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This reminds me of that section in the book Cryptonomicon, where our hero is programming on a laptop that he knows is being spied upon using Tempest and probably more, and is using clandestine input via morse code on the shift (?) key. I really enjoyed that book.
At risk of derailing the conversation, I finished Cryptonomicon earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Any recommendations for similar books?
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I think this is doable; and practice makes perfect. I can enter passcode on my apple watch with my nose. It’s the smaller apple watch model. Nose is quite big.
I do this to my watch and phone, most often when cuddling the wife because one of my arms will doubtlessly be unavailable.
Surely you can very discretely and ergonomically use this... if you move your lid jussttt above the point where it decides it is closed and then tap.
Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson had a subplot where a main character used morse code on his keyboard, or some other layered encoding on top of the keyboard, to write software and communicate surreptitiously even while his screen was being recorded.
Came across that book just recently in one of those free book libraries, tell me, was it a good read?
I think it's still a great story. The technology is definitely dated.
There is also some language that will offend or make some people uncomfortable (Racial slurs epithets, among them).
My MacBook has 2 magnets in the screen to avoid this issue.
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At risk of derailing the conversation, I finished Cryptonomicon earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Any recommendations for similar books?
If you can get past the absolute slog of a beginning, Anathem is amazing.
Haha. Tangentially - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_Me_to_Heaven - "developed by Carrot Pop which measures the vertical distance that a mobile phone is thrown. Players compete against each other by seeking to throw their phones higher than others, often at the risk of damaging their phones."
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Yes, it's an amazing book. But skip the last 20 pages, they're deeply unsatisfying writing.
The Neal Stephenson experience. That, and the 20-page grad-level dissertation on some esoteric subject randomly in the middle of the book. The man’s truly one of the best out there, and I’m convinced a more aggressive editor would ruin him, but it wouldn’t be a Stephenson without some real head scratching authorial decisions.
Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. ...
So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.
Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson had a subplot where a main character used morse code on his keyboard, or some other layered encoding on top of the keyboard, to write software and communicate surreptitiously even while his screen was being recorded.
Specifically, IIRC, the character used the "Scroll Lock" LED to blink out some coordinates in Morse, to avoid the location being displayed on-screen and thus captured by Van Eck phreaking[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking