All you Steve Balmers and Steve Jobs wannabes of the world, listen up! Time to leave your laptops at home and start living your life. How come? Well, because it seems that hackers have recently found a new way to log your every keystroke every time you use your computer in public.

Yep, no more taking your work with you to the park, no more hunting for extra power outlets in airports, because (according to Network World, at least) everything you do can and will be used by hackers against you. And even if you don't plug in your laptop, they have still found a pretty sneaky way to get your keys logged! Let us continue by talking about how hackers succeed in doing such feats and how the "power-line exploit" can be achieved even by ones that are less predisposed to such devious machinations.

The power-line exploit has the character recording the electric signals that keys being pressed by the user leak into the ground wiring. Since the pattern differs depending on the key that's being pressed, deciphering what the user has been typing is not that difficult at all. So, be careful when you're writing a romantic letter to your secretary or giving an order to nuke Racoon City, because someone might be recording your every key!

Oh, as for the other exploit (the one where you don't need to have the laptop plugged in so as to have your data stolen... well, that's even easier than the first. You get a cheap laser (you know, a little better than those things that you hang on your keychain) and point it at a shiny part of the laptop or an object on the table on which the laptop is standing so as to reflect the laser back into a receiver.

The receiver then records the modulations in the light beam in order to be translated into keystrokes at a later time. Pretty cool, right? Fortunately, it will clear the parks and airports of people in suits with laptops in their arms.


We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .