 offer nowadays? Can OS/2 use win95 drivers?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It has been established that the letter E is the most common letter in the english language (a useful tool in early cryptography with frequency graphs) But I wouldn't be surprized if x was even more common on the net :)
Years ago on my mac, I had a program that kept track how many feet I had moved my mouse... I got up to over 2 miles before I got tired of tracking it.
Hows about writing something that kept track of this, and make neat annoucements on the collective like, 'enough mouse-distance to go from MY to LA! enough to go to the moon!', etc?
"Nevermind the obvious...". Stupid fucks.
We can play the world's largest game of Scrabble with the results.
You're kidding me, right?
Well, for one, there's no Linux client, only Windows.. Everyone knows the most common key used by Windows users is their left mouse button.
I can smell keylogger from here. Even with his "trust me, I'm not keylogging..." disclaimer, I'd have to be very paranoid..
I think it'd be easier to just parse my ~/mail/sent-mail , and all my code, to see which keys I press more frequently. I can definately tell you how many letters I typed (after backspaces, hehe) each month..
Maybe I should have paid more attenation to that article on document retention. How long should I keep my old mail? Oh, who cares, he'll have it all logged for me anyways..
Anonymous Coward^H^H^H^H^H^H Paranoid
i don't know if the software is still in beta or something, but I didn't see anything about cheat preventing. He says that the client records the number of keypresses and connects to a CGI which transmits the info.
u m= 38948937492837493824793824792
It seems like it would be *really* easy to cheat. What prevents me from typing
http://dolphin.bitdevil.com/cgi-bin/count.cgi?n
into my Moz address bar?
Really, this would also teach us that some key are COMPLETELLY USELESS, such as Caps-Lock, INSERT and SCroll -lock!
Why not just tell them our passwords so they can agregate the data and find what are the most used ones? Oh, wait...
Maybe they just upload agregate data, but will still be a hazard (what if you type a password and then sit still?).
unfinished: (adj.)
This seems like a program that one could program in just a few hours, if that. It has such small functionality. Why is this so interesting? This is not 'slashdot'-worthy news.
I wonder, will this key-counting thing be open source? I wouldn't trust it if it weren't opensource... it might count more than just keystrokes. We all know how popular spyware is there days. If the author is serious about this, he would make the program open-source... just my .02
i've always told you kids out there that the space bar is the *KEY* to a healthy relationship between you and your fantasy partner. it so happens to be the same key that is mapped to the play button on your movie player to play that porn video you downloaded.
the 'bar' breaking on your lap-top isnt a good sign at all.
it marks the downfall of manhood..ugh.....mankind.
my blog
Another fine way to get a keylogger sitting on your machine, assuming there is not already one present.
I don't think there'll be people 'battling' for the top position on this ladder. All it proves is who wastes the most time posting to slashdot.
The letter distribution is based on frequency of use. You only get one z and q but a lot of e's and a's.
"THAN" is the comparative you dumb shit! "THEN" is temporal!
How many times do you have to make the same stupid third grade grammatical error? Are you completely retarded, Taco?
how frequently you press the keys on your keyboard in relation to each other is to just look at your keys. The friction generated by the movements of your fingers against the keys wears away the surface of the keys so that (1) the printed symbols begin to fade away and (2) the surfaces of the keys becomes smoother and smoother.
There's a smooth shiny oval-shaped area about 2/3's the way across my space bar (starting from the left) where I'm evidently accustomed to tapping that particular key. =)
I wouldn't. Had this old IBM keyboard where noone else was able to find the A, E, ^ or any other common used key. The chars just vanished :)
`grep key /proc/interrupts` already gives a nice count under Linux. Remember that all keys generate one interrupt when pressed, and one when released. IIRC, some generate more than one int per press (extended keycodes?), and there may be an issue with debouncing.
All of them. How many have you pressed?
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Here's a related idea. Why not use all these millions of keystrokes to generate power for your PC. Could you power your laptop just by typing on it hard enough if it had some sort of energy capture device in the key mechanisms? Has this been tried before?
When I ran Windows ME, Alt, Ctrl, and Delete were pretty high on the chart.
This isn't special...the FBI already logs all of my keystrokes for me...
:-)
i wonder if they'd be nice enough to hack together something to let me look at my stats
68794...wait...68809...wait...68824...
ahh, forget it...
