At the last two hacker conventions I have attended (Notacon and Defcon) there have been “lock picking tents” — areas set up to teach people about the art of lock picking. At their core, hackers are hackers because they are curious people that like to know how “things” work; “things” include both computer-based locks and physical, worldly locks. My guess is these lock picking areas draw a mix of people, some of who which think locks themselves are interesting, some of who are probably attracted by the “dangerous” aspect of picking locks, and some of who realize that knowing how to get out of a pair of handcuffs (regardless of how you ended up in them) might be a useful skill to know someday. <\/p>\n

I spent five or ten minutes at the Notacon lock picking area, most of which was spent looking of people’s shoulders, watching from afar. The guys running the booth made picking the locks seem very simple. Surely it couldn’t be that easy, could it? I plunked down my $25 for a set of picks and decided to find out once I got home.<\/p>\n

For $25, I got five picks and a torsion bar in a plastic tube along with a rolled up piece of paper. The piece of paper tells you the name of the picks and includes a bunch of words. I ditched the paper and went to YouTube where I found several videos showing the basics of lock picking. Armed with $25 worth of picks and the knowledge gleaned from a couple of YouTube videos, I set out to pick the locks on the front door of my house.<\/p>\n

For some reason I thought picking locks would take a bit more finesse. I don’t even know what one of the picks does. One is used for bumping one pin at a time. That leaves three, all of which are classified as “rakes”. Essentially these are used like tiny little lumberjack saws. You insert them into a lock and slide them in and out while jiggling things and applying turning pressure with the torsion bar. <\/p>\n

The first time took me about fifteen minutes. The second time took about thirty seconds. The dead bolt turned as easily as the main handle did. <\/p>\n

Once I was able to pick the lock consistently, I performed a real world test by locking myself out of the house. It took me about two minutes that time, due to the lack of light and the fluttering moths. After everybody else went to bed I did it again, to see if I could sneak in without anybody waking up. Nobody woke up.<\/p>\n

Sleep tight!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the last two hacker conventions I have attended (Notacon and Defcon) there have been “lock picking tents” — areas set up to teach people about the art of lock picking. At their core, hackers are hackers because they are curious people that like to know how “things” work; “things” include both computer-based locks and physical, worldly locks. My guess is these lock picking areas draw a mix of people, some of who which think locks themselves are interesting, some of who are probably attracted by the “dangerous” aspect of picking locks, and some of who realize that knowing how… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}