site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On Tuesday, March 22, 2005, at 07:39 pm, Michael D. Crawford wrote: thanks, ben. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... There's also other ways malicious coders could intercept keystrokes if they really wanted to, including ways of getting text in password fields, and there's not much we can do about it. It happens that my very first commercial software product was a keystroke logger called Last Resort from Working Software. It was a Mac control panel and INIT. It had the problem that it would capture passwords too, but those were gentler, less-networked days. The control panel allowed one to disable and renable it, and Last Resource made its presence known by showing its icon on the boot screen with the other inits. I received many grateful letters and phone calls from writers both amateurs and pro, whose Great American Novels were saved from crashes, power failures, and even just deleting a page of unsaved text by my little eight kilobyte program. I started to think about writing an OS X version of it the other day when a consulting contract proposal I had just written was lost when my wife's laptop hung just as I saved it. There was a file there but it was completely unrecoverable. It is no help that OpenOffice documents are zipped XML files; an error in the middle of a zip file means you can't get ANY of your text back. Bonita's laptop runs XP, but I don't know much about XP so instead I thought about doing it for OS X. Other consultants wrote versions for DOS and Windows. Each of us had our own solution to the password problem. I have some ideas now of how I can solve it, without doing anything skanky as I was so devoted to doing during my time as Working Software. (I am a wizard with MacsBug.) I also wrote Last Resort Programmer's edition which recorded menu selections and command keys, to help QA people reproduce bugs after crashes. i'm interested in code that would do these sort of things. i'd like code that records key presses (minus passwords if possible), mouse movements, clicks and even recorded menu selections as mentioned above if possible (didn't think that would be possible), on a per user basis within any app they might use. record as much user activity -- what they're doing where -- details as possible basically. i'm just asking out of curiosity at the moment. don't know anything about kernel programming -- is that what'd be necessary for this type of thing? is there any open source code that exists already that does anything like this? roughly what would be necessary to do something like this? would this sort of continual recording effect the performance of the user's machine at all (if not on a pretty modern machine what about a g3 for example?) -- perceptible pauses/stutters? This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com