6 ms·

Typewriters are back, and we have Edward Snowden to thank

65 points by doctorshady 12y ago

eksith 12y ago
The laughter was nearly deafening when this product was introduced http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/password-minder-the-blank-notebook-that-got-laughed-out-of-production/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/password-minder-the-b... I wonder whether its time has finally come. Edit: It's worth noting that each typewriter is unique and will leave a telltale signature subject to identification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Forensic_examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Forensic_examinatio... Of course, modern printers aren't immune to this and many models incorporate identifiers by the manufacturers to aid forensic investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  > Plus, the password minder features a discrete leatherette bound cover to ensure your passwords stay secret. First time I'm hearing about "security through leatherette".
  - eksith 12y ago
    It will look like every other book... intended to hold private information so they'll never suspect anything! ;) I once had the bright idea to put passwords written on a small piece of paper and place it inside a 3.5" floppy. If it's in a pack of other unlabeled disks, that's going to be a nice fishing trip.
- ganzuul 12y ago
  This is the public key for my server's SSL certificate: http://nya.dy.fi/static/nginx.png http://nya.dy.fi/static/nginx.png A camera phone could easily use this format to do impressive things.
joezydeco 12y ago
"Earlier this year, German politician Patrick Sensburg announced that Germany’s government officials might start using typewriters, as they are seen as being an “unhackable” technology." Yeah, about that... http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/using-old-school-typewriters-will-not-protect-you-from-snooping/ http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/using-old-school-typewr... http://www.magicmargin.net/2012/12/silencing-chatty-selectrics-operation.html http://www.magicmargin.net/2012/12/silencing-chatty-selectri... Unless they're going back to mechanical ones.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  (Nonmechanical) computer keyboards, relatively quiet in the world of text input technology, have been found to be extremely vulnerable to acoustic attack: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_Emanations_Revisited/tiss.preprint.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_E... A mechanical or electric typewriter full of moving parts? Sounds like side channel city to me.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    If your using a mechanical typewriter, your likely not in a public (and/or pre-deterined place). This forces an attacker into a cumbersome, intrusive, and maybe-evidence-left-behind espionage scenario (B&E). That in and of itself is quite useful.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Or just shine a laser or RF beam at the window and read the vibrations.
      - 001sky 12y ago
        you'd have to have either a permanent installation or exquisite timing. again, the greatly narrows down attack surface. you might be able to surveil small lots of targets this way, but it would be harder than you think. Again, if your a stuxtnet-level target, you're not going to be safe...but that's not really most people...is it? Your normal-ish executive will have the ability to work in places without LOS from non-credentialed personell (eg, high rise apartment, gated community, interior conference rooms, etc). The NSA or MI6 could of course rent the flat across the street, or have a sub-contractor con his way into employment, but this type of stuff is outside the remit of your basic opportunistic threat. And it leaves evidence and paper trails unless you are the mossad or cia whomever and can fake identities like passports, bank accounts, etc.
jMyles 12y ago
These seems completely unfounded. Even without the research to which other commenters have linked, it just seems plainly obvious that typewriters are vulnerable to all sorts of attack. Is open source software and reasonably security practice really that bad? I mean I know it's bad, but is it abandon-common-sense-and-just-grasp-at-straws bad?
- DrStalker 12y ago
  If you're willing to use a typewriter you're willing to use a computer with no network connection, so all you need to do is block radio transmissions. A faraday cage can't cost that much compared to the other costs involved in espionage.
  - jMyles 12y ago
    > block radio transmissions To what attack are you referring here?
    - femto 12y ago
      TEMPEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
  - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
    People can hop airgapped networks using speakers and microphones.
    - eksith 12y ago
      I had a discussion with a friend about The Thing[1], an invention by Léon Theremin and how ingenious it was that it required no external power source and can be turned on/off at will by transmitting at a certain frequency. The trouble with this is that it's still possible to identify the retransmission. In fact, this was how it was discovered. What if the room had a length of surgical or other type of long tubing embedded into the wall so that the detector was a fair distance away? Essentially, a very crude stethoscope originating in a wall outlet or other place in the room that already has an orifice(s) and terminating at another location with a passive resonator. By decoupling the transmitter from the audio source by using a non-electronic medium, it's possible to still eavesdrop on keystrokes even in an em-shielded room. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(listening_device)
tuke 12y ago
