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 :/)

Comments

Read the site!

[jargonCCNA]

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.

Wouldn't this fit the standard pattern?

[willybur]

This has already been done, in a way. A guy took a bunch of newspapers, and tallied up the numbers of times each letter occurred. He did this over a long period of time, and came up with a ranking chart. This list can be used to crack monoalphabetic ciphers, using frequency analysis (the most common code letter would translate to be most common real letter, and so forth). This is how you crack the Cryptoquotes in the newspaper.

In terms of frequency, here are the percentages (out of _The Code Book_, by Simon Singh, page 19):

• a: 8.2%
  
• b: 1.5%
  
• c: 2.8%
  
• d: 4.3%
  
• e: 12.7%
  
• f: 2.2%
  
• g: 2.0%
  
• h: 6.1%
  
• i: 7.0%
  
• j: 0.2%
  
• k: 0.8%
  
• l: 4.0%
  
• m: 2.4%
  
• n: 6.7%
  
• o: 7.5%
  
• p: 1.9%
  
• q: 0.1%
  
• r: 6.0%
  
• s: 6.3%
  
• t: 9.1%
  
• u: 2.8%
  
• v: 1.0%
  
• w: 2.4%
  
• x: 0.2%
  
• y: 2.0%
  
• z: 0.1%