Yubico Forum

Q: I just got my Yubikey yesterday, and am having some problems with it. I have used it on 3 machines (P3 laptop XP, P4 desktop XP and Vista, P3 desktop ME). I cannot get it to activate by double clicking caps-lock, although the green ring does flash when I do this. I do not know exactly where the "button" is, but when I squeeze the Yubikey between my thumb and forefinger and move them arround a bit, I sometimes get a 44 character string (above are examples). Also, the www.yubico.com/start web site for testing gets a 404 internet error.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there any usage documentation anywhere?

A: he YubiKey button is a touchbutton. You do not press it hard, just rest your fingertip on the round circle for one second. Instructions on www.yubico.com/start We are aware that the touch button needs some explanation, but we choose this design to avoid moving parts, to allow it to be very thin and to make it as cost-effiecient as possible.

All YubiKeys purchased on our website only works with the button. To activate the Caps Lock functionality, you need to re-programme it, using the personalization tool on our web.

In an early batch the YubiKey was made slightly thinner (2.0 mm) than the USB-standard (2.3 mm) Our experience is that this thin version works perfect on 98% of all computers, but if you have recieved one of these thin samples and cannot not make it work on all your computers, please let us know and we will send you a new free sample tomorrow.

Hi!

The caps-lock mode has been disabled for two reasons:

1) It doesn't work under Mac OS X. Mac OS X doesn't echo the caps lock key to all attached keyboards, which is required to make this work.
2) Security reasons. A trojan could simulate caps-lock and generate OTP's from the device.

We'll update our web pages about this, but it would help if you can give the URL where you found that this should work? Thanks.

You don't need to squeeze the button, just hold the finger steady over the green ring for around 1 second. Watch the video on our front page for illustrion.

Thanks,
Simon