Dave Feustel wrote:
The device is obviously not new. What *is* new is that it is being installed
as oem equipment inside of keyboards for HP and Dell systems and also inside
of 'used keyboards which can be unobtrusively switched in for older keyboards.
Then the companies doing the switching can secretly monitor all the keystrokes
of the user, picking up everything the user types. There is no way to detect
the
keylogger short of opening up the keyboard. Shortly I predict the keylogging
functiion will be incorporated into the keyboard cpu so that even opening up the
keyboard will not permit the presence of the logger to be detected.
What's new is that this functionality now comes builtin to new systems,
possibly at the
behest of Homeland Security, which would in that case know the password needed
to retrieve the logged keystrokes. So far I see no defense against this spying
technique of password capture.
If you haven't noticed, companies (probably driven by lawyer paranoia)
have been becoming more and more aware of the problems associated with
employees misusing email. While as a person I find this rather
intrusive and annoying, as an employee and (I shudder to think)
potential PHB in 40 years, I find nothing wrong with it. My continued
employment depends, in part, on the positive public image my
predecessors have spent years building up, and to have it destroyed by a
couple of people using company resources in inappropriate ways would
really tick me off. Do they have a right to see what I do at home?
Hell no, it's not their resources I'm using. But when I'm at the
office, they've got every right, because it's their equipment, and their
bandwidth.
As for the "homeland security" argument, do you have any idea how much
raw data they'd have to sift through before coming to something
appearing to be a password? This really wanders into the realm of "only
the criminals have something to fear", simply because monitoring every
computer user in the country would be a task only HAL could perform...
and we all know how well that turned out.
