This reminded me of Matt Blaze's work on physical lock security back in 2003. He found a method of deriving the "master key" for a building (one key that opens all locks) from a single example: https://www.mattblaze.org/masterkey.html
When he published about this he was bombarded with messages from locksmiths complaining that they all knew about this and kept it secret for a reason! https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/kiss.html
It was a fascinating clash between computer security principles - disclose vulnerabilities - and physical locksmith culture, which was all about trade secrets.
In 'Three Days of Condor', Robert Redford's character locates the hotel room of a professional hitmat (who is after him) by going to a locksmith and asking him "which hotel and room this key belongs to?" and the locksmith asks him "are you in the trade?" and he responds, "No, but I read a lot".
It's a serious hacker film, actually. Redford is the ultimate hacker in that film: social engineering, picking locks, scrambling MaBell's circuits, and taking out the bad guys in the CIA.
I have to disgree here regarding the film's merit. There are a few quite interesting (and unique) films in that genre from the 70s that are little known to today's audiances. Most came out around Watergate ~'74 (so were topical in those days) but then have been kind of memory holed.
The Kremlin Letter, 1970 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065950/) - I recall someone saying this film really shows the ugly underbelly of intelligence services. This is an interesting film but it is very dark and somewhat disturbing. This one predates Watergate - it is a Cold War spy flick and makes Smiley's People look warm and cuddly ..
The Conversation, 1974 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/) - Gene Hackman's character resurfaces a couple decades later in Enemy of the State (1998).
"memory holed" implies a deliberate coordinated attempt by the mass media and/or powerful actors to suppress some information they don't want knocking around the ether
Perhaps the most important difference is that software — even after being purchased and used — remains relatively easy to patch, unlike a physical lock.
Tbf that's a new-ish principle. 2003 was Windows XP era and the early days of Metasploit. I.e. Microsoft and all the other companies were still figuring out this internet thing, while most computers were riddled with unpatched vulnerabilities. There was no such thing as zero day back then, because you could use many exploits years later.
> But Windows Update was definitely already a thing back then, so I don’t think this “Microsoft was still figuring out this Internet thing” holds.
They had update mechanisms sure. But it was very much upto you to run. When XP came out most people used dial-up (at least in the UK), after 2002 ADSL internet started to become ubiquitous and computers were on the internet for longer periods.
They had to start baking security into every aspect of the OS. It was one of the reasons Vista came out several years later than planned. They had to pull people from Vista development and move them onto Windows XP SP2.
One of the reasons Vista was such a reviled OS is because the UAC controls broke lots of piece of software which ran under XP, 2000 and 98.
> Software was updated all the time, and it’s much more difficult to do that with locks.
YIt wasn't unusual to run un-patched software that come from a disc for years. You had to manually download patches and run them yourself. A software update / next version could take like 30 minutes or so on 56k dialup to download. If you didn't need to download a patch, you probably didn't.
It was a thing, but it was also a thing to have it disabled or simply not working. XP was famous for its hackability. And web frameworks were also far from what you see today with auto updates. It's hard to describe to people who were not involved how crazy ITsec was back then. It felt like the wild west compared to today. Literally every other DB had a critical unpatched vulnerability. Thankfully Shodan did not exist yet, so the barrier to entry was high for people without a particular skillset (which was also much harder to learn back then). But MSF pushed security awareness pretty hard once people realized how easy it can be if you just collect a bunch of scripts for common exploits in a simple framework that everyone can learn.
Totally true. Also consider that although software can theoretically or technically be patched, sometimes patches just don't exist... the amount of unmaintained but yet useful software is just huge.
Long ago I used to maintain a door lock system. I was responsible for designing a new system to encode the room keys and it became obvious as I worked with the internals that it had a vulnerability that would allow anyone to open any lock from this vendor with the right tool.
When I quietly mentioned this, the response was that everyone knows this but we don’t talk about it.
When Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated with no signs of forced entry on his hotel room, let’s just say it wasn’t surprising. And no, I don’t think these security flaws are some conspiracy or by design - it’s simply the difficulty of updating firmware on 10 year old boards with a 20 year old design with millions of them out in the field. And they cost around $750 a piece to replace and that was back in 2010.
There's a reason for the different cultures and information asymmetry: in most countries you need a criminal background check to be a locksmith. But not to operate a keyboard.
That only applies to access to modern electronic tools and digital codebooks requiring accounts. Nothing prevented people in the past from buying the physical books used.
Right. I’m in a structured trade right now and learning about _~hF.8f@,8zKub&&@(4’v but we’re not supposed to talk about it. At least they let us use the company computers for personal net stuff.
When my first house was under construction in 2001, I created my own key from the builder’s key. When I finally moved in, my key would then disable the builder’s key. Curious how this work, I disassembled my lock and found that there were (iirc) 8 keys which would open all my neighbors houses, even after they had moved in and had disabled the builder’s key. Of course I rekeyed my house to prevent that vulnerability, but in theory it remains on all my neighbors. I also didn’t disclose the vulnerability.
I don't know about builder's keys from that era, but modern builder's keys aren't vulnerable to this problem. The builder's key uses a deeper cut on one or more pins, but the owner's key can and should be pretty unique. The only real requirement is that there be at least one cut to a high enough number to allow for a builder's key. There's a good video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCW4OnE6Mc
"Although a few people have confused my reporting of the vulnerability with causing the vulnerability itself, I can take comfort in a story that Richard Feynman famously told about his days on the Manhattan project. Some simple vulnerabilities (and user interface problems) made it easy to open most of the safes in use at Los Alamos. He eventually demonstrated the problem to the Army officials in charge. Horrified, they promised to do something about it. The response? A memo ordering the staff to keep Feynman away from their safes."
> On July 7, the company dismissed the lawsuit against McNally instead.
> Proven also made a highly unusual request: Would the judge please seal almost the entire court record—including the request to seal?
Tough at first then running away with the tail between their legs. Typical bullying behavior.
> but Proven complained about a “pattern of intimidation and harassment by individuals influenced by Defendant McNally’s content.”
They have to know it's generated by their own lawsuit and how they approached it, right? They can't be that oblivious to turn around and say "Judge, look at all the craziness this generated, we just have to seal the records!". It's like an ice-cream cone that licks itself.
> the case became a classic example of the Streisand Effect, in which the attempt to censor information can instead call attention to it.
A constant reminder to keep the people who don't know what they are doing (including the owners of the company!) from the social media.
If you want an extreme example of this; go look at the Sacramento startup Sircles. 7+ year old "startup" that has sub $100k revenue after several years but 9 million in debt. The founder has an account there under u/Sirclesapp where he goes off on toxic and insane tirades to anyone who dares say anything but utmost praise at his app. Apparently he stalks their reddit accounts and sends threatening letters to their personal home addresses from his lawyer for "defamation". That I understand he sent one to some ex employees and one to some woman who I think is a paralegal and is now suing them in civil court.
He partnered with some radio program called radradio where the host had a lot of personal issues and the show ultimately got axed. The radio host was known for having issues with alcohol, but they kept partnering with him because he kept shilling their WeFunder. They've raised over $6m in SAFEs but considering they are $9m in debt, haven't broken $100k lifetime revenue after 7 years, and seem to have over a million a year burn rate, it's doubtful that the shares from those SAFEs (if ever executed) would ever be in the money.
Oh, even without looking into it, I would assume that Sircles is probably pretty dodgy. I just meant that SacToHacker's original points against it aren't necessarily bad. But can be damning in the context of their industry, yes!
Wow, it seems like the whole purpose of the product is grievance based against yelp. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of yelp, but I get the vibe that maybe this person would be even more extractive if given the opportunity
They also made sloppy mistakes like naming the Proven owner's partner un-redacted in a document they submitted to the court (which is then available through legal search engines). If they were concerned with privacy they could easily have withheld her name.
One thing Proven might have done is to analyze the attack. Then see if the lock could be improved to prevent it. Offer exchanges for the old locks (most of which are unlikely to be requested). Instead they resort to Lawyers, refuse to solve the problem and waste everyones time and money.
I think their point was that the lock picking videos were faked. But it’s still a silly comment from the Proven employee.
I’ve also seen people use “liberal” as a literal curse word before. On one “reality show”, a member of the cast broke down while highly intoxicated and started screaming at other people saying:
“You’re worse than a beep! You’re a liberal”
It’s insane just how far the political divide has become.
Othering is easier than improving. An old philosophy professor taught me that at a community college when we started getting on the subject of philosophy in politics. This was probably 20-something years ago, now, but one of the many things that stuck with me from his teaching, and makes even more sense now than it did then.
Surely this philosophy has great value if you still believe your adversary is misguided but still well-intentionned
But if your adversary is lying knowingly to everyone saying you are a criminal and should be locked up or deported then I wonder what's there to improve
The game of cooperation only works if you're not playing with someone who is constantly trying to exploit your cooperation attempts
Surely both sides are responsible even though it only started happening once a certain political figure popped up started calling his meekest opponents murderers and criminals and having crowds chant for them to be locked up
I wouldn’t say it’s a recent phenomenon. It’s just reached absurd levels.
As for who’s responsible, there’s plenty of blame to go around. However it’s hard to deny that conduct of one party is far far less professional than the other party.
I honestly think politicians should be thrown in jail for lying. But that will never happen because they’re all too busy being corrupt; the entire lot of them.
If I remember right, she said that half his supporters were a basket of deplorables. This right after a study was published suggesting that about half of conservatives were unconsciously racist.
So she wasn't wrong, but saying that out loud was pretty stupid.
This was a once unscripted statement that she never repeated again her entire campaign. She expressed regret immediately after making it (not after losing) explaining how it was grossly generalistic but stood by that it does describe a large chunk of Trump's base.
Can you name one time Trump immediately regretted what he said about the Left and explained that it was an overgeneralization? Also again, in Clinton's case it was a single unscripted statement. By contrast Trump has a pattern of calling opponents vermin, the anti-christ, evil, warning of a bloodbath to come... Yea the left's attacks on the right just don't seem nearly as bad especially if it is just being called "deplorable" once. I could write a book that is just hateful Trump quotes. Ganna print it and give it to my son one day as inspiration for how to be an honourable leader. /s
I say all this as a Canadian that would have voted for Trump in 2016 if I could have.
> A constant reminder to keep the people who don't know what they are doing (including the owners of the company!) from the social media.
I'm just guessing based on the contents of the article, but it sounds like a typical "hard-fist founder-run company" so good luck convincing the founder to not sit on social media and argue their points.
We recently had an example of that with Automattic and the WordPress drama. Where the founder was here on HN hurting his own legal case despite people here repeatedly told him to stop posting for his own sake and asking him to talk to his lawyers.
I once worked for a company that kept its passwords locked in a safe. One day, all other copies of the password were lost, and they needed it, but the safe's key could not be found.
They expensed a sledgehammer and obtained the password through physical modification of the safe using a careful application of force. Some employees complained that meant the safe wasn't... well, safe.
The security team replied "Working as Intended" - no safe is truly safe, it's just designed to slow down an attacker. At that moment, I was enlightened.
I worked on port facilities. Everything corrodes quite quickly, and locks and keys need to be replaced fairly regularly. Once, there was a problem with key management following the replacement of locks on a building containing emergency diesel generators.
The doors were heavy, 45-minute fire-rated security doors, aka "Fucking heavy doors that can cut your fingers just from inertia or wind.".
These doors had to be opened quickly in the middle of the night. There was no locksmith on call, but there were boilermakers. Supports and a chain were welded to the doors, and a T-Rex container mover was used to carefully pull the doors off the building.
The whole operation took less than an hour. Physical security is a matter of time and resources.
However, for good safes, there's a rating on how long it takes.[1] Ratings start at TL-15, for 15 minute resistance against hand tools. They go up to TXTL-60: torch, explosive and tool resisting for 60 minutes. Safes with these ratings will have a metal plate indicating UL testing and approval.
