Noisy mechanical keyboards have two groups of people that associate to them. One group loves them while the other group cannot stand the loudness of a mechanical keyboard and it drives them crazy. Well, if you are the latter, you might now have an excuse to get your co-workers to swap out the ole’ mechanical loud keyboard for a quiet key keyboard instead.
Georgi Gerganov developed a software called Keytap3 that can detect what keys are being pressed by listening (at close range) with a microphone, such as the one in your mobile phone. You can see him demonstrate his app here:
Gerganov explains that it “works by clustering the detected keystrokes based on their sound similarity and then using statistical information about the frequency of the letter n-grams in the supposed language of the text (for example, English).”
Although a bit concerning for the fans of loud keyboards, it is still far from 100% accurate and its very unlikely that hackers will gain access to your area to listen to your loud desktop keyboard. In fact, I would argue this technology, while neat to watch, is a day late and a dollar short. Keystroke logging infections known as key-loggers have existed for a very long time, they are software based and you are never the wiser unless your antivirus detects them. There are also physical devices that can be plugged into your keyboards USB cable that will log all of your keystrokes.
I say if you like the loud key keyboards, type away. 🙂 The likelihood of someone getting into your private space, mic’ing up and listening to your keystrokes has to be almost non-existent. But, it is always better to be informed and to make your own decisions based off of knowledge, which is what this newsletter is all about. 🙂
