Gearfuse

You know that super awesome hiding place you chose for your extra house key? Everybody knows it’s there, seriously. What’s the point of hiding an extra house key under your doormat anymore? As far as your home security is concerned, you might as well advertise your transparency, maybe get a few brownie points for honesty and an oddly self-inflicted sense of humor.

The Key Hidden Here Doormat comes in a variety of sizes, starting at 18″ x 24″ for $24.95.

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I don’t know how I should feel about this. I’m very scared and feel very confused. In a move that is very unlike them, Best Buy decided to open up its entire product catalog to developers via an API. Dubbed “Remix,” the API will allow developers to earn affiliate cash by using Best Buy’s images, information and, of course, online store.

This is really neat to an extent. Best Buy could be huge dicks about what you do with the API but if they’re smart, they’ll let someone create an iPhone app and then buy it off them or cut them some revenue from it. Now that’s the beauty of sharing data.

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Yesterday morning, the Fox News Twitter account posted breaking news that Bill O Riley is gay. To me this is no new news at all but to everyone else this comes as a complete surprise. It turns out that several celebrities have had their Twitter accounts hijacked, accompanied of course by phony posts desecrating their “good” name.

Among the victims includes Britney Spears posting about the size of her vagina, Rick Sanchez posting about how high he is on crack and President elect Barack Obama offering free gas money for opinionated feedback. Serves those suckers right for not using Tumblr instead!

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“Hi, I’m Vic Mackey from FX’s hit television show – The Shield. I’ve pawned off my traditional handbag in favor of something a little more…what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right, tech. I got this e-Volve Gadget Shoulder Holster because I was sick and tired of street gangs pocketing my iPhone. It’s got two pouches for easy access to my personal electronic gadgets, a zippered pouch to control loose items such as change, rubbers, and memory cards, a quick-release key chain holder and an elastic pen holder. The entire pouch is conveniently positioned underneath my arm. I don’t care how large your Peruvian drug ring is, you’re not taking my gadgets.

What’s that? You want my holster? Tough shit, get your own. They’re only $69.95. Good cop and bad cop have left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop. The tech kind of cop.”

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Two doctoral students, Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, have discovered a potential threat to security that declares keyboards “unsafe to transmit sensitive information”.

By monitoring signals produced by keystrokes, the researchers were able to reproduce what had been typed on 11 different keyboards using a variety of different attacks. One specific attack worked as far away as 20 meters from the keyboard. The next time you find yourself exchanging top secret information with someone on the Internet, you best watch what you type; the KGB could be monitoring your keystrokes.

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Looking to improve your burglary skills and you want to include your children in the process? Look no further than the Paper Locksmith Collection from Flying-Pig Paper Animation Kits. Inside the kit, you’ll find a working cylinder lock, a combination lock, a paper key, a warded lock and a 12-page instruction manual.

While it might not be as tasty as a papercraft steak, the Paper Locksmith Collection serves its purpose as a unique learning tool for all ages. At about $10, it’s a great project to tackle on a rainy weekend. Just don’t let the rain get near your paper locks or you’re S.O.L.

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If you go away for a few weeks and need to give your key to a housekeeper, babysitter, or dog watcher while your away, who knows whether that person is going out and making a copy of the key, with some sort of diabolical plot for thievery planned on your return. The ViprLock ensures that something like that could never happen, with its easy key lock changing.

The standard ViprLock comes with an A & B key lock, but add-ons are available for up to six different key options. Switching the key setting is as easy as depressing a special button while using key A, and then using key B to unlock the door. The two-key unit is available for $60, with extra key settings for $3 each.

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Isn’t it just annoying when you lose stupid items like keys, your wallet, your purse (and murse) or even your kid? They’re usually just somewhere, at the stupidest places covered by paper or clothes or food. Japanese company Imao (not LMAO) has come to save us with their Mitsukaru tags. What the tags do is that they are traceable with your remote, when you lost your wallet, simply press your remote and the tag in your wallet will ring. The maximum distance for that to work is 10m, so you can imagine yourself walking around the house and pressing the remote until you hear something. Well, this is already better than nothing. The tags measures 30×51x9mm, so it should not be too difficult to fit into your toilet case, or just use it as a keyholder. The remote uses AAA battery where as the tags use CR-2032 button batteries. The Mitsukaru tags come in 4 colors per pack, all with different alarm tones (that are actually too loud by Japanese standard- Impress), the whole kit is selling for 80USD. You can have an idea of how big the tag is after the jump.

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PayPal can’t seem to get a break. Because it is the main payment method of eBay, there are always tons of people trying to hack into the system and exploit flaws. Now, we understand that there shouldn’t be any flaws in the first place, but people shouldn’t be trying to steal other’s identities either. So here is a step that PayPal is trying to take to increase security: Security Keys. These keys generate unique passwords every 30 seconds or so, and everytime a user signs in to the service, they will have to enter this random key combination in addition to their username and pervious password. Of course, there are some serious problems with this. One being that, like nearly everything that is “random”, there are algorithms involved that can be cracked. Also, as is done today, users can be tricked into entering their information into a phishing site. All these new measures would do is give the scammers only 30 seconds to loging (which is still plenty of time). Will this new security measure work? It’s unlikely. — Nik Gomez

The Paypal Security Key [via Gadgetell]