Don’t you just hate it when you’re trying to log on from a public computer, or sending an email or chatting with a friend, there’s some stranger behind you looking at what you’re doing? Granted sometimes this stranger means no harm and is simply curious or bored, but there are times when these strangers are hoping to catch a glimpse of some your details and/or password. Researchers in Japan have come up with a pretty creative way of dealing with that, and that is by having dummy cursors flood your display, thus confusing the person behind you as well as remote hackers who are trying to screen capture your desktop from afar.
However this system involves the clicking of your password via a number pad as opposed to typing it in, so its usefulness for now does seem a little limited. Unless of course the keypad can be used to enter passwords into a text field much like how on-screen keyboards act. The researchers who developed this system admit that it might be a little confusing to the user as well at first, but they claim that users will have no problem figuring out which cursor belongs to them. It sounds pretty cool but we’re not sure if it will be widely accepted, but if you have a couple of minutes to spare, check it out in action in the video above.
Filed in Security.
. Read more about