full-disclosure - Does the following...

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From: nick at virus-l.demon.co.uk (Nick FitzGerald)
Subject: Does the following...

Andrew Farmer to Valdis Kletnieks:

> > Man, are they *still* selling sound cards that are *that* crappy and
<<snip>> 
> Apparently, yes. This is a known occurrence.
> 
> Support:
> - Text includes some text that one might expect in radio
>    - "San Bernardino 90" (traffic report)

...or a weather forecast?

> To other posters:
> - RF keyboards don't exist. Nobody's *that* unconcerned about security.

Please explain to the fine folk at Logitech then (sorry, URL will 
wrap):

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/usertype/businesstopics/US/EN
,CRID=864,parentCRID=267,contentID=7952

   ...  Whether it's our patented 27MHz cordless technology, a step up
   to our Fast RF cordless desktops and mice, ...

...and when you're done, please go research all the other keyboard, 
mouse and/or "presentation pointer" makers and explain to them why they 
also don't make products that millions have been happily using for 
years.

> - Bluetooth keyboards require a pairing process to work, so that's not
>    too likely.

I didn't say it was likely.

As presented, the clue-level of both the user and system installer/ 
configurer, are entirely unknown, so we were suggesting possibilities 
to a very loosely defined problem set.  Without knowing more my money, 
like yours, is on the speech recognition s/w and noisy/badly-shielded 
sound card combo, but I'd say that both the above are at least modestly 
likely and therefore worth suggesting for the OP to check/eliminate if 
it does not appear to be the (I thought well-known) speech recognition 
issue...

In case you don't know, "typical" RF cordless keyboards and mice have 
been recorded to have effective ranges to around 150m (way beyond what 
the manufacturer's specs say):

   http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article427668.ece

   http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/100/374785

> - Bayesian-defeating text? Explain to me why that'd be showing up in
>    Word.
> - Random prose script? Falls to Occam's razor: why would it be 
> implemented
>    in Word (other than as a prank)?

Agreed -- these were stabs-in-the-dark by folk who forgot to understand 
the problem description before responding...  (That said, there were a 
couple of rare variants of some manky Word macro viruses that, due to 
some weird bug in the virus and/or oddity in at least one version of 
Word that the virus replicated under, when you started Word on an 
infected machine the virus code effectively finished leaving the focus 
on a "hidden" window displaying the virus' source code in the Visual 
Basic Editor environment -- if you Alt-Tabbed "away" and then Alt-
Tabbed "back" the window was actually revealed.  _Further_, at least 
one of variants of these viruses had snatched some text (though not by 
the virus code's direct action) from some "sensitive" NATO setting.  
Neither deliberately progressively typed the text into a visible Word 
document though, but that effect could be pretty easily achieved using 
Word VBA macro features.)

-- 
Nick FitzGerald
Computer Virus Consulting Ltd.
Ph/FAX: +64 3 3529854