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Comment by rashkov | Hacker News Reader

This is cool but also it makes me think about the security implications of giving away your mouse movement data. Seems like creating realistic mouse movements can be valuable for defeating anti-scraping systems. Some security software even claims to uniquely identify a user based on their mouse movement.

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Downloadable software can be doing all sorts of things that you might not be aware of. Recording mouse movements is probably the least of your worries. So be a bit wary about what you download, especially free software from unknown sources.

From the article:

> We guarantee that IOGraph is safe. Softpedia can confirm it!

I love it when banks just add a PNG to their pages with a lock and the word “Secure”.

It’s PNG-secured.

LOL. I've made a living selling downloadable software for the last 19 years. I wouldn't put any stock in anything a download sites says. I'm not sure anything has improved since this little experiment I did in 2007: https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-award...

When I was a kid, I built a simple messenger one afternoon. It would send messages to any IP address with the software running on the other end. To show it off at school, I uploaded it to Sourceforge.

Today, this messenger is all over the internet and has won many awards, with rave reviews in several languages.

Regretfully, Softpedia has given it mere 3/5 stars.

Perhaps they had to knock a few stars off considering it’s probably now just an exe not meant to run on Windows of this century, Matryoska doll-ed in malware and installers that random software download sites added to it over decades.

BTW I've got no reason to believe that this particular piece of software (IOGraphica) is doing anything bad.

Perhaps they can add an obfuscating randomizer to the movement pattern so the original mouse movement is distorted. Same security issue goes for hackernews comments, there is a user identifiable pattern in the way you write sentences and paragraphs, although the fingerprint less certain then a mouse movement. With hacker news you could obfuscate it with pre-parsing a comment through an llm with some instructions.

Use a firewall.

What's a good firewall on windows these days

Sphinx or use the built in one, if you like torturing yourself :D.

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