If there are any rated safes on Amazon, I can't find them. A real TL-30 1 cubic foot safe sells for about $2000 and weighs about 500 pounds. Amazon sells something that looks similar for about $100 and weighs about 15 pounds.
There's a separate set of ratings for fire protection, from the NFPA. Fire safes are much simpler. They have more insulating materials and less steel.
Why? Everyone knows about rubber-hose cryptanalysis. The whole point of cryptography is to reduce them to this.
If they want our information, they should have to become literal tyrants, send armed men after us and violate human rights in order to get it. Not push a button on a computer to tap into their warrantless global dragnet surveilance networks and suddenly have our entire private lives revealed to them on a computer screen.
Yes, people will fold if they are kidnapped and tortured. That's not news. Forcing them to stoop to that is the entire design. Once the situation has escalated to that level, you are justified in killing them in self-defense. Torturers don't make a habit of allowing their victims to live and testify about it.
It's really pretty stupid. Your encryption is there in case your laptop gets stolen. If you have people willing and able to kidnap and torture you to get your data, you have much bigger problems than the fact that they'll probably get it.
Why? There are actually valuable takeaways from this.
One would be that people are the weak point in your security system. If all your organizational security hinges on one guy not folding, that guy is the natural target. Whether a literal 5$ wrench is used or they bribe him makes no difference.
That means you could consider shaping your org in a way that is resistent against this by e.g. decentralizing secrets. That means instead of bringing a "5$ wrench" to one person (which may even work without raising suspicion), you now need to convince multiple people at once which is much more unlikely to work without being detected.
In a similar way sometimes the best way to protect data is not to collect it of if you collect it not keep it around in its raw form.
As for secrets, you sometimes need to have them for very good reasons. If you can reach the same goals without a secret while having the same protection going without a secret is a good choice.
But let's assume if you want the cryptographic protections of confidentiality (through encryption), authenticity (through signatures) and integrity (also through signatures or hashes) chances are someone somewhere has to store a secret. If that someone isn't you it is someone else (or something else).
But if you want to protect data with encryption and you should be the only one who can decrypt it I don't really know how you would do it without any form of secret.
If you do a site search you'll find 700+ comments linking to it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the number one most frequently linked page in HN history.
Which is why McNally (the youtube in the title) demonstrating poor locks that can be opened by simple bypass attacks like shimming or whacking is especially damning for those locks. You can always destroy a lock with brute force, preferably power tools. You also spend years honing your lock-picking skills and open any keyed lock in less than a minute, but good locks make this a difficult craft. But shimming a padlock or whacking a masterlock with another masterlock takes no skill, doesn't leave evidence and allows you to relock it when you are done. It defeats every protection the lock was supposed to provide
Yep. There’s a safe engineer on YouTube who was explaining the history of dial combination locks commonly used for government filing cabinets, etc. He pointed out that you can drill them in minutes but you’d need several hours to make good the damage such that the break in wouldn’t be easily detected. The combined time is therefore the ‘strength’ of the security. (Also, why it might be a good idea to have open sensors on safes, cabinets, etc)
He is a great source of knowledge on physical security for laymen and professionals alike, and leaves an impression of an extremely amicable and well-rounded human being.
That's why one of the more advanced challenges in lock picking is to minimize the amount of evidence you leave. Eg even a normal pick can leave some scratches on and in the lock in different places than a normal key.
If I remember right, 'bumping' is an interesting technique partially because it leaves even less of a trace.
Yup, I've got a three bolt break in resistant front door in my house, but right next to it is a window that can be breached in .5 seconds by yeeting a brick though it. But both will leave traces if they've been forced so my home owner's insurance should cover any losses / damages.
That seems to be a rather weak security, especially relying on “…should cover…” to save you, which I presume you have also never been able to test. And that’s without addressing common mistakes like not realizing the policy is for cash value and requires evidence; which people do not have, is not updated, or is not compliant. That can leave people with effectively no coverage at all, with the only test being run in deployed systems… the first time you check if your arms supplier provided quality arms, is when you’re facing the enemy trying to kill your at the front lines.
I mean theoretically ever the hardest encryption just buys you time. That time may be long past the lifetime of our own sun, but it just buys you time.
The same is true for locks and safes as well.
Being one of the few people who never had their bicycle stolen in a city where this is common, the trick that always works is: Just make your lock harder to attack than other locks that safeguard comparable things.
Good lock + old looking bicycle = no theft
Unless your stuff is unique and high stakes that means regular criminals won't pick you since the surrounding stuff looks more intersting and is the easier target.
"I parked my old, crappy bike and started locking it.
Some guy went past and said, "Don't worry, love - no-one will nick that", and a passing crackhead said "I fuckin' would", and we three strangers shared a moment of humour together. "
Depends on the length of the key vs the message, but if the pad is 100 percent and has something approaching a random distribution, and the message length is suitably padded, and the results roll over in a modulo that is close to the information distribution, then all valid results become close to equally probable, so, while you may decode a message, it is very unlikely to be the message that was sent.
Still lots of ways to crack a poorly executed OTP.
> Under questioning, however, one of Proven’s employees admitted that he had been able to duplicate McNally’s technique, leading to the question from McNally’s lawyer: “When you did it yourself, did it occur to you for one moment that maybe the best thing to do, instead of file a lawsuit, was to fix [the lock]?”
Sometimes a single question tells you how the entire case is going to go.
Back in 2007, I published the first YouTube bypass of the Master Lock #175 (very common 4-digit code lock), using a paperclip.
After the video reached 1.5M views (over a couple years), the video was eventually demonetized (no official reason given). I suspect there was a similarly-frivolous DMCA / claim, but at that point in my life I didn't have any money (was worth negative) so I just accepted YouTube's ruling.
Eventually shut down the account, not wanting to help thieves bypass one of the most-common utility locks around — but definitely am in a position now where I understand that videos like mine and McNally's force manufacturers to actually improve their locks' securities/mechanisms.
It is lovely now to see that the tolerances on the #175 have been tightened enough that a paperclip no longer defeats the lock (at least non-destructively); but thin high-tensile picks still do the trick (of bypassing the lock) via the exact same mechanism.
Locks keep honest people honest, but to claim Master's products high security is inherently dishonest (e.g. in their advertising). Thievery is about ease of opportunity; if I were stealing from a jobsite with multiple lockboxes, the ones with Master locks would be attacked first (particularly wafer cylinders).
Actual thieves don't give a shit to learn lock picking, they can use a fine toothed sawzall or oxy-acetylene torch and defeat any lock just as fast without having to youtube the particular brand.
I used to rent a storage unit. I lost the key to it, and went to the manager. He came back to the unit with a small battery powered grinder. Cut the padlock's loop through in a few seconds.
Most locks are only good if the attacker doesn't have any tools.
I bought a giant pair of bolt cutters a while back for a use case other than bolt cutting (shark fishing; cut the big hook instead of putting your hand near the mouth).
I never caught any big sharks like I thought, but now my wife runs a restaurant and occasionally employees just don't show up to work and leave things in their lockers. Once in a while it's clear it's to be annoying (locking supplies in their locker).
Never met a padlock or combination lock I couldn't shear through easily. Totally has paid for itself.
Now, for a similar price, you can buy a hydraulic cutter powered by a hand pump. They also come with replaceable jaws so you dont wreck your cutters when attacking a hard lock.
Generally speaking, the hasps on employee locks aren't big enough to hold anything truly sturdy... I doubt even the most resistant lock you could put on a typical locker hasp would hold up to the giant 3 foot bolt cutters.
There's quite a few, many hardened locks will bend or mar bolt cutters... we're not taking bolt cutters off of the rigs because they're relatively small but a K12 and a pair of pliers is way more reliable.
To be fair to Sentry Safe, this product is designed to be resistant to fire. A better name for this product would be ‘fire resistant box’ instead of ‘fire safe’ but that’s what they call it for marketing reasons.
A hardened metal safe designed to be resistant to cutting can still be cut through, just not in seconds with a screamer saw (trade name for a metal cutting circular saw)
If you want truly secure, encase your metal box in concrete like John Wick. Access is difficult but security is high :)
FYI, most safes already have a decently thick concrete layer — that’s most of why safes are heavy! (Or, I guess you could say, adding a concrete layer is cheaper than making the steel thicker.)
But they also have a rubber or foam (often styrofoam in cheaper safes) layer, to “smooth out” the force from a sledgehammer, jackhammer, or just dropping the thing out the window.
And a layer of compressible wet(!) sand, to spread out the point stress from a hammer and chisel, impact gun, gunshot, or small explosive configured for concussive force. (The goal here is essentially to replicate the behavior of a bulletproof vest.)
Plus, they often contain a layer to bind and foul and dull (or even break) the teeth of drill bits and reciprocating/chain/band saws. This can be any number of things — low-melting-point plastics, recycled broken glass, etc — but look up “proteus” for a fun read.
If the safe’s designer is clever, just a few materials can serve several of these functions at once. But more is always better. Which is why good safes (and vaults) are so dang thick. It’s not to solve one problem really well; it’s to mitigate N problems acceptably well, for a frighteningly large value of N.
Even not dripping directly on to the goods, there's not a lot of stuff that you would be interested in getting out of a safe, but you will still be interested in even after being exposed to thermite. The list is basically "precious metals" and not much more, though that is admittedly a valid entry on the list.
In an analog to the somewhat frequent observation on HN that if you don't care whether the code is correct I can make it run arbitrarily quickly, if you don't care if the contents of the safe survive there's a lot of high-energy ways to blast it to smithereens. This is generally not considered a problem to be solved with a safe, though. If you want to prevent "being blasted to smithereens" that you'll need a completely different approach.
so... if i were a suitably evil billionaire, would i be able to shop for a safe protected by a layer of compressed mustard gas, that is released upon attempted breaching?
This would be a Booby Trap and is illegal, so it's not worth it for that chance of going to prison no matter the value in the safe, if you are a billionaire. It would be hard to find someone willing to help you.
That is a subset of thieves. There are still plenty of situations where it is beneficial to have a lock that can't be opened in 5 seconds with a paperclip, like a school or gym locker room for example. Nobody is bringing a sawzall into the gym while it's open.
Similarly, I know the lock on my front door is not going to stop anyone who really wants to get inside, but it does stop drunk people or bored kids from wandering in because it's easy.
> Nobody is bringing a sawzall into the gym while it's open.
They are bringing in bolt cutters to locker rooms. The locker metal loop that the lock threads through is easier to cut than the lock. I've first hand seen lockers destroyed to remove the lock. Not while the break in is happening but it's easy piece the crime scene back together to understand their tools.
Manual bolt cutters are almost silent except for the "thunk" when it breaks the metal, and there are even battery operated bolt cutters that are quick and compact.
I'm convinced there is basically no foolproof way to secure a bicycle in public.
I've seen everything from braided steel being cut clean to combination bike locks getting picked (by the attacker actually figuring out the correct combination, not just brute-forcing it apart or wangjangling a paperclip).
They just need to steal 1 good bicycle to more than pay off the cost of their equipment. One stolen bicycle could feed a family for a week. In some place like the Bay Area where $1000 bicycles abound, the economics are just too appealing.
Sure there is, but you need to understand the variables involved. How expensive is the bike, how safe is he area, how long are you leaving it there for?
At its worst, people get their fancy bikes robbed as they're riding them in big cities like London; at its best, nobody in small villages locks their bikes because they all know each other.
In terms of locks, general advice is to get an angle-grinder resistant U-lock and lock it through the rear frame triangle+wheel+some solid object.
Since a U-lock like that is impossible to defeat with anything that's not a power tool, and you'd need to spend several minutes grinding through it [0] [1], most thieves will not bother. If they cut through whatever the bike is locked to, they still have a bike that's locked to itself.
