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Reviews -> Wireless PC Lock
Last modified on Thu, 5th Apr 2007 at 15:50 BST by zippletSummary
Available from: Ebuyer (http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/home/)
Price: £13.71 inc VAT at time of review
Link: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/116360
Conclusion: Good hardware, very innovative - but let down by terrible software.
Rating: 6/10
Description
Do you need to secure your PC while you are not present, but you are fed up of remembering to lock it manually (windowskey + L)? Screensaver timeouts not short enough to kick in before someone plays around with your PC? Smartcards too expensive?
The idea of the Wireless PC Lock is to secure your PC whenever the keyfob is more than 2 meters away from the receiver dongle (you carry the keyfob with you in your pocket), and desecure it when you return. This is a nice idea that as far as I can tell noone else has yet tried.
The dongle is quite small - smaller than a lot of USB flash disks, but it's probably ever so slightly too fat to sit side by side with another USB plug in 2 adjacent ports. It has a single green LED that blinks whenever it receives a heartbeat from the keyfob. Amazingly, there are no drivers - when you plug the dongle in for the first time, windows identifies it as a Human Interface Device and it's ready for use, even under windows 98! I discovered why and it's covered later in this review.
The keyfob is quite a nicely designed unit although they could have made it thinner in my opinion. It takes a single CR2032 lithium battery and this is advertised to provide 2000 hours of continuous usage - this is believable considering the very small output of the transmitter and low frequency of heartbeats. The green plastic on the front is a pushbutton - hold in until the LED blinks to switch on, hold in until the LED extinguishes to switch off. You could activate it by accident, although atleast it requires a solid press of a second or so to activate which should reduce the chance of this happening.
The included software is so terrible that it was painful to reinstall it so that I could capture some screenshots for this review, but I'm going to ... okay.. here goes...
You're greeted with this when you insert the CD. Looks unprofessional but this is so far on the level of quality you'd expect with cheap Taiwanese goods. Once you proceed, you'll be prompted to insert your device if it's not inserted already.
I don't know about what you think but I think this is one of the silliest ideas I've seen for a progress bar in an installer.. a couple of cars moving along...
You'll be asked to set a password to use to unlock your PC if your keyfob is not available. Note the engrish...
Here we associate the keyfob with the receiver. More engrish! So far however, it's been easy and straightforward. After you switch on the receiver, it picks it up and installation is complete. Now, I have a little icon in my system tray showing the status of the system. The little red bar at the right hand side indicates presence of the USB receiver (it's grey if it's unplugged), and the "radio waves" indicate that it can see the keyfob.
Removing the receiver from the USB port, switching off the keyfob or taking the keyfob out of range will lock your system. Walking back into range will unlock the system, as will entering the password. Unfortunately, this is where the shit hits the fan. First, this is what will grace your monitor when it's locked:
EWWWW! Hideous and very unprofessional. And no, I don't normally have the language bar enabled. For some reason, when it locks my PC the language bar appears and floats up at the top. It dissapears again when it unlocks. Thankfully, it is possible to change the image - change the image file syslock.bmp in the installation directory.
Unfortunately in addition, the software is very, very broken. On a multiple monitor system, only the first monitor will be locked - you can continue to use the computer using the other monitors. It's also possible to sometimes open task manager and kill the security task... very bad!
Sometimes while the software is running, your PC will freeze for about a second and you'll see the tray icons flicker a little - very annoying.
But most annoying of all - sometimes it will lock, and then unlock your desktop for no reason at all even when the keyfob is right next to the receiver. On two occasions it would no longer see the keyfob until I restarted my computer - even reinserting the USB dongle had no effect.
Why didn't I just restart the software? Well, I tried but it wouldn't go away! I later found out why - it's easily defeatable but hideous. While looking at task manager I saw a task called "Explorer.Exe" - yes, with the capital E's. My first reaction was something like "eeeeek! trojan/worm/etc" but it's actually a task that comes with the wireless PC lock software. It checks to see if the wireless PC lock software is terminated, and restarts it if so. In my opinion it's very bad to name tasks like this after other programs like explorer as it can cause a lot of confusion.
The included software makes this hardware almost useless! So before I googled around (I should have done that first) I tried to see if I could find out how it worked. After all, it identified itself as a Human Interface Device. My first thought was it registered itself as a keyboard and sent special keycodes. I wasn't too far off - it registers itself as a gamepad even though it doesn't follow the HID specification for a gamepad! (more on that soon)
Hmm! I wonder what that "wire" thing is!
Aha! If you switch on the dongle, buttons 2 and 3 will be lit and the crosshair will move. After a while, the crosshair moves OUTSIDE the box! I was curious and opened up delphi and wrote a quick app to display the raw co-ordinate data. It's a mess - the X axis keeps incrementing and such. It's not behaving like a proper gamepad. There goes my idea of writing new software for it that uses the gamepad API
But! All is not lost! I googled around, and found an article about this device. Someone else reverse engineered it and noted that, yes, it registers itself as a gamepad - but no, it does not send data that is actually compliant with the gamepad HID specification. The only way to properly poll this device is to open the USB device "raw" and read the data stream directly.
There is a third party program that currently does this and works a lot better than the supplied software - it's still buggy and since it uses the .NET framework it's quite slow but it's worth a try - get it here at wirelessdefender.net.
I'm going to write my own software in Delphi that will work with this dongle soon when I get the time!