Reminds me of how Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age taught us that a culture might control the copying of information by utilizing mechanical type to print newspapers, where each printing shows the grain of the type and is hard to simulate.
bane 12y ago
Good, because the spy agencies of the world have an even deeper library of techniques to handle espionage off of typewriters than off of computers.
freshflowers 12y ago
It's disheartening how few people in this thread have actually read the article instead of reacting to the linkbait headline. God forbid we shouldn't worship new technology as always better.
johnchristopher 12y ago
I've always liked that paragraph from W. Gibson's `Virtual Light` > The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.
tincholio 12y ago
> Vinyl is one of the most notable technologies to have achieved a noticeable revival, not only for its retro value but also for its superior sound quality. After this, I have trouble taking the rest of the article seriously...
- firat 12y ago
  I was under the impression that vinyl records sound better. Are you saying that they are not or that they haven't achieved a noticeable revival?
  - ganzuul 12y ago
    The loudness war is common knowledge.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    If you like the sound of snap, crackle, and pop, vinyl does sound better.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    When you double-blind test you have people preferring better quality[1], which normally means carefully created MP3 is preferred to vinyl. When you just ask them what they prefer they say whatever they want to say, which often means things like "vinyl is warmer". There are some confounding factors. "Dynamic compression" (As ganzuul mentions, "loudness wars") does make a difference and MP3s (as created today) tend to have less variation between quiet and loud. [1] the benefits of "better quality" stop at quite a low point. Most people can't hear any difference between 256k or 350k MP3 file. Very few people can hear a difference between 350k CBR and FLAC.
- doctorshady 12y ago
  I've worked in audio engineering before. Generally speaking, I think the reason vinyl ends up sounding better isn't because it's necessarily a better medium. I mean, it's certainly resilient, but it inherently has some limitations that make the mastering process a little different. Let me explain: Digital audio has a very clearly defined limit as to how loud it can go. With magnetic tape, you have to consider the saturation point, or for vinyl, what the lathe cutting the master can physically cut, but depending on the conditions, how loud the actual medium can go changes. With digital formats, it simply goes to 0 dBFS. Period. That's a spot that's clearly marked on most meters. If you exceed it, you'll hear a very nasty sounding audible clipping, and a red light on your meter will turn on to let you know whatever you're recording is too loud. Anyway, in 1989, Sony came out with a digital "brickwall" limiting device that used a technique called lookahead to anticipate changes in loudness. Compared to conventional compression and limiting, it's very transparent, and produces drastically less artifacts - desirable or otherwise when it works. So when that happened, a shitton of developers came out with their own versions, and started accelerating what's called the loudness war. Fast forward twenty five years, it's very common for someone - whether it be a band member or a record label or somebody to use this tool very aggressively on their releases. You can push a brickwall limiter to quite literally absolute amplitude if you want - as in, the loudness level doesn't change at all for the entire song. Much to the chagrin of some of the engineers who have to actually work the brickwall limiter, people will occasionally want that. Anyway, back to the world of analog mediums. Without that clearly defined volume limit, it doesn't make much sense to be using a tool like that. That's the biggest difference in how vinyl and CD/mp3 releases are made. Some people don't like it ridiculously loud, others don't like the distortion aggressive brickwall limiting introduces, but I think the physical inability to use brickwall limiting is what's giving vinyl a comeback. Compare a vinyl/CD release of a Foo Fighters song for yourself if you want; http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/58998249/file.html http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/58998249/file.html tl;dr, digital releases can sound just as good as vinyl, but the people producing them don't want it that way. People disagree. Therefore, vinyl ends up with better sound quality. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm
noyesno 12y ago
I'm just waiting for the Kickstarter project for an Open Hardware typewriter, so we can all inspect the design and/or build our own without backdoors.
tracker1 12y ago
Okay, you can get the "sound" of typewriters, for a larger part by switching to physical switch keyboards... I actually really like my unicomp. As for the security aspect, a network or even workstations not connected to the internet goes a long way... you don't have to revert all the way back for security.
WalterBright 12y ago
Looks like my old mechanical typewriter still has a use. I've also discovered when scanning old typewritten letters they seem to be remarkably resistant to my scanner's OCR software.
davidgerard 12y ago
If you want the sound of a typewriter, just buy Model M for everyone. THE OFFICE SHOULD SOUND LIKE MACHINE-GUN FIRE.
NietTim 12y ago
Snowden is to thank? What the actual fuck? No, fucked up governments are to thank /no filter
partomniscient 12y ago
But analog typewriters can't even handle UTF-8, let alone all the other unicode nonsense. Their carriage return implementation is pretty cool though.

