09.21.05
Using a keyboard can be hazardous to your security
Three researchers in Berkeley have just put up a paper where they describe how from an audio recording of someone typing in English for 15 minutes, one can actually recover with very good accuracy the text typed! You can read a discussion about it on Bruce Schneier’s blog.
Basically they used the fact that different keystrokes have slightly different, though quite similar, sounds, and using that together with some machine learning, voice recognition techniques and the knowledge of the distribution of letters and words in the English language they were able to recover 96% of the typed characters. The method even allows for typos, which it then corrects. Pretty interesting read, and you can get a good laugh at the ideas suggested as a joke in order to prevent this sort of attack (e.g. changing keyboard layouts every fifteen minutes 
).
Later
