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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Scientists are always trying to replicate phenomenons here on earth. With the Large Hadron Collider attempting to test various theories and even replicate the big bang, you’d think scientists all over the world have their hands full.

On the contrary, scientists at the University of Maryland have their own little maniacal tests to conduct. They’ve built a ten foot high, 30 ton apparatus that’ll attempt to generate a magnetic field by spinning liquid sodium metal, much like the way Earth produces its own magnetic field. John Biggs of CrunchGear suggests putting beer in it. We couldn’t agree more.

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Who would’ve thought all it took is an Arduino, a standard magnetic stripe reader, a display and a little code to be able to read the data stored on magnetic stripe cards such as your VISA card.  I can’t begin to imagine how this DIY provided by Instructables could be abused.  No one is doing fraudulent things with an Arduino LED hat and the worst that could happen with an Arduino KITT in your car is people calling you “The Hoff.”

Turn this card reader portable and you’ve got yourself an identification theft device that’ll fit in your pocket.  The digital age is a dangerous time, a dog eat dog world. Do your part and make it as hectic as possible for the rest of mankind.

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No longer will your guitar have to suffer an early demise at the hands of a clumsy stage crew member tripping over your amp cords. Coming in September, Belkin is offering a new power connector for your guitar and amp that borrows the magnetic damage protection of Apple’s MagSafe adapter for your electric guitar.

It works with standard quarter-inch plugs and promises no audio quality issues. So it’s a safe bet that rocking hard won’t have you flinging your guitar from your hand because you tried to dance around your wires while playing. For $20, the worse that’s going to happen if someone does trip over your chords is the disconnection between your guitar and your amp, break-free. This will bring great relief to the audience, who thought that your music sounded nothing short of a guitar being thrown on the sidewalk and stepped upon in repetition.

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