65 points by doctorshady 12y ago

The laughter was nearly deafening when this product was introduced http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/password-minder-the-blank-notebook-that-got-laughed-out-of-production/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/password-minder-the-b... I wonder whether its time has finally come. Edit: It's worth noting that each typewriter is unique and will leave a telltale signature subject to identification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Forensic_examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Forensic_examinatio... Of course, modern printers aren't immune to this and many models incorporate identifiers by the manufacturers to aid forensic investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

adamnemecek 12y ago
> Plus, the password minder features a discrete leatherette bound cover to ensure your passwords stay secret. First time I'm hearing about "security through leatherette".
- eksith 12y ago
  It will look like every other book... intended to hold private information so they'll never suspect anything! ;) I once had the bright idea to put passwords written on a small piece of paper and place it inside a 3.5" floppy. If it's in a pack of other unlabeled disks, that's going to be a nice fishing trip.
ganzuul 12y ago
This is the public key for my server's SSL certificate: http://nya.dy.fi/static/nginx.png http://nya.dy.fi/static/nginx.png A camera phone could easily use this format to do impressive things.

joezydeco 12y ago

"Earlier this year, German politician Patrick Sensburg announced that Germany’s government officials might start using typewriters, as they are seen as being an “unhackable” technology." Yeah, about that... http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/using-old-school-typewriters-will-not-protect-you-from-snooping/ http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/using-old-school-typewr... http://www.magicmargin.net/2012/12/silencing-chatty-selectrics-operation.html http://www.magicmargin.net/2012/12/silencing-chatty-selectri... Unless they're going back to mechanical ones.

yzzxy 12y ago
(Nonmechanical) computer keyboards, relatively quiet in the world of text input technology, have been found to be extremely vulnerable to acoustic attack: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_Emanations_Revisited/tiss.preprint.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_E... A mechanical or electric typewriter full of moving parts? Sounds like side channel city to me.
- 001sky 12y ago
  If your using a mechanical typewriter, your likely not in a public (and/or pre-deterined place). This forces an attacker into a cumbersome, intrusive, and maybe-evidence-left-behind espionage scenario (B&E). That in and of itself is quite useful.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Or just shine a laser or RF beam at the window and read the vibrations.
    - 001sky 12y ago
      you'd have to have either a permanent installation or exquisite timing. again, the greatly narrows down attack surface. you might be able to surveil small lots of targets this way, but it would be harder than you think. Again, if your a stuxtnet-level target, you're not going to be safe...but that's not really most people...is it? Your normal-ish executive will have the ability to work in places without LOS from non-credentialed personell (eg, high rise apartment, gated community, interior conference rooms, etc). The NSA or MI6 could of course rent the flat across the street, or have a sub-contractor con his way into employment, but this type of stuff is outside the remit of your basic opportunistic threat. And it leaves evidence and paper trails unless you are the mossad or cia whomever and can fake identities like passports, bank accounts, etc.

jMyles 12y ago

These seems completely unfounded. Even without the research to which other commenters have linked, it just seems plainly obvious that typewriters are vulnerable to all sorts of attack. Is open source software and reasonably security practice really that bad? I mean I know it's bad, but is it abandon-common-sense-and-just-grasp-at-straws bad?

DrStalker 12y ago
If you're willing to use a typewriter you're willing to use a computer with no network connection, so all you need to do is block radio transmissions. A faraday cage can't cost that much compared to the other costs involved in espionage.
- jMyles 12y ago
  > block radio transmissions To what attack are you referring here?
  - femto 12y ago
    TEMPEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  People can hop airgapped networks using speakers and microphones.
  - eksith 12y ago
    I had a discussion with a friend about The Thing[1], an invention by Léon Theremin and how ingenious it was that it required no external power source and can be turned on/off at will by transmitting at a certain frequency. The trouble with this is that it's still possible to identify the retransmission. In fact, this was how it was discovered. What if the room had a length of surgical or other type of long tubing embedded into the wall so that the detector was a fair distance away? Essentially, a very crude stethoscope originating in a wall outlet or other place in the room that already has an orifice(s) and terminating at another location with a passive resonator. By decoupling the transmitter from the audio source by using a non-electronic medium, it's possible to still eavesdrop on keystrokes even in an em-shielded room. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(listening_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(listening_device)

tuke 12y ago

Reminds me of how Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age taught us that a culture might control the copying of information by utilizing mechanical type to print newspapers, where each printing shows the grain of the type and is hard to simulate.