For extra security you may want to do the same with the front wheel using something like a chain lock. Locking the saddle is also a good idea. Locks with alarms that notify you could be a decent idea too. And/or just get bike insurance.
From what I've heard, the way to go about it is to not have a very nice bike, make it identifiable and loud (eg ripped up neon tape and graffiti), and then use both a chain lock as well as a U lock that're both thick enough. Also perhaps throw on extra locks to make other bikes look attractive.
Of course none of these work if the thief is part of a ring that is targeting your bike because it's high value.
> use both a chain lock as well as a U lock that're both thick enough
No, thickness is an irrelevant property to an angle grinder. You're adding something like a second of grinding per kg of material. Makes no sense. The trick is to use grinder-resistant locks. Those extend grinding time to minutes.
I don't doubt that a bad looking bike isn't the biggest deterent. But it's the combination of factors that's practically helpful.
A tatty bike with 2 (or even 3!) high quality locks is a much lower target than a half decent looking bike with just a single cheap lock.
The more opportunistic the thief, the better your chances of not getting your bike stolen if you have 2 more locks than everyone around you. Heck, I'd argue, due to their unusual nature of being (not) used as a lock, a dozen zip ties might be more effective than a 3rd of 4th lock, simply because no thief is expecting to encounter it. They want a quick getaway, spending 20 seconds per tie * 10 ties is likely much longer than what it's worth for them, especially if your bike isn't that nice.
There is a new generation of bike locks which have the shackle wrapped in a composite coating that mostly destroys angle grinder cutting discs and similar cutting tools. This is likely the best current outdoor bike locking approach as it requires thieves to have either 1) lots of spare discs or 2) a torch or 3) picking skills, and very few thieves have any of those.
I have a Brompton and no bike lock for this reason. When I’m on my Brompton it goes where I go.
Actually I do have a “cafe lock”. Its purpose is just to slow someone down enough for me to catch them on foot. I’ve once successfully used the strap on my helmet for the same purpose in Barcelona too.
In Japan they have bike theft sorted with mandatory registration with the local police force. A sticker on the bike and a corresponding bit of paper in the wallet provides proof of ownership, which may be requested by police at any time.
This costs money to administer but it means that nobody in Japan needs to overly worry about their bicycle being stolen. Huge locks are not needed, nor is GPS tracking or third party registration schemes.
The idea of getting a 'hack bike' that looks undesirable is often touted as a solution to cycle theft in the West. However, thieves just want money, so the 'hack bike' that can be easily sold trumps the hard-to-sell expensive bike if money is needed now, for tonight's high. More money can be tomorrow's problem.
Self driving cars won’t fix the real problem - cars take up too much space for the number of people they carry in any reasonably dense city. I’d be quite confident bike lanes should be improving traffic by taking cars off the road more than they are causing “headaches” for traffic.
There are well studied effects that show good bike infrastructure gets more people (especially the young, old, women etc.) cycling who would be too fearful to cycle in traffic, because separate cycle lanes are both in reality far safer but also feel far more safe.
And bike lanes are actually really good for mobility scooters and other kinds of ways for elderly and disabled to get around!
Most people would be absolutely astounded how bold you can get with a safety vest and/or a clipboard, and how passive most people are to an obvious suspicious situation.
I have used a grinder to take off a bike lock (I owned the bike) in broad daylight in Downtown Denver on a main street. A local business even allowed me to use their power outlets. Not one person questioned me or asked me to see proof of ownership. I was fully prepared to have to deal with cops or at least a good samaritan, but nope, plenty of people watched me do the exact thing a bike thief would do and didn't ask any questions.
> Most people would be absolutely astounded how bold you can get with a safety vest and/or a clipboard, and how passive most people are to an obvious suspicious situation.
I don't think they'd be surprised at all.
What the hell am I supposed to do if I see someone stealing a bike or whatever? Stop them? Hell no, if they have tools then it's a good bet they have weapons. Call the cops? They don't care; recently they don't even pretend to care.
Pretty much all you can do is say, "knock it off" and maybe they stop (they won't).
Don't do this and don't let anyone else do this. Intervening in a crime in progress is likely to lead to immediate execution. Even police squads get shot at, and they are armed to the teeth and well trained.
If you're not ready, able and willing to whip out a pistol and instantly put two bullets right between the eyes of each one of those criminals, you're probably better off pulling out your phone and covertly dialing 911... After you have gotten as far away from those people as possible.
> the solution is citizens becoming at least as brutal themselves
Becoming a brutal, violent person capable of ending another human being's life is a long process. It's not a switch that people just flip. Especially civilized people from developed countries where it is likely they will go their entire lives without experiencing violence.
Even if they do manage it, they'll have to pay the price. There are professional soldiers out there who are traumatized by the lives they have taken. Normal citizens will have it that much worse... And that's if they don't screw it up and end up going to prison for excessive use of force which can easily turn self-defense into cold-blooded murder.
> In any shithole society
I'm brazilian. I live in exactly that kind of shithole society. You should see the hilariously violent liveleak videos this country produces. Way too many of them are the result of people trying to fight their way out of a robbery, or intervening in a crime in progress. I remember this particularly cartoonish video where a child is running away from something, pistol in hand, and some guy randomly decides to trip him up. He gets up, shoots the guy dead and resumes his escape as though absolutely nothing had just happened.
This is a country where the population is prone to brutally lynching criminals, by the way. Ironically, the drug traffickers are the most effective at it. They routinely dispense brutal violence against the lesser criminals who hurt their drug trade by scaring off potential customers. It's gotten to the point they have formed parallel governments, complete with laws, tribunals and taxes.
I get it. The sheer audacity of criminals is offensive and the impunity is truly soul crushing. This sense of impunity permeates the life of every brazilian. It feels like there's no justice. I'm just saying that if you aim to fight this impunity, you need a far more sophisticated approach than telling random bystanders to be "fit" and "stubborn". That sort of thing will accomplish nothing but the eventual deaths of well meaning people.
Yes I assumed you were Brazilian, which is where most of the "off duty cop" shooting videos come from - sounds like a Mad Max state. But in other countries, people don't get executed for standing up to crooks.
Of course, if you ever get a Bukele in power all the leftists will be out in force crying about the poor criminal's human rights etc - always a good reminder that these situations are intentionally inflicted from above.
> if you ever get a Bukele in power all the leftists will be out in force crying about the poor criminal's human rights etc
Current president of Brazil literally makes excuses for them. "I'm so tired of watching people die just because they robbed a phone", he says. "It was just to buy some beer", as though crime was an actual legitimate profession. That is the absolute state of this country. Mad Max would be an improvement over this shithole. In the Mad Max universe it's literally kill or be killed but you don't have leftists worshipping the criminals and shitting all over the "fascist" police defending them.
Police is powerless to stop it. If they try, they are tried and imprisoned by the same government that hired them to do it. It is already common knowledge that military police is one of the worst career choices you can make. The country is losing police officers at a rate of thousands per year. Not enough people are signing up for this shit. Meanwhile, drug gangs dominate over a quarter of our territory. The current speculation is that they finance judges and politicians. In other words, it is not only possible but probable that this is a literal narcostate.
At some point, it becomes war. The criminals are sufficiently organized that they should be treated as enemy combatants and gunned down on sight. Trump ordering US ships to nuke drug boats out of existence is the correct course of action. The only problem is the "civilized" people who cry about it instead of thanking him for his service and thanking god they have people willing to commit extreme violence against others in order to protect them from the evils of this world. That is a luxury I would love to have myself. Instead I live in a extremely leftist country where drug traffickers spray paint threats on people's homes, giving them 24 hours to leave on pain of death.
Sadly the power of drug gangs in Latin America and Brazil can be traced as much to the war on drugs itself as the lack of war on drugs.
I do believe your assertion is correct that literal war would probably be better than the status quo, but regulating powerful drugs as basically "sell to adults and it needs to meet some sort of purity standard" would bring the drug trafficking portion of gangs into looking more like Petrobas than Comando Vermelho.
As a doctor I can't support full legalization of drugs. Nobody who's seen up close what opioid addiction does to a person ever could. It's not even a question of allowing people to ruin their own lives. The drugs themselves absolutely cause crime all on their own. Many violent robberies are perpetrated by people whose reward systems are so warped by drugs they'd sell their own mother for their next dose. I had one such person as one of my neighbors for decades.
I'll admit I'm unable to fully calculate the total devastation between the three of
(1) Absolute war against drug traffickers
(2) Full legalization
(3) status quo
I'd rank (3) as the absolute worst. I don't see (1) nor (2) as avoiding crime and infliction upon innocents, though, rather choosing which lesser poison to pick.
I claim (1) is the only possible response. We're already at war, and innocents are already dying.
I claim that the drug gangs have launched a stealthy secession. They have gotten sufficiently organized that they have laws, tribunals, taxes and territory. Is gang territory really brazilian territory? I don't think so. In such areas police is executed on sight, like enemy combatants. The brazilian government is not really there guaranteeing any of your so called rights. So are you really a brazilian citizen if you live in gang territory? Don't think so. These drug gangs have formed a government so barbarous they kill you if you don't pay your taxes.
When São Paulo tried to secede last century, war was declared and they were massacred. So why are these gangs tolerated? It's just a completely stupid status quo. This government needs to recognize the gravity of the situation and react accordingly. Instead the government and the gangs are merging into one.
I'm intrigued by your take, and it is quite convincing.
What are the effects you predict would happen if drugs were legalized, therefore eliminating most of the profits of drug traffickers, and simultaneously declaring war on the groups controlling seceded territory?
What's your calculus on the over under of fighting a war against drug-funded vs non-funded drug traffickers? I'm willing to take at face that they are de facto seceded and have already started a war, but I don't see how it can exclude (2) since even if you defeated them there would still be yet the same underlying incentives and the seceding drug traffickers could emerge again.
Legalization depends on the drug. We could certainly afford to be more lax than we are now. We could legalize and control the use of many drugs. Certainly not all. Drugs like fentanyl cannot be allowed to circulate freely. Even if we completely ignore the safety of the individual, the safety of society as a whole is threatened by such drugs.
Legalization will wipe out the drug gang operations due to simple economics. I don't think criminals can compete with actual pharmaceutical laboratories operating in the clear. Drugs would be cheaper and higher quality. In fact I seriously doubt drug gangs would support legalization of drugs. It would destroy their ridiculously high profitability. Their prices would be squeezed. They'd have to compete on quality and price. They wouldn't be able to eliminate the competition, impose cartels and control prices. Drug companies get rich due to patents which are government-granted monopolies, once they expire it's a literal race to the bottom, you actually need regulation in order to protect consumers. Some drugs actually disappear from the market because they are too cheap to be profitable.
Drug gangs are the career path of the favela denizens. Drug operations have lots of "employees" and they pay ridiculously well. Wiping them out via economic or military means will also wipe out all of those "jobs". It will do nothing to solve the underlying problem of a poor and disenfranchised people forgotten by society. They're likely to turn to other forms of crime if society doesn't integrate them, and it probably won't.
The hope is that whatever criminal activity they turn to will not be as profitable as the drug trade. Robbery isn't that big a problem in the grand scheme of things, drug gangs moving billions and billions of dollars absolutely is. All wars come down to money. Make enough money and you can have better equipment than police, militaries. You can raise armies, just like the middle ages. You can hire actual professional soldiers to train your men. Crime that's too profitable is literally a matter of war. Common criminals are a thorn on our side but in the grand scheme of things they are mere nuisances. Well-funded criminals are an existential threat for civilized society.
