---------- From: Tyler Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 9:38 PM To: sunder@sunder.net Cc: shaddack@ns.arachne.cz; timcmay@got.net; cypherpunks@minder.net Subject: Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
I don't think a virtual keyboard is necessarily a bad idea in this case. I
live in a densely populated neighborhood in NYC. SOmeone is ALWAYS in my home, and in the rare cases nobody's here we turn on our alarm. This does not mean some visual surveillance of my keyboard is impossible, but it greatly reduces the number of parties with the desire and resources to attempt such a surveillance. And the reason this matters is because I can download such a virtual keyboard for pennies (thus causing the need for VERY costly forms of surveillance by nullifying keystroke loggers), and cause the cost of surveillance to rise probably far more than exponentially. This is a good thing (from my point of view!) in and of itself, but imagine if a large number of people thought this way, encrypting even the most trivial of communications.
-TD
Lets not forget optical TEMPEST - remember a few months ago, when it was demonstrated that the image on a CRT could be reconstructed just from the light it reflected on walls? The point where the electron beam is hitting the phosphors is much brighter than the rest of the screen, and by syncing a fast photodetector to monitor scan rates, you can reconstruct the image on a screen in a distant room just by viewing the backwash light through a telescope. Peter