Entries Tagged 'keyboards' ↓

Did you know your smartphone’s accelerometer can be used to steal keystrokes from a nearby keyboard?

Using an iPhone 4 and some pirate software they wrote, a team of researchers at Georgia Tech has managed to capture complete sentences from a nearby keyboard with up to 80 percent accuracy.

“The way we see this attack working is that you, the phone’s owner, would request or be asked to download an innocuous-looking application, which doesn’t ask you for the use of any suspicious phone sensors,” team member Henry Carter, a PhD student in computer science and one of the paper’s co-authors, explains. “Then the keyboard-detection malware is turned on, and the next time you place your phone next to the keyboard and start typing, it starts listening.”

The team initially tried to use an iPhone 3GS in their experiments, but the results were too difficult to read.

“But then we tried an iPhone 4,” says Georgia Tech School of Computer Science Assistant Professor Patrick Traynor, who is a member of the team along with Carter, Georgia Tech grad student Arunabh Verma, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Philip Marquardt.

“[The iPhone 4] has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise [and] the results were much better. We believe that most smartphones made in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack.”

Other researchers have attempted to steal keystrokes using a phone’s microphone, but there are drawbacks to that method. For example, microphones have a sampling frequency of 44,000 vibrations per second. this is much more difficult to analyze than an accelerometer, which samples at just 100 times per second.

Also, handset makers typically restrict app access to phone microphones. when an app tries to grab hold of the mic, your phone will usually ask you if you want that to happen. Such protections aren’t placed around accelerometers.

How it Works

The malware creates a model based on probability and keyboard pairs. it determines if a pair is on the left or right side of the keyboard, and then it determines the distance between the keys in the pair–are they far apart or close together? After analyzing that data for a series of pairs, it compares what it’s hearing to a pre-loaded dictionary that classifies words based on left-right, near-far characteristics.

For example, the word “canoe” would consist of four pairs: C-A, A-N, N-O and O-E. The malware would interpret those strokes into Left-Left-Near, or LLN, LRF, RRF and RLF. when that data is compared to the entries in pre-loaded dictionary, a statistically probable result would be produced. in this case, “canoe.”

For the technique to work reliably, words must be three letters or more. Working with a 58,000 word dictionary, the researchers found their word recovery rate was as high as 80 percent.

Should you start being paranoid when a colleague places their cell phone by your keyboard? Not really. “The likelihood of someone falling victim to an attack like this right now is pretty low,”Traynor says. “This was really hard to do. But could people do it if they really wanted to? We think yes.”

Carter, Traynor, Verma, and Marquardt will present their findings in a paper entitled “(sp)iPhone: Decoding Vibrations from Nearby Keyboards Using Mobile Phone Accelerometers” on Thursday at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago.

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The three musicians in the post-rock instrumental project Drift Era love writing, performing, and recording original music, but their fantasy is to score films for some of their favorite directors like Wes Anderson and Terry Gilliam. Anyone who’s listened to Drift Era’s tuneage either online or in person won’t be surprised by such cinematic leanings. Tunes like “Smoking Lamp,” “Really Black Magic,” and “Slowly Going the way of the Trade Winds” are all about evoking mysterious, sometimes sinister, sometimes lighthearted moods that could provide the backdrop to all kinds of filmic shenanigans. with propulsive rhythms by drummer Michael Garcia, improvisatory fretwork by guitarist Michael Tune, and a variety of electronic string and keyboard effects by producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonathon O’Connor, Drift Era strives to write soundtracks for the human imagination. “We watch movies [with the sound turned down] and just play our instruments along with them,” said Garcia, 28, a Fort Worth native. “We pop in a Michel Gondry or a Stanley Kubrick whenever we need something visual to inspire us.”

Although the Drift Era guys have been playing together for less than a year, they’ve managed to synthesize their musical influences pretty impressively. These include the famous (Sonic Youth, Radiohead), the slightly obscure or forgotten (Tortoise, Mogwai), and the local (sub oslo). O’Connor started making music about four years ago with a loose outfit he called JoCo, inspired by cheap home-recording technology and his own unusual sonic tastes. “I could sit for 90 minutes and just listen to guitar feedback and drone,” said O’Connor, 31, also a Fort Worth native. “With JoCo, I started making the kind of music I wanted to hear. it was lo-fi and more downtrodden [than Drift Era]. I wanted the recordings to have a deliberately crappy sound.”

O’Connor had trouble finding musicians who’d commit to steady rehearsals and performances with JoCo, and about a year ago he and Garcia — who’d known each other for several years — decided to merge their distinct musical sensibilities. O’Connor uses a handheld synthesizer called a Korg Monotron as well as an e-bow — an electronic bow that he slides across a guitar violin-style to create bizarre and dissonant effects. Garcia started as a bassist and then switched to drums, insisting that a hard funk/hip-hop edge should be brought into the sound. soon after, Tune came onboard for the new ensemble, and all three of them began to pursue a cleaner, tighter, brighter sound that was still “more about style and enthusiasm than technical skill,” as Garcia put it.