War on these groups would require enormous political capital. Television networks would probably have to spend years manufacturing consent for it. The fact is left has infiltrated the entire country and they practically worship these "victims of society". Literally days ago we were forced to listen to our president say that drug traffickers are victims of their consumers. I have no idea what it takes to reverse this sort of brainwashing but whatever it is we'll need lots of it.
If by some miracle the military is deployed against the drug gangs, the gangs will be routed. It's happened before and will happen again. Drug gangs do not have the training, the discipline, the sheer organization required to stand up to actual armed forces. Even our pathetic military has managed to prevail against them. It's the politicians who get in the way. There's no point in "pacifying" an area and then retreating from it, thereby allowing the enemy to occupy it again.
Believe me, there are a large number of countries where, if someone was shot for standing up to a crime, it would be national news for months. Not in the Americas, obviously, but they exist.
The drug war is the stupidest thing humans have ever done. It literally fuels the criminals, and even entire criminal states like north Korea. State illegalisaion (mostly the US) of drugs is to put guns right into the hands of gangs and create competing states. Drugs should both be 100% legal - so they cost the same as sugar, gutting the money that empowers the gangs - and simultaneously drug users should be pushed to the edges of society with wide open discrimination.
Sure, don't get yourself hurt, but also don't live in irrational fear. Intervening in a crime in progress has never led to my execution, so it seems that likely is the wrong assessment of chance.
I have stopped bike thieves, car break-ins, and harassment in multiple cities in North America. I have stopped a racist situation escalating into an attack on a subway in Rotterdam, and stopped a pickpocket in Barcelona. I have shooed away people clearly up to no good in Central and South America. Certainly there was the possibility of violence, but the worst of it in reality was criminals cussing at me as they retreated.
If you don't feel comfortable with direct confrontation, something as simple as yelling "I already called the cops" has worked, or you know, actually calling the cops is an option.
I'm well aware that there are parts of the world where intervening will get you into trouble (and have been in situations where I have held back), but I also believe pretty strongly that doing the right thing is a virtuous feedback loop, and the risks do not outweigh the benefits.
I don't want to live in a world where good people won't do the right thing out of fear. So I choose not to live in that world by being a good person that does the right thing.
> I'm well aware that there are parts of the world where intervening will get you into trouble (and have been in situations where I have held back)
You clearly have more street smarts than the average person. The average person doesn't know when to hold back. They will say and do dumb things, and they will be killed.
There are examples right there in your comment.
> the worst of it in reality was criminals cussing at me as they retreated
You allowed them to leave even though they were insulting you, thereby avoiding violence.
Plenty of people out there who would do the opposite of what you did: they'd go out of their way to insult and humiliate the criminals as they were leaving. "Teach them a lesson", as they say. This can easily escalate the situation into lethal force.
If you insult a man in front of his peers, tell him he's a pussy right in front of his friends, you almost leave him no choice but to come back and escalate just to prove you wrong. It seems obvious but there's plenty of people out there who have died over disrespect.
> something as simple as yelling "I already called the cops"
You were smart enough to back up your threat before confronting the criminals.
Plenty of people out there who threaten the criminal with the 911 call itself. "Stop or I'll call the cops". Not only is it a direct challenge to the criminal, it also provides them with the solution to their problem: kill the guy and he won't call the cops.
It all seems obvious when we're academically discussing this stuff here but in a rapidly escalating, potentially violent situation where emotions and adrenaline are running high, people will do and say all kinds of stupid shit. And they are going to die for it.
Anarcho-tyranny. In places like Brazil or California, thief is armed at will with ease, person defending themselves instead have to pass licensing and background check which is difficult for poor people or those convicted of BS crimes like possessing a pot plant 20 years ago when they lived in Texas.
Thief only faces lukewarm prospects at prosecution, and moves around from address to address, and stranger-on-stranger homicide conviction rate in places like Chicago well below 50%. Honest citizen has mortgage, child in school ,and a day job, very easy for police to fuck with them if they dare fight back, which makes criminals even more violent and bold as they rely on many of them overwhelming the tiny minority that will fight back.
All of civilization exists due to the threat of violence. There's no need to negotiate peacefully when you can just take what you want. It's the violence that makes it happen. Negotiate, because if you don't there's no telling who's gonna be left standing.
If people are breaking locks and stealing property in plain sight right in front of other people, it's because they think society has become so soft they won't do anything about it.
And frankly, the average person won't. They'll probably just stand there shocked at the event unfolding before them. Or they'll try to "stand up" to the criminal, only to end up insulting his masculinity or something, thereby getting themselves killed for the insult. Yes, criminals kill people who disrespect them.
If you're gonna do this, you have to be prepared to use lethal force against another human being. The vast majority of people are not. They're better off calling the cops, whose entire purpose is to be that person.
> If you're gonna do this, you have to be prepared to use lethal force against another human being.
Many people, me included, would gladly do that, if they were allowed to. The problem is that when dust settle, the criminal will remain a criminal with one more record in his file, but the whole legal system will steamroll me if I don't precisely calculate force in split second and apply 3N more than absolute necessary minimum.
Here in Canada there were cases when people defended themselves and ended up in legal kafkaesque hell, imposed by country. Even after acquitted of all charges, they would spend lifetime savings, lose jobs and actually have to rebuilt their lives from almost zero.
We voted for all of this and I don't understand how it happened. Aliens dispersed something so we all became that stupid?
> Many people, me included, would gladly do that, if they were allowed to.
Doubt. Many people certainly think they would. In a real situation, they'd hesitate.
I don't even mean that in a disrespectful way. Taking lives traumatizes professional soldiers. It has enormous psychological costs. If you do it, you will live with it until the end of your days.
I'm not speaking out against guns and self-defense either. Better to be traumatized than dead. Weapons are a requirement for basic human dignity. Just pointing out the fact that it's not that simple.
> Here in Canada there were cases when people defended themselves and ended up in legal kafkaesque hell, imposed by country.
My country is the same. The absurdities produced by the "justice" system are maddening.
I remember one case where a person had his house burglarized dozens of times. The "justice" system didn't do shit about it. He got so fed up he booby trapped his own home and killed the criminal when he tried to victimize him again. Suddenly police, prosecutors and judges found the will to act and vigorously condemned him for cold blooded murder. It's the kind of thing that makes me wish a meteor would strike this country and reset it back to the stone age.
As for why it happens... I've thought about it for way too long and I don't have a definitive answer for you. I think it's because people want to prevent the abyss from gazing into them as they combat the darkness. My conclusion is that we should have some very dark people of our own, pointed right at the abyss, perpetually staring it down into submission.
I fought in the Syrian Civil War (with the YPG) and the effects on the ISIS enemy has not bothered me a single day of my life. This is over a decade ago and I've never lost a single second of sleep over it. In fact I often dream about going back and fucking them over even more, as it was one of the happiest moments of my life, even though like 10%+ of the people I was with ended up dead.
The tracer rounds flying at the enemy at night, absolutely exquisite, brings a joy like the 4th of July.
Your characterization of Brazil leads me to believe that "people like me" would be better off just living in the favela and joining a gang, as at least then you could have some chance to defend yourself and the government would not be able to enforce their anarcho-tyranny. Which sucks, but leaves me wondering if they're even acting irrationally.
I suspect, somewhere in brazil, there is a group of people that have adopted the practices of the drug traffickers of soft secession, but actually do it for a righteous cause, and are getting away with it, as long as they are not too noisy about it. They have learned the tactics work, and rather than trying a seemingly futile effort to steer the government in their favor they ultimately likely came to the same conclusions as the drug traffickers as to how to gain control of their community and perhaps even their own lives.
Sad part is... You probably would be better off joining a gang. We'd all probably be better off. They just keep winning. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to just give up and become a criminal myself instead of insisting on this upstanding-citizen-in-corrupt-shithole life. My father didn't raise me to be a criminal and sometimes I curse that fact.
Rio de Janeiro is in a state akin to civil war literally right now. Apparently the drug gangs have discovered drones. They're using drones to drop grenades on top of each other and on top of police. Nearly a hundred dead as of right now.
We broke into our own lockers the whole time with metal rulers back when I was in school because of forgotten keys or just because it was quicker opening them that way than actually unlocking and relocking them. (And of course the more students did this, the more worn the metal became and made it even easier the next time)
Yeah as long as we don't have unrealistic expectations from our $30 deadbolts and our $5 combo locks it's fine. But people sometimes buy the cheap thing and expect it to perform as well as a really expensive thing.
That's usually with skills that few have the time to acquire. But I also saw on LPL where he tested a cheap Chinese lock, where the "hardened steel" had a visible groove after just a few strokes of a file, and you could use pliers to rip off the plastic cover around the keyhole, after which all the little parts of the lock mechanism came tumbling out...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Actual thieves are most interested in low effort/fast methods of bypassing locks. Master single pin picking to LPL's level and the thief might as well just turn locksmithing into a career instead of stealing. Low effort attacks like shimming, raking, bumping though might be worth a thief's time to learn.
Which is relevant when you're defending against Ocean's 11 or the Mossad, but for the other 99.999% of us, the lock is there to keep a bored teenager or a meth junkie out.
Or, more realistically, to convince an insurer that we've made a token effort to keep them out.
The lock is there to keep the honest people out AND leave a trace that someone came in forcibly when they want to do so.
Which is why stuff like bump keying those stupid flat-keyed American locks is so scary because it requires almost zero skill and leaves very little traces.
Unless an expert takes apart the lock investigating for traces, there's no way to tell it was opened without a key.
These jobsite storage boxes [0] are typically too heavy to steal (and can also be anchor-bolted), and the locks are highly-recessed within an enclosure... practically the only exposure is the keyway... and then there's thousands of dollars of tools inside.
Worth it for smarter crooks. I'm a former IBEW electrician, and I've seen both stranger and more-miraculous occurrences — but I've seen it all.
I trained a few years as an IBEW electrician in large government data centers, but have done decades of residential side work (mostly 500k-2M suburbia):
The stuff you actually witnessed on both types of jobsites often isn't believable. But I've seen [your comment] many times, in the middle of nowhere, with trailcams rolling and tweekers not giving AF, smiling as they roll away with your belongings...
----
We caught a burglar once in our wire warehouse... huffing our marking paint, but on his way to scoring a five-figure copper haul. As foreman, I had to pull a few of my electricians off of the young man (~20~white~highAF) — I sent my guys to their jobsites, keeping myself and two larger others to detain the guy until the police arrived: arrested. Drawn out court proceedings 5x. Dismissed =( "Adjudicated"
That little twerp ended up having already become a career criminal, at just two decades on this earth. He needed good guys like mine to beat his ass a few times, like his family never did the favor of helping him learn.
Next time my guys will not be calling the police, with blessings.
Some are still resisting this kind of attacks. The hiplok D1000 has a thick rubber like abrasive coating that makes it super hard to cut through the metal with power tools
It depends on where you live. I guess it's not uncommon to hear about someone entering a building "as the delivery guy" just to try to pick a lock and see which one opens.
If you make too much noise people will get suspicious and might call the police.
Yes. I once saw a guy open a bike U-lock using a car scissor jack and he was done in about 20 seconds and the bike was gone. Nowadays there are very good battery powered grinders that can take a cutoff wheel and no padlock is going to resist that.
Get a used pickup, get some vinyl letters at home Depot, put something like "a+ home services" on the side, and you can probably break into a few dozen suburban homes without anyone reporting you
A portable plasma cutter? What is this, Star Trek? Are there some extremely-high-power-density battery-operated plasma cutters available on Aliexpress that I haven't yet run across? Or maybe I should locate my safe far away from my stove/dryer receptacles?
But people have been welding with batteries for ages. The most primitive welder is a car battery and a couple of wire leads. Tons of videos of it on YouTube.
Yeah, fair enough. Two car batteries in series is even better.
Not easy on the batteries, but it will get the jeep out of the bush.