Something like this could be used to truly improve UI's. By studying key presses (and mouse movements), and seeing the particular things that *slow* people down in their interactions, better UI's could be created.
:-)
Things like the Fitaly keyboard (and an IBM equivalent, and others), were created by using large texts to estimate pen motion and such. Actual user interaction would be even more valuable (although it's hard to say if it'd be much different; certainly some things like cursor motion and other navigation would come out higher in real world analysis, than using text analysis).
The concept of automated collection and analysis of user interaction efficiency is pretty exciting. It really could amount to more than "which keys have you pressed the most." (With me, it'd be backspace
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Now they can log how many keystrokes are in all my passwords, credit card numbers, all my account info and even my private emails!! This is awsome!! GREAT IDEA!!
Of course I trust them 100% not to mine my data for unscrupulous purposes.
WTF?!!
Congrats to the editors for overrulling mob irrationality on this one.
My first reaction to seeing this post was one of incredulity. Reading other people's posts, I get the impression that they just loving handing out passwords and personal info to complete strangers.
But they don't like Microsoft? Funny that.
So I guess it would work for those who sit at the console...?
db
Cig:
ôô
Whilst one does not even have to point out the comparative vs. temporal reasoning, the general public needs to be more aware of stupid shit like this to keep us on our toes grammatically.
I have a geek kid who can code circles around me, but when he says "alias" he pronounces it to make me think of the Big Boy Restaurant. Go figger. To his credit: He can remember "righty-tighty, lefty-loosy"
db
Cig:
ôô
"this would explain why my spacebars always seem to break on my laptops"
If I look closely at my laptop spacebar, I notice that the texture on the right edge of the spacebar is much smoother than the left side. Conclusion: I press the spacebar with my right hand much more often than my left.
Hah, your program couldn't figure that out =P (And pressing just one side of a wide key will probably cause it to break in the long run!)
There's much more to this than first meets the eye. Here are some things to consider when making the counts:
I'm sure there's more, but I would really be interested to see how well the program captures every single keypress!
BTW, it would be really interesting to compare the distribution of keypresses required for an experienced Emacs user compared to an experienced vi user for typing in say, identical computer programs! One could then see which one was more efficient. Then, of course, one could argue that some keypresses require more "work" than others. A home-row "d" being less work than pressing the digit "1"; but of course is that a "1" from the main group of keys, or the "1" on a numeric keypad? Let the editor wars continue! ;^)
One Logitech Mouse Man: $95.99 (now completely ruined)
Internet Access: $34.95 / month
The crackly noise whenever I move my index finger: Priceless
Actually, I shouldn't have called Taco "retarded." The Down Syndrome patient I know doesn't make the same dumb mistake day in and day out, year after year. Taco is worse than retarded, he's determinedly ignorant. These mistakes aren't occasional goofs or typos, they represent pattern of complete disregard for basic communications skills in his own native language.
I wonder how many different ways Taco can misspell "definitely?"
Do you install any software on your computer? Are you aware of what programs hook the keyboard, or do you keep track of every packet sent from your computer?
If you're gonna be that paranoid, anything could log all your keystrokes and send them away. Ok, big companies are less likely to do this (someone's guaranteed to notice), but it's still possible.
magic lantern right? I can see it now, the fbi is so clever they even tell people the program logs keystrokes, all the criminals will run this.
Oh, you mean RC5's not frivolous? There are people dying in the world due to our continued lack of scientific knowledge regarding various diseases and our own gene structures.
Try one of these instead, please...
Genome@Home: gene structure
Folding@Home: protein folding
United Devices: cancer and anthrax
Parabon Pioneer: cancer
Entropia's FightAIDS@Home: AIDS
can we say wheel of fortune? :)
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
From the download page:
/. crowd) use Linux than OS/2.. it'd be a lot better for his project.
Pulse is currently not available for public download. It is in its beta phase and is currently undergoing tests by a group of friends on the internet. This will be the place to download Pulse when it goes public.
(NOTE: An OS/2 port is being considered.)
Why OS/2? Wouldn't a Linux port make a little more sense? After all, I'd imagine many more people (especially from the
-Dave
The program captures & analyzes keystrokes, made by programmers fixing bugs and making enhancements to the program, which captures and analyzes keystrokes made by programmers.....
