The Ultimate Lock Picker | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Lock Picker

wired.com

144 pointssimonb14 comments

I really very highly recommend that every geek/hacker out there learn lock picking.

There is a row of padlocks on my desk at work that I play with every time I get stuck on a coding problem. It's really helpful :). (I also freed my brother's bike from the clutches of the bike rack after he lost the key to it a week ago).

Go take a walk and look down. What you're looking for are street sweeper bristles. They'll look like sticks, but unnaturally straight. You can use of one to make a tension wrench, and the others to make your picks.

Hackers are people of secrets.

Picking a bike lock is pretty impressive - I had to resort to a battery powered masonry saw when I was in this situation. In high school I made my own set of lock picks only I used hacksaw blades and a bench grinder. One of my friends in school managed to acquire a pick-gun and it worked okay.

Great article.

But Ralph Nader with a slim-jim? Really?

Ralph Nader isn't even half this cool.

Perhaps today. But in the past, General Motors was so threatened by him that they sent hookers to seduce him. His settlement with GM funded Public Citizen. Ralph Nader was a total badass once upon a time.

I don't think that anything's as badass as pissing people off by picking locks, and not even for crime.

> Ralph Nader was a total badass once upon a time.

Unfortunately, he was also completely wrong about the Corvair. And he was either dishonest or ignorant. (He claimed to be concerned about auto safety but ignored cars that actually were death-traps by comparison, such as the VW beetle.)

I would expect military facilities and corporate headquarters have more security measures then locked doors. Still a very interesting article.

a full-fledged unauthorized intruder would use more than just lock picks. but social engineering can't get you past a locked door. which is why people buy expensive locks.

Sure it can: ask someone with a key to help.

Unless you've got false ceilings with crawl spaces above them.

Like the article says, the point isn't that a locked door stops an intruder, it's that they're counted on to slow down an intruder for a minimum amount of time.

If your security guard walks past a door once every 8 minutes (assuming it would take a minimum of 10 to pick the lock) and the door can actually be compromised in 15 seconds, you have a problem.

You'd also expect military networks to protect against SQL injection, but apparently they don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com