You can also make your own stick electrodes from coathanger wire tightly wrapped in paper.
I couldn't tell you how many pairs of sunglasses you should parallel to protect yourself...
This rig, on the other hand, is something you could pack into just about any plant and fix something with without raising any eyebrows. If you have $5,000 to spend, that is. Super handy for small jobs in hard to access places.
Batteries in series, typical stick welding voltage is ~27v. You might be able to light up on one battery, but you will quickly learn why it's called "stick" welding.
I wouldn't arc weld with any number of pairs of sunglasses, that was firmly tongue-in-cheek; but yes you are right, stacked glasses would be series.
Also, if you try this, before pulling the battery from the non-broken jeep, drive it to the top of a hill so you can bump start it later when the battery is too dead to turn the engine over.
I doubt you could charge them faster than the welder can run them down, so you might want three sets and two gang chargers if you want production anything like a plug-in machine.
You can pick up a wholly self-contained plasma cutter in Lidl or Hofer in their "cool tools week" for about £100 these days.
It wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to hook that up to a biggish inverter and 24V worth of deep cycle batteries on a small trolley, maybe a wheelie suitcase.
A while back I was making a point about the border wall farce--and found everything I would need to do "portable" plasma cutting on said wall on Home Depot's website. Not pick it up type portable, but put it in a wagon type portable. (Generator, not batteries.)
I don't know how anybody can look at those rusty metal pylons and not think their natural habitat is at home on top of a 40 year old white Toyota pickup with a suspension that long ago achieved sainthood. Like if I were looking to attract illegal immigrants, those pylons would be exactly what I would use. But then again isn't this just the standard fascist pattern? Propose a comically self-defeating solution to some problem, and build a tribal identity around aggressively denying the obvious. It's like the social justice preaching to the choir writ large.
Entirely depends on what manner of thief we are talking about here, what they're going after, how important it is to them, and how much they care about the owner knowing the lock was tampered with.
This is why I don't like such black-and-white opinions... I think the answer is rarely so simple.
I think it's largely a class or educational divide. I come from a very hick, redneck, working class area. People use black-and-white statements and course language with the understanding that corner cases will exist anyway. My use of this type of language common in more middle America is something I find the more silicon valley or tech centered HN constantly finds issue with.
It's common in more upper-crust / educated circles to shit on people that use more course, black and white language. I believe it has more to do with cultural divide than misunderstanding that rare/corner cases exist.
In another recent exchange on HN, I was damned for using the word 'never.' They didn't even explain why, just said they wouldn't believe people that used it. I was using it in the redneck sense "you'll never get that girl" as in it's extremely unlikely to the point it's hardly worth even considering, rather than the nerded out version that it means the chance is literally precisely 0.
FWIW I come from a non working class background ( but am not American ). My friends and I routinely debate in such a manner, and don’t see any problem with this. If confronted with a stranger we might be a bit more cautious ( basically we’ll state the rules of the conversation) but that’s about it. If needed, we’ll sometimes be a bit more accurate.
I understand your statements as you mean them - I default to giving you the benefit of the doubt, and automatically assume that black and white statements are shortcuts. Only, and only if you seem to not understand nuance then I will adjust my stance, but I usually assume you do!
I think the problem can be described as assuming good faith in the argument - that is, that you're talking with someone who you are presuming is attempting to communicate, not just "win" the conversation.
The difference becomes clear very quickly - if there's a genuine misunderstanding, someone will clarify and move on; if someone is trying to rules lawyer the conversation, it won't.
People from "hick, redneck, working class" areas don't say "hick, redneck, working class".
They might say "hick" if they're from rural northern New England, the upper midwest, rural Canada, or Cascadia, usually with self-deprecating facetiousness. Most of these people are smart enough to do whatever they want in life, but just choose to live by their standard of normalcy and just like their friendly small towns best.
If they are from the lower midwest or south, they will sure as hell just say "redneck", and most take it as a compliment even though many of them deep down are just compensating because they don't have any other options.
But nobody calls themselves "working class". Not in the rust belt, not in the rural midwest, and not in the south. That's more of a politician's word, and a condescending slur from the white collar crowd that usually ends in a broken jaw.
> Low-intelligence people are masters of black-and-white thinking. It's also part of a psychological defense mechanism called "splitting."
> They only seem to think in terms of opposites, ignoring the grey areas in between. Reality is too complex to be interpreted only in opposites.
> As a result, they tend to simplify everything. While simplification is useful sometimes, not everything can, or should be, simplified. Knowing what does and doesn’t require simplification signals high intelligence.
The problem is when you speak in absolutes while simultaneously "not meaning it" that way, is that this is not conveyed to the people you are speaking to, so we can only assume that you did mean it, and now we think you're being unreasonably generalizing.
And I think it's pretty hard to have a useful conversation if we cannot use agreed upon terms to convey what we mean. If you know that not everyone will understand your intention by saying it that way, then why do it?
I'm saying that some people don't understand that some cultural uses of black-and-white English indicate practical precision rather than absolute theoretical precision.
Issues with master locks are hardly new- back in the 1980s, I downloaded a file from a BBS explaining how to open a combo lock (basically by pulling on the shackle while turning, and a few other tricks.
Oh my god, I remember doing this technique on my lock, I remember doing this in the early BBS days, I remember learning this from a short text file. I'm 80% sure it was this file!
The most absurd thing is the original video response from the company was good, and with a very compelling argument: their customers never saw shimming in the field. Their user base don't need shimming resistance: security needs to be adequate, not perfect. And they follow-up by presenting options about people requiring the lock to be shim-proof.
Granted, in this day and age, it's a disgrace to still make locks that can be shimmed. Especially when the shim-proof alternatives they show just have an additional notch to catch the shim.
> their customers never saw shimming in the field.
This is arguably good PR, but a terrible response. Shimming is so quick and hard to detect that even if you had 24-7 video of the lock, you probably wouldn't notice that the lock had been shimmed. You would just assume that someone lost a key.
It's a trailer hitch lock. If someone steals your trailer then you definitely do notice. And if they just shim the lock and put it back then it doesn't really matter.
This guy shims a $100+ lock in 10 seconds with a liquid death can, all without speaking in the video, just replays and then destroyed their claims and GTFO. Absolutely masterful.
If you don't know him already, I highly recommend videos by LockPickingLawyer — he routinely destroys bogus claims of various companies within seconds. It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
LPL owns Covert Instruments, who employs McNally, the YouTuber who got sued in this case. Probably not a coincidence that Covert Instruments wasn't named in the lawsuit.
There aren't that many ways to cut a shim from a can that work and don't take excessive effort. It's a rounded hook shape, with a handle piece trimmed so you don't cut yourself.
That explains so much. Done to well for a goof channel, eclectic assortment of skills ("tactical garden trowel" vs fully equipped metal shop vs perfect video production), all fat trimmed off the videos.
I kinda want tvtropes to put a name on his slapstick humor. It's like looking over the shoulder of that weird uncle that seems to live in an entirely different world.
My understanding is that LPL is not still practicing (he says he's retired, to focus on security work), but I'd guess he knows someone, if McNally didn't already have his own lawyer.
I mean, it's not exactly a secret. If you really want to know you can look it up online. He even has a whole talk he gives about why he generally doesn't reveal his identity. People send him packages with trackers hidden in them, hire private investigators to follow him with bogus stories, etc.
Crime had already been falling consistently for several hundred years throughout Europe when the first gun-licensing and gun-control laws were being passed in the Wiemar Republic. You don’t need control over weapons to reduce crime, you just reduce crime.
Incidentally, a few years later a certain political party got their candidate elected Chancellor. He more or less immediately ordered the police to use the gun-licensing records to identify Jews who owned guns and had them arrested. It’s actually pretty hilarious, in a very dark way, to read some of the arrest reports. When Jews were ordered to surrender their weapons to the police, many of them brought the weapons to a police station as instructed. They politely stood in line while the officer at the desk wrote out arrest warrants for them one after the other. The crime? Carrying an unlicensed weapon. The location? The police station in such-and-such precinct. The witness? The officer at the desk. The prisoner? Turned over to the SS.
Not in any civilised country. Criminals do have guns in my country but firearm use is incredibly rare and use is restricted to crim V cop and crim v crim because police response and enforcement are so harsh for gun crime it isnt worth it unless it quite literally becomes life or death.
So then non criminals, while not armed with guns, face no real gun violence because even getting access to guns requires critical thinking and intelligence at least sufficient to understand risk vs reward well enough to understand civilian pop isn't a reasonable use case for firearms. Any firearm related incident here is a multi week news item. Stuff thats everyday in the USA and doesnt even make local news.
So, our cops and our criminals are armed, and i can trust my kids wont get shot up in school, i wont get shot in a store robbery, or by a disgruntled coworker etc.
You dont quite understand how bad it is I think, USA americans who move here have an adjustment period and usually need mental health support coping with leaving a country where getting shot in a road rage incident, for example, is a real risk. I had a colleague driving break down after cutting someone off accidentally, the cut off swerved ahead of us aggressivly stopped traffic got out and started shouting. Eventually wore themsleves out, as they do, got vack in car and kept driving. Didnt stress me too bad but my coworker driving totally shut down. Why? A year earlier a coworker in the USA did something similar and the person with road rage got out and started shooting at their car.
It’s also extremely rare here, when looked at rationally. Those kinds of shootings are limited to specific areas of the country. The other 99% of the country faces nothing like that, ever.
> police response and enforcement are so harsh for gun crime it isnt worth it
That's the key right there. USA enforcement is far less than what it needs to be, especially in (dare I say it) Democrat-controlled local districts.
The number of soft-on-crime DAs elected has increased significantly in the last 30 years, and the fraction of violent crime cases that are left unsolved has also increased significantly.
It's gotten so bad that a lot of conspiracy theories are circulating, like "Davos people want to destabilize the US, so George Soros is donating millions through his Open Foundation to soft-on-crime DA local election campaigns."
With guns being uncontrolled police have plausible deniability on demand to gun down anyone they like. No free unrestricted gun access means gunning down people as they please isnt justifiable anymore.
so if its about safety, in a country actively descended into facism, aren't you worried about freedom of political expression given you can just be gunned down at a moments notice and it gets brushed away?
You're more worried about some hypothetical apocalyptic scenario where lawful firearm owners suddenly lose their minds and fall into mass-psychosis than you are about existing known violent criminals committing more violent crimes.
I can guarantee you that those "backwards" wheat farmers from Salina, KS with $10k worth of hunting rifles and shotguns just don't think about people like you on a daily basis. Their minds are on the wind, rain, beetles, and grain futures, not "how can we launch a successful invasion against Somerville, MA?".
Frankly, I'm a lot more worried about my Greek classmate being assaulted by a "Free Palestine" moron who can't tell the difference between the flags for Israel and Greece:
As for mob violence in general, I'm just not worried about complete strangers wanting to risk their lives in a firefight to kill me. The kind of people who are attracted to angry mobs are not the kind of people volunteering to drive the Waffen SS out of Eindhoven or chase the Japanese out of the Philippines.
Likewise, the people violently assaulting Jewish pre-med students in America are there because the IDF in Gaza scare them.
If the kind of people you most fear and hate wanted war, they could just stop growing your food and let you starve to death.
Not trying to belittle you, so much as reassure that if Trump supporters really wanted to hurt you, they would have done it already in 2015.
> Point is, gun control has led to a reduction in gun crime in every country I know of. Thats hard evidence against your qippy one-liner.
That's a tautology - of course it did. The real questions are - what percentage of violent crimes were committed with guns after after gun control, how much did overall violent crime decrease after gun control, and to what extent was gun control provably responsible for the reduction of violent crime (when statistically controlling for other factors that reduce violent crime)?
The overall slope of the violent crime curve has been negative, but the value may have been more negative if it were not for gun control.