This is one of the most inane things I've seen. Who cares how many keys you've pressed?
This is a real distributed computing project, UD's Cancer Research...
Linux users need WINE to run it, as there is no native client yet...
Easier ways: Grime build-up. What keys are the grimiest?
- Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
At least with SETI there is a CHANCE of finding new information that would advance civilization. To have a confirmation of Hawking's dying black hole theory would give me something new to use as bar trivia. "What did you do this weekend ?"
Counting keystrokes seems more like trivia than science. Are you going to change the pattern of the keyboard away from QWERTY ? It's like the foot/miles system in the U.S. Everybody says we should get rid of it but it never gets done.
Perhaps a third of my work at my day-time job is pressing simulated function keys on virtual terminals using my mouse, or I could have used the keys CTL-Alt-6. Does a mouse click get a prorated number of keystrokes ?
This response brought to you by the letter B.
A: all of them
There has already been research into the most frequent keys pressed, etc.
Hence the advent of the Dvorak keyboard. The mose frequent keys are on home row. People who have learned to use the Dvorak keyboard are faster typists, and more accurate to boot.
You can set up any normal keyboard to use Dvorak .
heyitsme
It'd be interesting to see how relative keystroke frequencies have changed. My senior honors project on keyboard layout efficiency used a study from the 1960's by Lawrence Stolurow: "Frequency of letters and bigrams in the english language" (or something like that) as a guage of bigram (two-letter combo) frequency, but there are a lot of new factors to account for these days. For instance the frequency of the bigram "ww" (as in www.slashdot.org) is probably a lot higher these days.
I was impressed that Dolphin's privacy policy was up front. It looks like the data sent to their server only counts the number of keys hit, without recording *which* keys. That additional info would be great to have available to the individual user, but I wouldn't be as comfortable having it logged publically. An even less useful app, would be to bring togehter data from the aleready-overused mouse odometers around the world. We'd be able to get some serious mileage. How far do mice go in 24 hours? --Dan
I think your program is a fun idea. It really isn't worth anything to anyone, but it is interesting just knowing actually how much you type. I would not mind trying it out once you open it for public download.
> Can a melicious version of this code be put out there
;-)
Would that be what they call a honey trap?
- Alan
EOM
Maybe this is an FBI scam. Just like the "You have won boat. Please show up to claim." that shows up on the news or in the Simpsons every so often.
I can see it now: "But your honor, he asked us to install our key tracking software."
A mouse odometer - there's several out there, although I don't know of a distributed one...
I've been recording my keystrokes for about nine months to optimize my keyboard layout for me. Here are my counts:
Count Key (Some are decimal ASCII Codes)
Count Key (Some are decimal ASCII Codes)
3584 Alt_L
137 Alt_R
128 Control_L
1328 Shift_L
4905 Up
1516 Down
2844 Left
359 Right
1181 Home
1111 End
2 F1
15 F2
4 F5
4 F6
1 F9
955 F10 (Lower Window)
140 F11 (Maximize Window)
549 F12 (Kill Window)
847 Insert
1435 Next
1 Pause
351 Prior
8 1
168 3
4 4
1 5
1 6
3699 8
1386 9
4238 13
2 18
11 26
283 27
3019 32
102 33
34 34
8 35
34 36
9 37
38 38
52 39
44 40
49 41
127 42
35 43
32 44
260 45
956 46
441 47
214 48
262 49
128 50
147 51
77 52
110 53
30 54
62 55
50 56
46 57
154 58
59 59
9 60
43 61
15 62
8 63
12 64
89 65 (Capital A)
15 66
35 67
22 68
66 69
8 70
37 71
4 72
30 73
3 74
1 75
26 76
40 77
43 78
39 79
37 80
8 81
25 82
60 83
42 84
39 85
9 86
5 87
6 88
1 89
3 91
58 92
1 93
105 95
12 96
958 97 (lowercase "a")
241 98
1458 99
1217 100
1354 101
415 102
825 103
992 104
1359 105
2265 106
1523 107
2374 108
1335 109
784 110
1421 111
899 112
276 113
1351 114
1669 115
1079 116
480 117
386 118
485 119
542 120
172 121
25 122
7 123
46 124
7 125
34 126
1713 127
Umm... How exactly did posting to the Turd Report's journal 'stop' him? He is still posting and still making journal entries. Please explain.
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hi there fred