Know everything they type, or stop them from typing at all!
Back in 2000, I reviewed the KeyGhost Security Keyboard, an apparently ordinary keyboard with a hardware keylogger hidden inside it. Later that year, I reviewed the KeyGhost II Professional, another hardware keylogger, this time built into an innocuous-looking keyboard plug adapter.
Those reviews have a special place in my heart, partly because I just love the sneakiness of these little things, and partly because someone ripped off my pictures of the guts of the Security Keyboard…
…to create an urban legend about hardware keyloggers allegedly being built into Dell laptops. (Or other makes of computer - the story’s had a few mutations over the years.) Some people appear to have decided that the fact that the pictures and info about the hardware are obviously copied from my review means that I’m part of the conspiracy.
(KeyGhost now offer a Mini PCI keylogger, which actually could be hidden in a laptop computer with a spare expansion slot, or in a desktop machine with a Mini-PCI-to-normal-PCI adapter. I’m pretty sure they’re not selling them by the million to the Department of Homeland Security, though.)
Anyway, KeyGhost don’t sell those exact products any more. They’ve got better ones. And a new gadget with a completely different purpose, whose value it took me a little while to see.
The old Security Keyboard I reviewed had a memory capacity of half a million keystrokes, before new keystrokes would start overwriting the oldest ones. The KeyGhost Pro had a compression system that let it fit rather more keystrokes into the same amount of memory. And they weren’t particularly cheap; the Security Keyboard version I reviewed listed for $US299, and the KeyGhost II Professional was a $US249 item.
Nowadays, you can get a 128,000-keystroke plug-adapter “External KeyGhost Home Edition” for only $US89, and for the price of the old Security Keyboard you can get the KeyGhost Professional SE Security Keyboard, with more than two million keystrokes of capacity. That’s enough to hold, for comparison, Moby Dick plus the New Testament of the King James Bible).
All of the “Professional” KeyGhost loggers also still have 128-bit encryption of their contents. It wouldn’t be very hard for someone who doesn’t know the password for a KeyGhost Pro, but who does have some experience with hardware hacking, to dump the entire contents of the Flash memory chip - the actual dump would take almost no time at all, since you’re only talking a couple of megabytes for even the top-spec KeyGhosts. But if there isn’t some weakness in the encryption scheme, the attacker would then need cubic kilometres of sci-fi nanotech to decrypt the data.
As you’d expect, KeyGhost also now have USB keyloggers for people who prefer a 15-year-old keyboard interface to a 25-year-old one. The USB loggers are more expensive, starting from $US199; the flagship model is $US349. For that price, though, you get a keylogger that date-stamps keyboard activity, and records everything that’s typed on any USB keyboard plugged into the computer, whether or not that keyboard’s plugged in through the KeyGhost itself. It even works with multiple USB keyboards.
UPDATE: I misunderstood part of the USB keylogger product page. What that part actually meant was that the USB keylogger can be plugged into root ports or into a hub, and still work. It will also work with a keyboard that has its own built-in USB hub, provided all you have plugged into that hub is a mouse (many Mac keyboards are like this). But the USB KeyGhost only logs keystrokes from the one keyboard that’s plugged into it.
And then, there’s the new “QIDO“. It’s another little thumb-drive-shaped thing, but it doesn’t log keystrokes - it changes them. Its name stands for “Qwerty In, Dvorak Out”, and it does what it says on the tin - translates keystrokes from any ordinary Qwerty keyboard into Dvorak Simplified Keyboard keystrokes - and it supports a few different Dvorak variants, too. You activate and deactivate the QIDO by double-tapping Num Lock (or, apparently “Clear”, on some Mac keyboards).
If you’re one of the few, the proud, the Dvorak-keymap users, you’ll be used to fooling around with keymap settings every time you sit down in front of a new computer, and whenever you want to make the computer usable for a Qwerty typist again. With a QIDO, all you need to do is carry the little USB dongle with you. It costs $US119 $US89 plus $US29 delivery, or less if you buy two or more.
The QIDO is a plug-and-play USB device, so to install it, all you have to do is unplug the USB keyboard cable and insert the QIDO between keyboard plug and computer (or USB hub) socket. Actually, because of the QIDO’s thumb-drive form factor, I’d recommend you get a little USB extension cable to put between QIDO and computer, so the QIDO isn’t hanging in the air, stressing its plug and the computer’s socket. But it’s still easy to install, and very portable.
The KeyGhost people asked me whether I’d like to review a QIDO, but I don’t really see that there’s a great deal to review in there. I can tell you now what my review would say: “I plugged the thing inline with a USB keyboard, and the keyboard continued to work normally, except when I tapped Num Lock twice, whereupon I couldn’t type any more because I don’t know Dvorak.”
Ideally, QIDO would magically transform the keyboard’s keycaps from “qwerty” to “‘,.pyf” when you switched modes, but you can only do that if you’ve got one of those incredibly expensive Optimus Maximus jobbies with a little OLED display built into each key. (The Maximus is apparently quite rubbish to type on, by the way.)
Having the wrong things printed on the keys is not actually a huge problem for Dvorak typists, once they’ve learned the layout well enough that they don’t have to look at the keys for everyday typing, or have just built a mental lookup table of which Qwerty keys correspond to which Dvorak ones.
This isn’t as hard as you might think, because standard Dvorak only relocates the alphabetic keys and common punctuation. So the lesser-used symbols of which people are most likely to forget the precise location - @, #, $, % and so on - are still where the keycaps say they are. And if you’re learning Dvorak on a Qwerty keyboard you can, of course, just stick a picture of the Dvorak map on the wall and glance at it as necessary.
Since the QIDO can’t change the keycaps, though, I was having some trouble figuring out what real advantage it offers over the free alternative - just changing your operating system’s keymap.