Also, I think history will bear this out in the coming centuries -- totalitarianism and terrorism can flourish far better when citizens are unarmed.
Youre missing an important detail - how many deaths / maimings per violent offense. If violent offences dont drop but those do, worth no? How about school shooters - will people no longer crash out and attack their classmates? No. We havent solved the underlying issue, however, such a crashout sans guns seems siginificantly more preferable to me.
besides, the usa has proven that freedom to access guns doesnt protect you from dictatorships / authoritarian governments. That was the main stated constitutional reason for having that right.
So the USA hasn't seen any benefits from free gun access ans has lost uncountbaly many lives to death and trauma. How is it still justified?
Yup. I think that is a neat and internally consistent statement that doesnt omit facts. One can do with that statement what one wants, but if carrying arms becomes extremely risky, if using arms carries an burden akin to dying, you can bet that criminals who are quite good at weighing risk v reward will not be running amok.
Your friend sounds like a good guy. Hopefully you're with him when you're out in public, and some sicko goes postal or some bum with a drug addiction starts waving a knife at you.
He has very carefully rehearsed a lot of situations in his mind, and I'm confident he would only draw his weapon when actual lives are in imminent danger (like an active armed assailant situation).
I used to be a competitive marksman through JROTC, and the FUD around firearms is so overblown compared to the fear most people should have while driving their car or doing certain jobs.
A chem lab staffed only by trained professionals is still a lot more dangerous than an indoor range in a red state. A firearm in Cletus' hands is a lot safer than a beaker of sulfuric acid in anybody's hands, let alone piranha solution.
And all of that is nothing compared to the danger of being on a road with other cars, many of which are operated by people who simply do not give a f***.
100% agree. But - firearms (combined with training and skill) carry far more risk asymmetry compared to cars, sulfuric acid beakers, or even explosives. I think that's why there's more fear around letting people carry them. The potential damage to personal risk ratio is higher with firearms.
But the root public policy problem is the same no matter what the weapon is: violent criminals will harm people, others generally won't. So the most effective policies have to lean heavily on good police and DA behavior, to make sure violent criminals aren't able to keep harming people. Going after the weapons criminals use is effectively a red herring if known violent criminals are still generally at large. Any policy intended to reduce violent crime will fail insofar as cases continue to go unsolved, and police, DAs, and courts don't enforce the law when the identities of violent criminals are known.
Locking doors makes legal follow-up easier: "The deceased - do you know if he broke and entered?" "Yes, your honor. I always lock my doors at night. Exhibit A is a video of him busting the door down after trying the doorknob."
That's a really well put. We are expecting a son soon and as I was reading this read and your comment, I couldn't help but asking myself will I ever say anything that my son will remember for years. And how can I be prepared.
I've watched LPL videos and practiced on regular locks, I can pick something that is about 10$ or less, but these expensive locks with good tolerances (Abus) or disc detainer cores (kryptonite locks,) no amount of practice and fiddling with the correct tools has ever opened one of these. I lack the skill or touch.
I can hold a 18v grinder with a cutoff wheel just fine though, I lost the keys to one of those kryptonite locks on my bike and I was riding my bike again 30 seconds later.
Yep, it’s like those security screws, they’re not used to stop you opening the box, they’re used to prove that you knew you shouldn’t be opening the box.
Most of the time they’re just there to make you _think_ that you shouldn’t be opening the box. In the US the Magnusen–Moss Warranty Act of 1977 explicitly prohibits companies from voiding any warranty merely because the owner opened up the device, repaired it, or had it repaired.
> It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
Yeah, one of my conclusions after years of watching LPL is ironically to start buying cheaper locks.
The difference between a $3 and a $300 lock is just about a minute of time for an experienced lockpick. No lock is capable of dissuading a determined thief, but any lock is equally capable of dissuading a lazy one.
The best policy is to have a lock that is resistant to cutting and destruction, with a trivial key. Nobody tries to pick a lock, and if they do, they're winning. Most or all breakins happen through brute force not technical sophistication, so a decent chunk of metal is a fine adaptation.
About the only thing I've seen that qualifies is the no-car, metal gates to walking/camping trails in State Parks (PA, anyway.) The key-lock is surrounded by a 1/2" steel can, with only the bottom open and some distance to the lock itself. Attempting to pick that would mean being upside down 2 feet off the ground. The steel shroud would thwart a casual angle-grinder for long enough not to bother.
Most other security for locks I've seen could be defeated with 60 seconds and a 3" cutoff tool that fits in a pocket.
I use the locks my insurance company recommends. That's who it's there for anyways.
The other side is "career" thieves will know how to pop-can shim a lock but most of them are not going to use or break out a set of picks. One main reason it's an additional felony charge if you get caught using them. So a _slightly_ better lock is sometimes warranted for outdoor applications.
The final piece is they'll just steal a car and then drive that car through your shop front to get what they want. Up here in Northern California a gang pulled off the same heist as the movie "Casino." They drove a van up to a wall and then knocked out a small segment of the wall to gain entry.
>The difference between a $3 and a $300 lock is just about a minute of time for an experienced lockpick.
How about non-experienced lockpick? Or the one who gonna brute force everything? I think there's value is expensive lock (Assume you buy the high quality one, not the over-price one)
Yep. The low hanging fruit principle in action. You can’t make anything completely secure so you put up more obstacles than your neighbor so the attackers go visit the neighbor instead.
Or in the case of targets with no neighbors like missile bases, you know approximately how long it might take an attacker to succeed, then put big guys with guns within that distance measured by time.
I'm considering an angle grinder resistant lock for the bicycle. They are not totally uncuttable but it means you have to be stood there for a couple of minutes changing worn cutting disks and the like. Quite expensive though.
Oh, this is where I disagree. A wire can be quietly and discreetly cut with wire cutters in seconds. This is no protection at all. It's just inconvenience for you.
What I've been using for years is a heavy chain with a lock (disc-detainer style). The chain weighs around 3.5kg. You can of course cut it with an angle grinder, but have you ever tried cutting a chain with an angle grinder without a vise? The chain slips away and it's really difficult to hold it in place for the cutting, which would take more than a minute.
All those Kryptonite-style U-locks have the disadvantage of being easily fixed in place for the cutting. They are also useless for attaching your bike to large trees, street lights, etc.
Remember that if a bear is chasing you, you don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun your friends. If there are 4 bikes and my bike is the most difficult to steal, I'm fine.
It's completely different to snip a cheap wire lock or even just pull hard on it and have the lock break versus pulling out the angle grinder and making a huge racket for a minute.
I picked up and started practicing with Lishi lock tools, and I cannot recommend them enough. Pocket Tool Warehouse out of Texas has been good in my experience for sourcing them, no affiliation. Like an automatic transmission for lock picking.
Ditto. I was even able to put my lock picking skills to use one fine summer day when the dog park was locked due to "rain from yesterday" even though the grass and everything was clearly fine. We had a lovely time running around as a family, along with a couple other families, for about an hour before the groundskeeper came and shooed us away.
When we moved last time, our "financials" filing cabinet accidentally got locked (one of the ones with button lock) and I wound up having to pick it. The ability, even at a basic level, comes in handy more often then you would expect.
At a previous company, a power outage knocked out our router, which knocked out the card access system, which locked us out of the server room where the router was. Good news, there was a physical key bypass. Bad news, nobody knew where said key was. Lucky for us, I could pop out to my car, grab my picks, and then got the thing open in a couple of minutes.
Definitely the most above-the-board use those picks ever got (Though obtaining access to my university dorm's AC controls definitely made me more popular).
In high school I didn't even have lockpicks, I just carried a super tiny pair of needle-nose pliers along with some other tools in my Five-Star zipper binder, and the tips of the pliers were fine enough to stab into the holes of those stupid snake-bite security screws that held down the thermostat covers in the classrooms.
Once teachers realized I could open the thermostat covers and adjust their setting in seconds instead of the hours it took to go the official route, not only was I very popular, they would occasionally send hall passes to summon me from other rooms to perform the service. I was doing fine in my studies and this was not an academic impediment, it was just hilarious. Eventually I just started leaving the covers loose, a fig-leaf that the custodial staff seemed content to ignore.
...
Fastforward a few years into my career, still not carrying lockpicks, but much more familiar with the art. A shipment of cabinetized network hardware arrived, but the cabinet keys were not ziptied to the doors as was customary. The installers were looking at having to go home with a short timesheet because they couldn't work.
I was in the NOC for another reason entirely, but I asked the supe to cover me for a minute and trotted out to the equipment room. I swiped a couple pins from the corkboard (for some reason, the office used dissection T-pins instead of regular pushpins), bent the tip of one, used the other as a turning tool, and proceeded to rake open one of the cabinets. The install crew lead's jaw hit the floor. I insisted on teaching him to do the rest, and moments later not only had he opened the rest of the cabinet doors, he had scared himself with how easy that just was, and stood in silence for a minute, shocked by his newly-acquired skill.
Early in our dating, my (now) wife moved into a new apartment and accidentally turned in the key to the back patio storage room with the keys to the old place. She was embarrassed to ask the old landlord, so she asked me to ask him. Instead, I popped home, picked open the patio storage lock, and then re-keyed the lock to match the front door. When I was a teenager I bought a (apparently lifetime) supply of assorted lock pins.
The ethic, IIRC, is that you only pick locks that you own, or that you have permission to pick.
Also, maybe the groundskeeper knows things about groundskeeping that you don't, on account of how much time they spend doing their job, which is keeping the grounds.
I had to use my lockpicking skills when my grandma moved across country to live with my mom. She put her stuff in a "Portable On-Demand Storage" container and accidentally put the key to the lock with her stuff inside the container.
Luckily, she used the shitty round lock that a lot of storage companies recommend. I was able to pick it in just a couple minutes. Someone like LPL would have had it open in mere seconds.
Thinking of doing the same! Which kit did you order? I see a FNG, FNG+ Bundle, and "Learn lockpicking bundle". 3rd one seems the most likely candidate. Any tips you can share? Thanks!
Start with a cheap kit from e.g. Amazon which includes a couple of perspex locks so you can see what you're doing. Get a real set of picks for real money once you graduate from that.
I got the Learn Lockpicking bundle a few years back, it's a solid customizable lock - six slots, a few different pin styles, and the springs to make it work. I got practiced enough to get a 3-pin opened, but I'm definitely out of practice now.
I did the same (also during COVID, after doing it for a bit in my youth). I haven't tried Covert Instruments gear, I bought some other pack from China, but whatever pack you can find with the basics (and maybe some variety so you can try different techniques) plus a training padlock so you can see what's going on inside, and it'll be a walk in the park.
> It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
Physical locks are for honest people. They signify that something is not meant to be accessed and at best slow down someone actively trying to access the other side of the lock.
I recall either "The lock picking lawyer" or McNally explains that only in 3% of cases are locks picked during a burglary. In all other cases windows or doors are simply forced open. So at best locks are meant to prevent of crimes of opportunities.
One day I came into the office and noticed that one of our neighbors doors had a triangular hole cut into it near the door handle. It was a solid core door on an interior hallway. One of our cameras picked up the sound, someone brought a chainsaw and in about 30 seconds cut a hole in the door so they could reach through and open it from the inside. They took the safe, but I was told the safe was empty.
Oddly, this is a case where they would have had plenty of time to pick the lock as well, and it would have been much quieter.
> at best locks are meant to prevent of crimes of opportunities
A lock forces the thief to either spend time defeating it or physically break something. Even if it doesn't slow him down it should hopefully make it visibly obvious that he's doing something illicit.
Yeah my understanding of burgling is it’s all about speed. One of the best deterrents you can have is I think called “laminate glass,”that doesn’t shatter into a bunch of pieces when it’s hit. It has a tendency to hold together so they have to spend precious seconds knocking out more of it which almost always makes them run away rather than risk it.
