Once our algorithm has ten minutes’ worth of typed English, it can recover arbitrary text, such as passwords.

It’s a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts.

Background noise definitely made it harder to recover accurate text, but the differences became smaller after several rounds of feedback. Given enough tries, the computer algorithm will eventually come up with a pretty good estimate...

I think the music industry will have a strong challenge working in these kinds of environments.

The message from this study is that there is no easy escape from this acoustic snooping.

I don’t think it’s very hard for people to put this together, but I don’t want to make it easy for people, either.

The keyboard is a little like a conga drum.

We probably don’t want to be relying on passwords as we do.

There are different forms of authentication that could be used, including smart cards, one-time password tokens or biometrics. That helps with passwords, but it doesn’t help protect text documents we would want to keep classified....