This may be the first time I've ever wanted to do so, but I'd mod this Anonymous Coward up if I had points.

And I'm even a fan of PHP

I hate to be the one that says this, but... care to explain?

perl is for nihlists

It is concerning when macaroni and cheese stalks you.

Ah, well, you just need to get more of it, shoot it intravenously, and mix it with cocaine.

Wow. Meta-meta humor. My head is spinning.

On an unrelated note, Tonic water tastes funny without gin, but gin tastes fine without tonic.

I was thinking more like using 1000lb of thermite to cut an SUV in half, but you get the idea.

Actually, it's just a conspiracy from all of us security-types. We haven't had a good global-scale emergency in a while and were getting a bit bored.

There really is no a conficker. In fact, the name itself is an anagram for "Dan Kaminsky pwns joo"

I'll be honest, while normally the first post thing is pretty lame, writing a badass virus to do it would strike me as pretty cool and delightfully overkill.

I confess I didn't read the article closely and I assumed that they were using the laser mic like a regular laser mic.

However, the algorithms to pull keystrokes from an audio recording have been public since 2005, and have probably been used by government and bad guys for a lot longer than that.

According to that article, this can be done with a simple PC mic. For what it's worth, my basic experiments with DIY laser mics get almost as good of sound quality in the right conditions. It's not hard to imagine that somebody who actually understands optics and sound could get much better.

Buttons with different colored lights, or in the case of the Optimus Maximus, little LCD screens in every keyboard. The idea is that the display can be changed quickly.

It's still pretty good at reflecting it, and the reflections are what you record the windows' vibrations with.

I'm not sure it really even requires that secretive of projects.

Laser mics are cheap and easy to build. I can definitely see them being the future of surveillance tech.

It doesn't have to go through the window, it has to bounce off. The whole thing works by recording vibrations in the reflection.

They're also way easier to build. I was playing with them last weekend.

http://www.diylife.com/2007/08/22/diy-laser-long-distance-listening-device/