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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

There are key loggers and Key Loggers. If you need admin rights to enable it and it saves the keystrokes locally, then you probably shouldn't care. Anyone with that level of access can install something worse.

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The salient variable when it comes to key loggers is knowledge of its existence.

"keylogger" has become one of those loaded words for me that I basically ignore whenever I read.

You can make any piece of software that takes user input sound like a "keylogger" with the right wording, that the word has basically lost all meaning.

It still is a keylogger in a consumer product.

So is Notepad.

Notepad runs in userland under the supervision of the kernel. This is a driver and could be running in kernel mode. It could make a big difference.

Even if it's not malicious, I still think it is a rather serious professional mistake to ship a driver containing potentially dangerous deadcode.

There's plenty of "rather serious professional mistakes" in whatever operating system you happen to run in the first place - it's very rare that something that doesn't affect security in any meaningful way gets the attention this has.

The last time i checked the whatever you type in browser, does not end up in text file or notepad. This does show the quality thinking about security. Oh we can enable when we want check things out rather than finding way to add and remove this after informing user

Notepad doesn't fit the definition of a keylogger.

This does.

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