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How Many Keys Have You Pressed?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-how-many-have-all-of-us-pressed dept.

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 :/)

6 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Am I the only one... by GearheadX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

  2. RSI by Score0,+Overrated · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The distributed version sounds dangerous for the security reasons others have pointed out ...

    But, could a local version help with RSI? I remember obnoxious programs which popped up every hour reminding you to take a break ... how about something which popped up every 1000 key strokes (or whatever) reminding you to give you wrists a rest.

  3. Re:My GOD! Can we say "security risk" by funkhauser · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. Easy to do safely in linux.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can almost count the number of keys pressed by parsing /proc/interrupts...

  5. Re:Pardon? by ecc0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is the remaining 33,000 bytes big enough to contain full key-stroke logging, back-orifice-style, screenshot-capturing, cdrom-drive-opening code?

    In short; yes.

  6. Re:Pardon? by DutchSter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sure is. Consider this: http://www.TinyAps.org The notepad replacement I'm using is a grand total of 6k, written in assembler, yet it has word wrap and full search and replace. Jeez, at that rate you could write an entire kernel in the 60k download here.