bane 12y ago

Good, because the spy agencies of the world have an even deeper library of techniques to handle espionage off of typewriters than off of computers.

freshflowers 12y ago

It's disheartening how few people in this thread have actually read the article instead of reacting to the linkbait headline. God forbid we shouldn't worship new technology as always better.

johnchristopher 12y ago

I've always liked that paragraph from W. Gibson's `Virtual Light` > The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.

tincholio 12y ago

> Vinyl is one of the most notable technologies to have achieved a noticeable revival, not only for its retro value but also for its superior sound quality. After this, I have trouble taking the rest of the article seriously...

firat 12y ago
I was under the impression that vinyl records sound better. Are you saying that they are not or that they haven't achieved a noticeable revival?
- ganzuul 12y ago
  The loudness war is common knowledge.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  If you like the sound of snap, crackle, and pop, vinyl does sound better.
- DanBC 12y ago
  When you double-blind test you have people preferring better quality[1], which normally means carefully created MP3 is preferred to vinyl. When you just ask them what they prefer they say whatever they want to say, which often means things like "vinyl is warmer". There are some confounding factors. "Dynamic compression" (As ganzuul mentions, "loudness wars") does make a difference and MP3s (as created today) tend to have less variation between quiet and loud. [1] the benefits of "better quality" stop at quite a low point. Most people can't hear any difference between 256k or 350k MP3 file. Very few people can hear a difference between 350k CBR and FLAC.
doctorshady 12y ago
I've worked in audio engineering before. Generally speaking, I think the reason vinyl ends up sounding better isn't because it's necessarily a better medium. I mean, it's certainly resilient, but it inherently has some limitations that make the mastering process a little different. Let me explain: Digital audio has a very clearly defined limit as to how loud it can go. With magnetic tape, you have to consider the saturation point, or for vinyl, what the lathe cutting the master can physically cut, but depending on the conditions, how loud the actual medium can go changes. With digital formats, it simply goes to 0 dBFS. Period. That's a spot that's clearly marked on most meters. If you exceed it, you'll hear a very nasty sounding audible clipping, and a red light on your meter will turn on to let you know whatever you're recording is too loud. Anyway, in 1989, Sony came out with a digital "brickwall" limiting device that used a technique called lookahead to anticipate changes in loudness. Compared to conventional compression and limiting, it's very transparent, and produces drastically less artifacts - desirable or otherwise when it works. So when that happened, a shitton of developers came out with their own versions, and started accelerating what's called the loudness war. Fast forward twenty five years, it's very common for someone - whether it be a band member or a record label or somebody to use this tool very aggressively on their releases. You can push a brickwall limiter to quite literally absolute amplitude if you want - as in, the loudness level doesn't change at all for the entire song. Much to the chagrin of some of the engineers who have to actually work the brickwall limiter, people will occasionally want that. Anyway, back to the world of analog mediums. Without that clearly defined volume limit, it doesn't make much sense to be using a tool like that. That's the biggest difference in how vinyl and CD/mp3 releases are made. Some people don't like it ridiculously loud, others don't like the distortion aggressive brickwall limiting introduces, but I think the physical inability to use brickwall limiting is what's giving vinyl a comeback. Compare a vinyl/CD release of a Foo Fighters song for yourself if you want; http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/58998249/file.html http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/58998249/file.html tl;dr, digital releases can sound just as good as vinyl, but the people producing them don't want it that way. People disagree. Therefore, vinyl ends up with better sound quality. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm

noyesno 12y ago

I'm just waiting for the Kickstarter project for an Open Hardware typewriter, so we can all inspect the design and/or build our own without backdoors.

tracker1 12y ago

Okay, you can get the "sound" of typewriters, for a larger part by switching to physical switch keyboards... I actually really like my unicomp. As for the security aspect, a network or even workstations not connected to the internet goes a long way... you don't have to revert all the way back for security.

WalterBright 12y ago

Looks like my old mechanical typewriter still has a use. I've also discovered when scanning old typewritten letters they seem to be remarkably resistant to my scanner's OCR software.

davidgerard 12y ago

If you want the sound of a typewriter, just buy Model M for everyone. THE OFFICE SHOULD SOUND LIKE MACHINE-GUN FIRE.

NietTim 12y ago

Snowden is to thank? What the actual fuck? No, fucked up governments are to thank /no filter

partomniscient 12y ago

But analog typewriters can't even handle UTF-8, let alone all the other unicode nonsense. Their carriage return implementation is pretty cool though.