Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

It is actually surprising just how little brute force many semi-decent padlocks can handle. A decent mallet and some force concentrator and I think good amount of them will fail.

View on HN

I just need to be able to show the insurance company a police report and obvious tampering. On video, someone using an aluminum shim looks the same as someone using a key, and any evidence would require some decent forensics. Same goes for skilled lockpicking and bump-keying. Ideally, the weakest link should be the door, the hinges, the shackle, etc.

Padlocks can be snapped open by angling two wrenches: https://youtu.be/dBSSA5ot0tA

This even works with bigger padlocks, you just need two really big wrenches and a buddy to help you.

I don't think there's much of a point. If the thief came prepared with tools and is willing to make a lot of noise, there's not a ton that can be done.

Without even exotic tools, what are the odds the door the lock is attached to will withstand a crowbar? Or the same mallet and force concentrator applied to the door/hinges/where the lock attaches?

There are diminishing returns. Just look at bike locks. Anything higher than trash tier, and the issue is finding a dedicated bike stand, since anything else will get destroyed by the grinder faster than the lock.

bike theft should be classified as a felony akin to grand theft auto

Instead of declaring all bike thieves felons and imprisoning the 1% of them we manage to catch, we should spend our money on sting operations that catch the 50 or so individuals in each city that steal 80% of the bikes, and reserve the felony treatment for repeat offenders.

Yea, be rather dumb for someone to grab their red Huffy at the park and get a felony charge because they picked up a look alike bike.

I like the bait bike operations some police departments do to catch the shops buying stolen bikes. Addicts steal things they can fence and cutting into the business side means you don’t have to catch nearly as many people, although Facebook is determined to fill some of the gaps.

I helped catch one of these repeat offenders when my bike was stolen. When it was recovered they told me they had a huge warehouse of bikes that nobody would claim, and mentioned 90%-ish of all bikes aren’t recovered and they were having space problems just storing all the unclaimed bikes. First thing we actually need to do is get people to register their bikes before they’re stolen, and then report them missing after.

Funny side note, the cops actually offered to let me setup the sting, make contact with the thief and pose as a buyer. I was sure they’d sternly recommend I do not get involved, so I was very surprised, but it was a busy night when I called and they had no officers immediately available. I did make online contact, but due to delays setting up the meet, the cops ended up handling it without me, and when I went to pick it up they were rightfully very proud of catching the guy and being able to return the bike to me.

You had better luck than me. The San Jose PD only begrudgingly gave me a police report weeks after reporting it (needed it for insurance purposes), and told me a could get a copy of it a month later. I'd have to go to the records dept in person between the hours of 10AM - 2PM (email a copy? Are you crazy?).

So I did that, showed up. No other people there. Person behind the counter told me they were too busy, and I'd have to show up some other (unspecified) day.

So yeah, I'd like to trade PDs with ya.

A bummer, sorry to hear it, that sounds frustrating. The big difference might be that I found my bike for sale in the local classified ads (a couple weeks after it was stolen), and I had the thief’s phone number, before I called the cops. They recognized the phone number. My PD might also do little to nothing if I just report something missing. I do think I got lucky, yes. And I was extra lucky that the thief listed my bike for a completely ridiculous amount of money, more than the original purchase price for a bike that was like 15 years old and not as well maintained as it should have been. His list price meant nobody else jumped on buying it right away. (But I do know now that my chances of recovery go way up if I register a bike.)

I'd bet that if you're stealing a $50-100k bike, it already is.

Hardened chains of sufficient thickness can stand up to an angle grinder pretty well, to the point where thieves will rather steal another bike because angle grinding for that long will attract attention.

Ring locks suck, a lot of them can be defeated with a pair of scissors. Similarly, U-locks suck because they're never as strong as the bike frame. You can just pick up the bike and use the frame as lever and the streetlight pole as fulcrum, twisting the bike around until the locking notches of the U-lock snap.

Occasionally, in The Netherlands professional bike thieves will drive up with a stolen van at night and load up entire bike racks. Not much you can do against that except store your bike inside.

But usually the thing that's locked up can survive even less brute force than the lock -- a storage unit near mine was broken into, and the unit owner (who was there with the police) said the thieves just pried off the storage unit lock, the sheet metal door literally tore and the entire locking mechanism came out.

This was an outdoor unit, the thieves came in over the fence (the barbed wire on the fence didn't slow them), and left the same way. If I had anything valuable, I'd keep it in an indoor unit where at least there's a locked door in the way.

So the whole Breaking Bad cash hoard on pallets thing is not a good idea?

Barbed wire is security theater. It was invented for cattle, and it does a reasonably good job of keeping cattle confined. (It doesn't work well for horses because horses are even more stupid than cattle and horses repeatedly injure themselves on it and the wounds get infected.)

Barbed wire doesn't work for humans, especially humans who have some familiarity with it.

I assume that means humans with adequate tools. If I didn't at least have some wire cutters or a carpet I don't know how I would get through it without grievous injury. (I further assume we're not talking about the serious barbed wire from WWI.)

In this case, they did it with a moving blanket -- just folded it over and tossed it over the barbed wire at the top of the fence, then scaled the fence. It was still laying over the fence then next day.

Barbed wire worked well for human soldiers in WWI. It was part of a security system that also included trenches, artillery, machine guns, and active counterattacks, but it was a crucial part.

Barbed wire only slows you down.

Same with most locking mechanisms.

Oh definitely. That just makes it regular security, not security theater. (Again, assuming it's the "good" stuff from the military that you can't bypass quite so casually.)

Barbed wire discourages casual trespassers.

I learned this as a kid: that big, chunky padlock on our garden shed could be busted open by a 10-year-old with a cricket stump and 3 seconds of pulling.

but then it's obvious the locked thing in question had been defiled. To exfiltrate without detection is the real skill

Reply on news.ycombinator.com