If I can go out on a limb here, I also think I recall that they have very specific things they look for. For instance they will often run straight for the master bedroom and start pulling out drawers/checking closets because people tend to keep jewelry in there. They want small items.
Anything that slows them down tends to deter them even if they make an initial attempt
This is why the complaint about smart locks being hacked is so utterly ridiculous to me. A thief isn't going to hack your lock, they're going to bash a window in
Even if I can unlock a hypothetical 90% of physical locks, I still need to go in person to every house that has one. On the other hand, if I crack one smart lock I now have remote access to every home that has one, and I can operate on all of them simultaneously. Anything internet-connected makes doing damaging things at scale much easier.
Exactly. There's a lot of strongly worded stuff in here about how easy locks are to defeat, but that's only against someone who's practiced the art, which is a very small percentage of the population. And in my experience they're mostly honest people interested in the technical challenge, rather than criminal exploitation. A typical modern lock is going to massively slow down or outright stop nearly everyone who comes up against it.
I think that it's more useful to think of all defenses against physical intrusion as increasing the cost of intrusion in some way, be that time, skill, risk of being caught, access to specialized devices, etc.
Most "normal" locks don't increase the cost too much but they do raise it - perhaps enough for a thief to pick another target, or perhaps enough for the thief to choose another method of entry such as kicking in the door (which itself comes with additional risk of detection).
Exactly it is about layers. It is the same with computer security. Is my network "unhackable" no. But I've put up enough layers of basic security that script kiddies and the like won't be able to get in.
Depends, do you count wave-raking as picking? I bought a cheap lock-picking set, takes me about 5 minutes to get their basic perspex lock open. "Masterlock", wave rake opens it in a few seconds -- even my then 10yo could open it in <30s.
Security is about layers. If I have a basic lock, all I want to do is stop an opportunist.
I have a vehicle that is extremely simple to steal (you can unlock everything with a screwdriver), to protect it I use both a pedal lock, a secret second key and a steering wheel lock.
Will it defeat a determined thief or a team of thieves? No way. However it will put off most opportunists and slow down a more experienced thief enough that they may choose another target.
> overpriced lock they conveniently have for sale and in stock in their vehicle
I object to the word overpriced in this context. It costs a lot of money to keep locks, tools, and other spare parts in a vehicle (including the cost of the vehicle). If you need a lock now and they have one it should cost a lot more than if you need a lock in 6 months and can wait for the factory to get around to making it. When you call their locks overpriced you are failing to understand the costs and value of having a part on hand.
Don't know why you are being downvoted because it's true. Lots of people wouldn't try to break past a lock but if you leave a door open many people would fall for the temptation.
No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door given the right cutting tool. Yet people seem to act surprised and betrayed to learn that a normal lock can be picked or broken given the right tool.
And that's fair and reasonable. Of course you can cut a hole in a door. Everyone capable of forming thoughts on the subject has seen someone use a saw at some point in their life. However, locks greatly exaggerate their abilities, to the point you can forgive someone for believing that they actually mean them.
I just now went to masterlock.com, clicked HOME & PERSONAL > View All Products, and picked the very first product[0]. It says:
> The 4-pin cylinder prevents picking and the dual locking levers provide resistance against prying and hammering.
The very first thing it says is that it prevents picking. To someone who isn't familiar with LPL, and who doesn't want to have someone pick their lock, this seems like a great product. It prevents picking! And it must, because otherwise it would be illegal to say that, right? But alas, it does not, in fact, prevent picking.
Compare that to a random product page for a household front door[1] that says "Steel security plate in the frame helps to resist forced entry" and "Reinforced lock area provides strength and security for door hardware", which indicates that this might be a strong door, but doesn't claim that it "prevents someone kicking it in". It helps to resist forced entry, but doesn't say that it prevents it.
> No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door
The definition of “normal” varies by region. In European cities, it means a pretty heavy door of multiple layers of steel (and pretty unpleasant stuff in the middle) that would probably take 15 minutes of deafeningly loud cutting with a circular saw. I understand the standard for US suburbs is much lower (as it might as well be, given windows exist and the walls aren’t all that sturdy either).
A very long time ago I worked in an office building that had several suites of offices. One of them was a biotechnics company that did things like genetic analysis of farmed fish for selective breeding, massively commercially sensitive stuff. They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other. One key in the possession of the CIO, one in the possession of the CEO. CEO was at a fish farm in Norway. CIO was in the office, getting paperwork out of the safe in the secure room, got a phone call, stepped out of the room to get a better signal, slam <CLICK> <KACHUNK> as six spring-loaded bolts about as thick as your thumb pegged the door shut.
Rude words.
Can't get a locksmith that can pick that particular Ingersoll lock. Can't get a replacement key because the certificate is in the room, and you'd have to drive down to England to get it. Can't jemmy the door open, it's too strong.
Wait.
There's a guy who parks an old Citroën in the car park, I bet he has tools, doesn't he work for that video company downstairs? Let's ask him.
So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.
A swift appointment with an interior decorator was made by a certain C-level exec, and a day or two later there was a cooler with about 25kg of assorted kinds of salmon and a bottle of whisky left in my edit suite.
I know it's OT but I wanna know what your old Citroën was. My first car was an S1 BX. Plasticky 80s goodness. I know it's not everybody's idea of a classic (at least in Australia where Citroëns aren't particularly common) but I loved it.
At the time I had a 1989 XM 2.0, but at various times I've had a couple of CXes, several XMs, a couple of GSAs, a BX briefly, and an AX GT.
One of the XMs was the 3-litre 24-valve one which would sit comfortably at twice the legal limit, with the only real difference being the stereo had to be a couple of notches louder and the trees and road signs came up twice as fast. Oh, and the trip computer showed an astounding 8MPG - you wouldn't be doing 147mph for long because you've got less than an hour of fuel in the tank at that speed.
The AX GT was the carby one, basically their 950cc hatchback with the 1.4 out of a BX dropped in and a lumpy cam and twin-choke 2x32mm Weber carb. It was a little pocket-size tin of hooliganism.
The CXes were probably the most refined of the lot. Look up DIRAVI steering - fully powered, no mechanical connection between the steering wheel and road wheels when it's working normally.
Our uncle had a CX when we were kids. When he would visit we loved waiting in the driveway for him to start it so we can watch the air suspension engage and lift the car a good foot up.
Hydropneumatic suspension :-) There's a hydraulic pump about the size of a coffee cup driven off the end of the camshaft, which provides power to the suspension, braking system, and steering.
The suspension has no springs or shock absorbers - there's a "sphere" screwed into the end of each suspension cylinder with a bubble of nitrogen trapped by a rubber sheet that acts as a spring, and a set of spring-loaded valves kind of like the ones in a shock absorber piston to set the damping rate.
For the brakes, the hydraulic pump fed the ABS block through a shuttle valve under the pedal. When you press the pedal it does not move! Or, hardly at all. I takes a little getting used to and the brakes feel really harsh until you realise you don't need to welly it down hard - just gently touch it. The back brakes use pressure from the rear suspension, so they're more effective the heavier the car is.
The steering is amazing. When the engine is running the road wheels and steering wheel are not really connected. There's a linkage through a shuttle valve and when you turn the steering wheel it acts as a servo, with the wheels being moved entirely by hydraulic pressure. The Danfoss valves in normal power steering systems work a bit like this but they use a bendy spring, and the hydraulics only "help".
To make it respond properly at speed there was a heart-shaped cam in the steering box, with a sprung piston pushed into it by hydraulic pressure from a speed governor on the gearbox. The faster you go, the more pressure on the piston, and the harder the spring presses a roller into the cam. At idle with the car stationary you can move the steering wheel and it'll spring back to the middle by itself, and at 70mph you can barely move the steering wheel at all.
It's really sensitive and the first time you drive one you find yourself zig-zagging down the road until you get used to just leaving your fingertips on the rim of the wheel and basically just touching the side you want it to turn to.
They're not terribly fast but you can gobble up the miles surprisingly quickly, and I've never driven anything where you arrived so relaxed.
If you hadn't been there to fish them out of the situation, they would have been boned to a scale they weren't prepared to deal with. You deserved the reward for getting them off the hook.
> They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other.
Wow, that sounds like a pretty secure entry! I wonder how they secured the walls, that’s a lot of steel plate, enough to require structural reinforc—
> So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.
Haha, that was my guess. This is like constructing a safe with a super heavy reinforced steel door on the front and construction paper on the sides and top! He could’ve kicked his way through 5/8” (prolly 16mm to you lot) drywall ;) Your solution was a lot cleaner and you earned that tasty reward!
Hah, I love this sort of story. Recently I was on site and we needed some electrical as-built drawings. They’d been stashed in a tool box, which was locked (and pretty well designed to protect the padlock from bolt cutters / angle grinders). Unfortunately one of the guys had taken the key with him and it was now a two hour plane flight away. They already tried and failed to cut the lock, and were getting an angle grinder to just cut in through the lid (it was ~3mm steel sheet, so hardly impenetrable, but destroying the toolbox would not have been ideal) when I pulled the pin out of the hinge and recovered the drawings that way.
Turns out watching Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t a waste of time after all. ;)
Right - the quality of your locks matter a lot less if your average 5-year-old tee-baller can through brick through the wind and climb in. One always needs to consider their threat model when considering what security to invest in getting.
Bang on. LPL himself uses a slightly modified Kwikset lock. The modification seizes the lock if someone tries to pick it. I'm the video, he says it isn't to stop all break-ins, but to stop non-destructive break-ins.
Bought my teenage son a couple lock picking kits, he's picked almost every single lock we have in our house.
I then picked up a sizable rock, and told him I could get into the house faster than he could. He didn't understand for a few moments, but the lesson was learned.
Dog is not the cheapest option. The amount of work that goes into taking care of a dog is quite substantial. I know from experience. While many/most people do not mind doing the work/expense, some of us prefer cats because they are a lot less work, among other reasons. I do however admit that cats suck at scaring away intruders.
A large dog is one of the few things that can actually prevent most break-ins.
Story time:
There was a serial killer in CA a few decades ago. The police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with dogs, next victim had a small dog. Next the police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with medium or large dogs, next victim had a 30lb dog. Next the police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with large dogs. His next victim didn't have a dog. If its 80+lbs, very few people will mess with them and they will love you forever.
Most of the world don't construct their homes out of flammable materials, so the risk of the entire place going up in flames is quite low. In some places your home is uninsurable if you dont have burglar bars on all windows.
Regarding dogs: some organophosphate mixed into minced meat and lobbed through your fence/gate/open window is an instant and quiet way to get rid of a dog - personal experience taught me this lesson.
Best and cheapest option is a dog, decent insurance, and off site backups that regularly get restores tested.
And maybe a little bit of not getting too attached to "stuff" - there's very little stuff that's truly irreplaceable. I'd miss my first guitar if my house was robbed and they took it or if my place burnt down. I'd miss the HiFi gear I bought in 1988 and still use, and maybe my modded espresso machine. But I'd get over that loss and my sentimental attraction to those things just fine, especially after I'd replaced then with my insurance settlement.
Or "diversify", basically don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Can be done at any scale too, from storing backup copies of important documents at your parents house to buying a few apartments in Indonesia.
Reminds me of high school when people were buying expensive locks for their lockers. These locks, no matter how tough, all still locked onto a flimsy 1.5mm steel hasp that you could bend with your fingers.
The difference here is that cutting a hole in a door is a destructive operation, like applying bolt cutters to a padlock. Lockpicking just operates the lock as designed.
The analogy is probably closer to someone entering your home by pushing the doorframe open so that the door opens without unlocking the lock, or that many automatic doors can be opened by spraying some compressed air through a thin sliver, triggering the internal door sensors. Both are feasible in practice, leave little evidence behind if done well, and do actually surprise a lot of people.
