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Comment by bike4beer | Hacker News Reader

Read Feynman's book "Surely your joking Dr. Feynman", he's got an entire chapter on safe cracking.

Yep, I remember in high school, in fact it was in Pasadena not far from Cal Tech, I don't remember who, but somehow I learned from somebody how to open the high-school lockers by 'feel', in a fairly short-time I could open any locker quicker than my own knowing the combo.

Locks are fairly amazing when you think about it the locksmiths and the criminals all know how to crack any lock, yet the people in the middle think they're secure.

Years later as a landlord I got to know my locksmith fairly well, one day by offhand he told me that the master-key ( So I could have one key to rule them all ) I was using could open 1/2 the units in the city.

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Your telling comes across as an indictment of the security industry.

I think it's a testament to human progress. We've never been as safe as we are today.

Maybe time to just leave the lock away then. It's pretty common in Scandinavia, and, at least for me as a tourist, had quite an impact on the societies' mood.

Oh, but we are not safe because of better locks. We are safe because most societies your typical HN readers lives in are fairly safe.

(I know lots of people in Germany who don't bother to lock their doors.)

Decades ago, as part of the CalTech freshman experience (Page House), I was required to buy a set of lock picks, learn their use and pick three designated locks within a time limit. Penalty for failure was being tossed in the showers by sophomores.

This was handy for getting around the Institute after hours (steam tunnels).

You would probably be sad to know that the steam tunnels are no longer accessible to students at will and South Masters are passing out of the living memory of students (the last time they could be used was in 2010-11)

(1) I love your book recommendation; however, it dedicates maybe one or two pages to safe-cracking, so I would not recommend it for this purpose.

Instead, I would read the material that Deviant Ollam has published (http://deviating.net/lockpicking/resources.html) or look for an upcoming TOOOL meetup (http://toool.us/).

(2) I don't intend to be pedantic – and perhaps I'm mistaking hyperbole for fact – but how could you are opening a combination lock with an secret unbeknownst to you more quickly than your a combination lock with a secret known to you? Unless, you're shimming the new lock and avoiding dialing the correct combination altogether, in which case you would solve them all locks in the same span of time, this is unlikely. However, you said you're opening the lock by 'feel,' so I assume that's not the case.

With respect to #2 -- "more quickly" could be a bit much, but there are quite a few combination locks (of the sort commonly found on cheap-ass high-school lockers) wherein getting within 2-3 digits of each digit in the combination is sufficient to open them.

Given that, I could easily see how "feeling" that you'd hit the right digit (give or take) might be faster than focussing on visually actually hitting the right digits.

when i was in high school, the school issued old master combination padlocks to everybody and they had a very obvious audible and tactile "thunk" when the dial hit the right number, if you pulled down on them the right amount while spinning the dial.

and yes, it actually was quicker to open them by feel than by looking at the numbers on the dial.

I saw a good number of folks that were able to seemingly jiggle the locker, maybe with a kick near the bottom, and it opened. Much quicker than entering in the 3 numbers on the dial and then lifting the handle.

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