Slashdot Mirror
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...
And on a more serious note, here is their privacy policy.
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
I can see it now. Instead of KLOCs we will have MOKP (millions of keys pressed). My boss would love it!
Sean.OutaHere()
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.
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?!
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
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/
No doubt. First off, it runs on Windows -- making it totally useless to me and most of the slashdot crowd, but... *where's the source*?
Anybody who would install such a thing is asking for trouble.
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.
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
You can almost count the number of keys pressed by parsing /proc/interrupts...
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!
That thing is used in some logic textbooks as the NOT symbol, and AppleScript (Macintosh scripting language) uses it at the end of a line to signal that the code continues on the next line (like how a \ is used at the end of a line in shell scripts):
set d to (display dialog "What the hell is this?"
with buttons { "OK", "Cancel" })
set x to button returned of d
In Unicode, it is U+00AC, and is called the not sign and an angled dash in the documentation [PDF].
Why did you mention UK keyboards; is that thing some kind of British symbol that I am unaware of? Or did you mean to type the pound sign and my browser is displaying it wrong? (I see a sideways L-like thing, FYI.)
Liberty in your lifetime
Eventually, he would need only one key.
Would it be labeled "Any"?
Anyway, I hope you are trying to be funny, because I can't think of a less efficient way to type than having the keys move around on you.
-Peter
"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.
Actually, it is available to some people. Basically, the author's friends. I just started running Pulse today. It probably only occupies something like 1 MHz of CPU time and about 62K of RAM. Whoop-de-shit.
But yeah, it's entirely benign.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
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.
So the FBI's key logger gets announcements on Slashdot now? How much are they paying for this?
Pedro Côrte-Real.
Hah, intersting keyboard lore! You UK folks are lucky, us poor Swedes have the almost completely useless and ½ (without and with shift, respectively) symbols on that key. Oh, and with AltGr it does . I never knew. Anyway, paragraph and "one-half" symbols are not exactly commonly used... Both the apostrophe and the tilde are far better. I wonder who came up with these stupid choices, anyway.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
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.
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.
Eventually, he would need only one key.
Congratulations, you just invented the telegraph.
...when I can just ask the VX2 Corporation how many keys I've pressed?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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
It's a question of how concentrated the information is.
For a lark, sending every single keystroke to something wouldn't bother me too much. When too many people are sending and too many people are looking, it's time to get out of it.
Nothing hypocritical about it. Whatever XP has/does/will call home with is not really known or knowable, not optional, and can choose its victims at will from the unfortunate horde of XP users.
Somehow a keylogger that records everything bothers me much less than something that trys to be selective.
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 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?
It counts as 4 keystrokes either way. Soon that will be all that matters. Will save kids time, not having to take English.
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. =)
`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.
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
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.
"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
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
Cool.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It would be a big number. But I don't think it would be very easy to estimate it using that method. You would need to:
a) Eliminate all non-typed text, particularly computer generated text and copies. Not easy, especially since identical pieces of text could have been typed many types ("First Post!" springs to mind....)
b) Add in an estimate of all typing that never made publication (deleted paragraphs etc.), in game keystrokes.
My suggested method of estimate the grand total number of keypresses per user would be to install lots of keyloggers, or look at MTBF rates for keyboard supplier.