From: Jay Levitt <jay+news@...>
Date: 2007-12-30T05:25:02+09:00
Subject: Can Ruby be a keylogger on Win/Mac?

I know the subject's vague; that's because I don't know what I'm talking
about.

Is it possible to write an Ruby program that will intercept keystrokes on
Windows XP?  I'm on Windows at the moment, but I'm switching to Mac soon.
(Then again, I'm not sure if a Mac keylogger would be low-level enough to
get keystrokes destined for a Parallels virtual machine running Windows, so
both may be important.)

No, I'm not doing anything nefarious.  In fact, here are the specs for what
I want to write, and I'd probably give a small bounty to someone who did
this SMOP:

- Measure the average percentage of keystrokes that are either delete,
backspace, or cursor keys
- If that percentage is significantly higher than normal (for some value of
"significantly"), pop up a modal alert
- Don't be a CPU hog; maybe even self-disable when the computer is idle

And if you know me, or dig a little, you'll know exactly why I want that.
:)

If it can hide from the process list or otherwise make itself difficult to
close, all the better, but that's not strictly necessary.  It's fine if it
needs Administrator/root permissions to run.

-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm         | - Kristoffer