WhatPulse Leads to Increased Chances of Carpal Tunnel
Ok so the folks over at WhatPulse have a nifty little app that you install on your computer and it transmits the amount of keystrokes you make to their site. You can then compete against other people for keystrokes and clicks. I immediately thought of the security aspect of this and after some investigation it seems that everything is clean. It is only transmitting your number of keystrokes and the data it is passing contains nothing in regards to the actual information you are typing.
I noticed that some people have reached some keystroke leveld that seem to be a bit unrealistic. It makes you think they set a cup on a key and walked away. The great thing about that is that it does not count repetitive keystrokes. It only counts a repetitive string as one stroke. So I figured they were using a SendKey script to jack up their counts. I created one real quick to see if it would do the trick (not to cheat, but to determine if it were possible). The script is as follows:
set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "notepad"
WScript.Sleep 100
WshShell.AppActivate "notepad"
WScript.Sleep 100
For i=1 to 100
WshShell.SendKeys "1{ }"
Next
This script opened notepad and typed the number one followed by a space 100 times. The space would eliminate the repetitive key and hopefully jack up some numbers. Unfortunately, it did not. So it appears that they have protected against several methods of jacking up your key count. I will continue to look into it out of pure curiosity and boredom.
Meanwhile, get an account and see how you compare to others. If you want to join the team that I am in, just leave a comment and I will get you the info.
Posted by dmac at April 11, 2005 03:41 PM