It’s easy to add a Dvorak keymap in Windows - or Mac OS and Linux, for that matter - and then you can switch keymap in a couple of clicks. The QIDO makes switching even faster, but by and large it didn’t seem to me that it does anything that changing the keymap in the OS doesn’t do.
But then I found this blog post from one Alex Eagle, which I shall now shamelessly plunder.
[KeyGhost now tell me that Alex Eagle is actually “the guy who came up with the concept for the QIDO”, so it’s obviously not coincidental that his blog-post wish-list so closely matches its actual features.]
Reasons why the QIDO’s worth buying:
1: OS keymap control is imperfect. It’s possible, for instance, to find certain modifier-key combinations that don’t Dvorak-ify properly.
Windows XP (and maybe Vista - I don’t know) does Dvorakification in a strange “application-by-application” way. If you add a Dvorak “Keyboard layout/IME” to WinXP, and then bring up the little Language Bar thing and select the new layout, you’ll find that you’re back in Qwerty mode as soon as you select any other application. This probably isn’t what you want, but you’re still going to have to separately select Dvorak from the Language Bar for that app, and for every other app you switch to. Each application remembers what keymap is selected, but they all seem to have to be told individually.
Windows Explorer itself counts as an application, here. So you have to select Dvorak after clicking on the desktop or a folder window, if you want to be able to press the-key-usually-known-as-R and have Windows highlight a file whose name starts with the Dvorak-layout P.
I don’t think I’ve quite gotten to the bottom of this, either. The WinXP computer I’m typing this on is now slightly confused, after I switched the keymap back and forth umpteen times; it just switched to Dvorak spontaneously when I was in the middle of typing this document. I can definitely see the attraction of having a keyboard that sends Dvorak-mapped keycodes all by itself, and doesn’t even dip a toe into this OS-mediated weirdness.
2: Some software bypasses OS keymap control and looks at direct keyboard scancodes, assuming them to map to the Qwerty values. Or, even more annoyingly, some software may sometimes look at scancodes, and at other times obey OS keyboard remapping. (From reading Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing, I know that just because an application has a user base of more than fifty million people does not mean it won’t do boneheaded things like this.)
3: The QIDO lets you have a Dvorak keyboard and a Qwerty keyboard both connected to a computer, and working, at the same time, with no switch-over needed and no fooling with strange WinXP-type keymap selection. This isn’t something that most people need, but if you do need it, you probably need it quite badly.
4: Remote computing. If you take control of another computer via VNC or Remote Desktop or whatever, you may or may not get the same keymap at the other end. Again, the QIDO fixes this problem altogether.
You can use the QIDO with any computer you can plug it into, regardless of whether that computer has software support for Dvorak keymaps; it will even work when the computer’s not even running a normal operating system, like in BIOS setup programs (provided the computer accepts USB input in BIOS setup, of course) or the Splashtop quick-starting Linux environment. There’s probably some allegedly-USB-supporting computer out there that won’t work with a QIDO, but it’s a standard low-power Human Interface Device, so it really ought to work with just about anything. I could believe it not working if you use it with an old high-power-consumption PS/2 keyboard (like my beloved IBMs), but I wouldn’t be surprised if you just needed a better PS/2-to-USB adapter, like the one I mention here.
5: The QIDO doesn’t just support Dvorak Standard and a Dvorak-Qwerty hybrid, but also the Single-Handed Left and Single-Handed Right Dvorak variants, for typing using only one hand.
(Certain jokes immediately suggest themselves, but single-handed keyboards of various sorts are immensely helpful for people who only have one hand to type with, because the other one’s missing, or because the other one’s busy with some other task, like steering their freaky computer-bike, or something.)
You select the keymap you want the QIDO to switch to by using a system taken from the KeyGhosts; type “keydvorak” into a text editor when the QIDO’s plugged in, and a “ghost” will type out a menu for you and then await your selection.
Since the QIDO unfortunately does not magically rearrange your keycaps, I think it’s likely that most people who’ll want a QIDO will also want a keyboard with keys that match their Dvorak layout. It’s not easy to actually find an ordinary, inexpensive off-the-shelf keyboard that comes with Dvorak-layout keycaps, but you can often just swap the keycaps around. This’ll move the key-locating “pips” that most keyboards have on the F and J keys, and it’s unacceptably untidy if your keyboard has differently-angled keys on each rank; if that’s the case, you can just use stickers, or break out the sandpaper and permanent marker.
Switching your mind between Dvorak and Qwerty can be a lot harder than switching your keymap. If, for whatever reason, you’re better at typing on a Dvorak keyboard than on a Qwerty one - which you’d of course better be at some point in the near future, if you’re bothering with Dvorak at all - then you’re probably going to need some way of Dvorak-ising any computer you’re going to need to type on, lest you overtax your fading brain.
An expensive keyboard with a hardware Qwerty/Dvorak switch on it will solve this problem for you, provided you’re happy to carry the darn thing to every computer you use. The QIDO isn’t cheap, but it’s not as expensive as any switchable keyboard I’ve found, and it’s an awful lot more portable.
The only things it won’t Dvorak-ise are computers that can’t accept a USB keyboard for whatever reason, and laptops. But you’ll probably be able to muddle along with operating-system keymap switching then, if you don’t face these situations too often.
I, personally, have not the slightest need for a QIDO. But contrary to my first impression, it really does look like a useful little gadget. If you’re using flaky OS keymap switching all the time and tearing your hair out, a QIDO for $US119 plus delivery could be a bargain - and, as mentioned by KeyGhost in the comments below, everybody now gets the $US89 bulk price, even if they’re only buying one unit!

















