Slashdot Mirror
Mandatory Keyloggers in Mumbai's Cyber Cafes
YIAAL writes "Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai's police are requiring the city's 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have your credit card number. 'Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely.'"
Depending on the key logger's capabilities, an easy way to improve your security is to open another edit window (for example notepad) next to the password input window. Enter a character of your secret password, credit card number, etc), then, using the mouse, switch focus to the second window, type in a bunch of random characters, switch back, rinse and repeat. The logger ends with a bunch of gibberish, some of which is your key. If you do it right, extracting your secret from the resulting log will be really difficult (especially since the mouse allows you to add new characters in the middle of the already typed string, which means the characters in your secret won't even be in order).