Drift Era has played shows at The Grotto and Froggy’s Beach Club, insisting there is no frontman — each instrument is as important and potentially expressive as the others. The band has recorded about a dozen tracks so far, including several just this summer using technology as disparate as an iPhone (“I was surprised at how good it sounded,” said O’Connor) and a four-track recorder. O’Connor and company consider the music to be still evolving and are proud that it’s hard to classify. Both O’Connor and Garcia toss around labels like “shoegaze,” “ambient,” and “trance rock,” but there’s one broad category that each band member enthusiastically embraces: post-rock.

In O’Connor’s mind, post-rock is “anything that’s instrumental and isn’t fast,” he said. “I love [the openness] of that. There’s no lead singer with an ego to get in the way. It’s like, if the apocalypse happened, and everybody lost their voices, the only thing to do would be pick up the instruments and start playing.”

O’Connor and Garcia refer to Drift Era as a serious hobby that they are committed to for the long haul. right now, the band has just taken on a bassist, Josh Howell, but is going on a hiatus — O’Connor’s girlfriend just had a baby, and Tune and his girlfriend are expecting. The musicians hope to play a few more local shows in 2011 and then early next year begin laying down tracks for a debut EP. Garcia said he wants to keep it low pressure: “I consider myself blessed just to be doing interviews like this one and playing shows and hanging out with my friends,” he said. “I don’t mean to sound like a hippy, but it’s not all about the money. Music is therapeutic for me.”

O’Connor has very specific markers for what success would mean to him — longevity and unfettered creativity. His favorite band on the planet provides an excellent working model. “Look at Sonic Youth,” he said. “They’re been doing it since 1978. They’re not rich rock stars, but they make a living. And they’re always relevant.”

I'm looking for a new piano keyboard, can anyone recommend me one that
a) sounds good
b) has a lot of knobs and switches for sound effects (like the bendy note-y thing off to the left most keyboards have)
c) Kinda portable, I'd like to set it up at my house on a stand and then be able to take it off the stand and bring it to college/friends house/etc.

Please post a link to the site with the keyboard as well. thank you!

Casio's range in price from about $89–to $300 for a good keyboard.
It is very light & portable–most of them have a built in amp and the sounds and effects you can get are excellent.

I went for a casio CDP100, found it to be the best bet – not got a lot of fancy stuff though but is a lot like a piano and not vastly expensive
try at
shop.ebay.co.uk/?_from=R40&_trksi…

Adventus inc. of Halifax, NS reached agreement this week with French market leader I.P.E. Music of Paris, France, for worldwide distribution of a custom Adventus version of I.P.E.’s flagship software Prodipe VE.

The I.P.E. solution (Prodipe) provides Adventus with the exclusive means when using Adventus award winning software to turn a $100 MIDI keyboard into a very satisfying instrument, improving both the response time and the quality of instrument sounds to match or exceed keyboards selling for several times more.

IPE Music is a privately owned company based in Paris, France. IPE manufactures and distributes musical instruments, software and studio equipment to several hundred music retail stores in France, with partners worldwide.

Adventus, a privately owned innovative Canadian company established in 1997, is based in Halifax, NS. it focuses on the valuable, practical use of technology to improve the results from time spent learning music. Adventus is considered the leading provider of software solutions that can make a quality instrumental music education accessible to all families.

Adventus develops and markets a comprehensive and innovative solution for learning the language of music that combines ideal elements of traditional approaches with the best in modern strategies. the Adventus approach utilizes several award-winning interactive music learning software titles to boost student interest and ensure success across a wide range of student learning styles.

Jim Mullen of Adventus states “The new exclusive agreement with IPE Music paves the way for Adventus to set a new standard for tangible results from group music programs, while at the same time making quality music learning more enjoyable and accessible to all students. With this new quality keyboard solution now available by download, at a reasonable price, the practice at home element has just reached a new level of value to families."

Mr. Mullen further states “This agreement strengthens Adventus’ strategy to make quality instrumental music programs achievable at any school via a partnership with Adventus called MusIQ Connect. MusIQ Connect provides a link between practice at home and the weekly group music classes at school.“

Earlier this year Adventus signed exclusive foreign license contracts for Duzon, the IT market leader in South Korea, and Furtados the oldest (147 years) and largest music company in India, to distribute the award winning Adventus Software in their respective markets. ( Adventus Partners with South Korean Online Education,IT Leader Duzon, Canadian Firm Sets new Standard for Music Market in India )

For further information on Adventus or MusIQ Connect contact jdmullen@adventus.com or adventus.com

Need anime music with keyboard/piano (keyboard preferably) melodies, either dark or sweet. anyone know of any good sndtrks?

I absolutely loved the .hack//Sign soundtrack. Popotan has a couple of nice piano tracks on it. Let's see here…Ah! my Goddess, When Cicadas cry, Sola, Nodame Cantabile (The anime soundtrack, not so much the live,) Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children soundtrack, Da Capo, Clannad.

Those should keep you going for a bit.