Folks that really care about security go for tamper evidence.
For example you can get a filing cabinet which has a lock and a counter that ticks every time it is opened. You pair it with a clipboard where you note the counter count, why you opened it and sign.
It can be picked, that can't be avoided. But the act of opening it creates a trail which can be detected. Adding a false clipboard entry is detected by subsequent users, there typically aren't many people with access.
Determining that you have a breach allows it to be investigated, mitigated. The lock is an important part of that, but it isn't perfectly secure so you manage that flaw.
Of course filing cabinets are getting rare and replaced by digital document stores, with their own auditing and issues.
But if that's not the threat you are trying to protect against, there are locks that are sufficiently secure that picking or other "low-impact" defeat attempts are considered pretty much pointless. Abloy protec2 comes to mind.
The Canadian Mint in Ottawa has a rather impressive large gold bar on display in the gift shop for people to lift and take photos with. It's not in a case or anything.
It's chained down with a Protec padlock - and there's a cop a few feet away to deal with you trying something un-subtle.
To me that sounds more like a good endorsement for having a guy legally authorized to use force against you standing guard. Any old padlock is probably safe when a uniformed agent of the state with weapons of varying lethality is standing next to it.
You don't even have to go that far. Firefighters have core pulling kits that take care of 90% of all locks in 2 minutes tops. And for most other locks, the thing holding the lock tends to be less of an issue than the lock.
I had an Abloy Protec2 malfunction while locked (PSA don't use them for key-only sashlocks) and the locksmith drilled it out in ~10 seconds. That is the last time I spend that kind of money on a lock!
Doesn't even need to go as far as using power tools.
Every lock I've been unable to pick (usually due to the fact that it's a pile of rust) has been susceptible to bolt-cutters. Big lock? Bigger cutters. Still cheaper than an angle-grinder.
Not in the sense of "can't be opened without the key".
Good locks buy you two things: Deterrence (maybe), and a set minimum of time and noise requirements to bypass them. If your lock reputably takes 3 minutes to pick or a Ramset gun to blast them open, make sure your guard comes by every two minutes, and otherwise stays in earshot.
It's obvious to the owner and the whole world that an intrusion has occurred if the door is sawed open or the lock is cut off. It's nice to know your home has been broken into vs. some of your jewelry is gone and you don't know whether to blame your teenager, a relative, someone who did work on your house since you last checked, etc.
Photos of your sawed open door will probably help in your insurance claim too. Telling your assessor "the cops say they might have picked the lock" isn't something I'd want to rely on to get my claim approved.
It depends on what "secure" means. Any lock can be destroyed with tools. Most locks can be broken with a big pair of bolt cutters, a drill, or, failing that, melting.
If secure means "without leaving evidence of tampering," things get a lot more interesting, but that has narrow practical use cases outside of stuff like espionage. Once you're in this space, we can start talking about how difficult something can be without specialized tools. But now we're leaving "I am protecting my stuff" territory and entering "this is just a sport and we're agreeing on a ruleset" territory.
There are a couple of lock designs out there that I don't think anybody's successfully ever picked. The ones that first come to mind are a couple of the "smart" electronic locks. Many of those are junk, but a few are very well thought out.
Secure against what? You might be surprised at what a wench and a truck can pull / destroy. If that fails, there are shotguns and also explosives, jackhammers and the like.
There are always assumptions built into lock design. A simple lock is very secure if a fence is jumpable, most people will jump the fence rather than mess with a lock.
Even a complex lock will never be secure for national secrets (like nuclear missiles), you need to just assign guards. Locks exist but are basically a formality (IIRC, many tanks and airplanes are left unlocked because all the security posture is with the military and the lock itself is too much of a hassle for logistics).
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Fort Knox itself was designed to be safe from Nazi invasion. If the Nazis invaded New York City, they won't find any of the governments gold. The 'lock' in this case is the miles and miles of geography the Nazis would have to navigate before reaching Fort Knox.
"In 1933, the U.S. suspended gold convertibility and gold exports. In the following year, the U.S. dollar was devalued when the gold price was fixed at $35 per troy ounce. After the U.S. dollar devaluation, so much gold began to flow into the United States that the country’s gold reserves quadrupled within eight years. Notice that this is several years before the outbreak of World War II and predates a large trade surplus in the late 1940s. [...] In 1930, the U.S. controlled about 40% of the world’s gold reserves, but by 1950, the U.S. controlled nearly two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves."
Assa Abloy’s Cliq (electromechanical) keys aren’t able to be picked as far as I know (I could definitely be wrong!), the local international airport uses them to secure doors. The keys aren’t cheap, we have to put up a several hundred dollar deposit when checking them out from airport security for projects. These sorts of locks are useful in places with 24-hour operations or in public spaces that lead to private spaces, an unpickable lock falls to a drill pretty quickly if that’s an option.
Virtually any lock can be destroyed with tools and most doors/walls can be busted through with enough effort and equipment. I think the airport police would notice that, though ;)
This also works on places like HN. I will often make an argument in my normal, working class low educated redneck hick sort of writing style. People will assume I have an unsophisticated basis for my argument and are way more likely to debate me on it. They like to attack an 'easy' target and even better if they are culturally seen as different.
If I use my pretend upper well-to-do white guy rhetoric with precise and deep vocabulary, I can make claims with a lower likelihood someone will challenge it, even if they are equally well backed.
Great channel, and yes the ineffectiveness of nearly all commercially available locks is depressing. At best it would briefly slow down a skilled picker.
The entire field of locksmithing has a failing culture around security. They still rely on security by obscurity, they sue attackers, and they never improve
If a company’s first reaction to a flaw is to sue instead of fix it, the problem probably goes beyond the lock itself. A real security company would appreciate someone pointing out a weakness rather than trying to take the video down. That kind of openness would actually make people trust them more.
The weird thing is, they actually had someone competent dealing with the issue:
> The strange thing about the whole situation is that Proven actually knew how to respond constructively to the first McNally video. Its own response video opened with a bit of humor (the presenter drinks a can of Liquid Death), acknowledged the issue (“we’ve had a little bit of controversy in the last couple days”), and made clear that Proven could handle criticism (“we aren’t afraid of a little bit of feedback”).
> The video went on to show how their locks work and provided some context on shimming attacks and their likelihood of real-world use. It ended by showing how users concerned about shimming attacks could choose more expensive but more secure lock cores that should resist the technique.
Sounds to me like someone professional in the company with a cooler head was on this and was handling it well, but someone else higher up got angry and aggressive and decided that revenge was more important.
This reminds me of the CEO of a cyber security company that challenged Anonimous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary. If you work for any kind of security company, do not ever ever ever challenge any kind penetration specialist. Everything is hackable, it is only a matter of cost vs reward, but when you challenge someone that goes out of the window.
Don't challenge people. Don't insult people. Don't humiliate people. Don't threaten people. Allow them to maintain their self-respect even when they lose. Don't rub it in. Give them a face-saving exit.
Plenty of violence and aggression is caused by violation of the above rules. They seem simple but they're broken on a daily basis. Famous last words: "you don't have the guts".
Here in Finland mechanical locks with electronic keying are pretty common in some places. Some of them like iLOQ or Abloy eCLIQ are actually pretty clever: electrical bits of the lock are powered from mechanical action of inserting and turning the key, so you don't have to worry about batteries. In theory, they promise significant cost savings in scenarios like rental apartment buildings where tenants move in and out, need access to common areas, lose keys, etc, without compromising security or having to replace or recode locks - they just give you a generic key, click some buttons in the admin panel, and your key could be provisioned accordingly once you first enter the building and interact with one of the "smarter" locks that are externally powered and networked to the mothership.
In practice, in addition to the usual bugs you would expect from a software-based system managed and maintained by a plethora of organizations and contractors, they tend to become very annoying as parts wear out, so you have to fiddle with the key reinserting it repeatedly trying to find just the right angle so it will make a good contact to be recognized by the lock (for example the iLOQ system by my landlord communicates over a thin contact strip molded into the key opposite of the cutting and separated from the rest of the key with a thin layer of plastic).
Sounds about right for Abloy. They own Yale and their app-based alarm is subcontracted dogshit (by https://mobilepeople.dk) that didn't get updated for years on end, logs you out constantly, has less functionally than a 90s keypad model and even the hub thing sometimes just falls over and needs a power cycle, etc etc etc. Presumably they are entirely unable to handle any of it in house and are at the mercy of the contractor to fix anything.
This is how Nintendo engineered a legal argument disallowing 3rd party cartridges original GameBoy. The cartridge needed to display the Nintendo logo on startup which was checked pixel for pixel, otherwise the GameBoy wouldn't proceed with booting. Third party carts couldn't do so without infringing trademark.
But that was in a pre-DMCA world, before the anti-circumvention provisions gave these companies more legal weapons to criminalize fair use and competition.
I don't really "get" locks. If you want something to be closed forever, seal it shut. If it should be opened and closed, leave a hinge. If it should only be open and closed by a select few, leave it in a trusted environment
I've lived in a fair few places, but I've never lived in a place where an unlocked bicycle wouldn't be stolen. I'll keep using locks, thank you very much.
> A trusted environment, even in a "good neighborhood", requires a lock at least to the front door of your house, or gate, or w/e.
I don't think that's a trusted environment or "good neighborhood". But then I basically use "can leave front door unlocked with zero worries" as the threshold for "trusted environment".
But those environments and neighborhoods definitively exists today across the world, although they're probably becoming less and less common.
If anyone is interested in the legal side, I'd also recommend 'Runkle of the Bailey' who has a series on this saga but with a focus on the legal shenanigans [0]
I wonder how many stories like this are caused simply because a corporate lawyer is looking for some work to do, and maybe to meet some kind of internal KPI.
Former in-house lawyer here and in my experience the answer is something like "probably less than you think." The job of the lawyer is to advise the client and (within the bounds of ethical rules) advocate for their position, not to come up what the company's position should be.
Within the limits of their knowledge/ability, yes. Some bosses make it clear they do not like being told no, however. YMMV if you continue to work for such people.
The bar there is very high. This case might be embarrassing but probably isn’t sanctionable. And the only lawyer that would get sanctioned would be the ones that signed the papers not the drone that hired them.
Once came back to work after 4 week holidays (not USA) and realized I forgot the 3 digit code to my locker.
But I remembered that friend's locker (he was on holidays then) used US police code for murder. (Police in US use codes for crimes when communicating on the radio).
I googled the code, used friend's locker for the day, and by lunch the next day I've bruteforced through enough codes to learn that my code was the embarrassing 420.
Someone : “Sucks to see how many people take everything they see online for face value,” one Proven employee wrote. “Sounds like a bunch of liberals lol.”
The company : Proven also had its lawyers file “multiple” DMCA takedown notices against the McNally video, claiming that its use of Proven’s promo video was copyright infringement.
When did facts and enlightenment started to be for "liberals lol" ?
Freedom of speech based on facts should be universal.
I just saw grokpedia results, which include a gay-free description of gay novels (Banana Fish) and forged or curated accounts of war on Iraq, Thatcher and Duterte.
I like liquid death because their water is delicious and not high in sugar. I usually drink a sparkling water with dinner and I definitely prefer liquid death over la croix. They are technically different products though.
That their marketing is so edgy is just fun. I don't take it seriously, and it doesn't seem like they do either.
But Proven is definitely full of toxic masculinity internet tough guys.
> When did facts and enlightenment started to be for "liberals lol" ?
It didn't. That's one employee of the company, who has a clear bias in the matter, being ridiculous. It has nothing to do with liberal ideology, nor critique of liberal ideology, nor whatever sort of person that employee thinks should be considered a "liberal", nor their ideology. It's only the employee who even suggests that, and probably not even seriously.
>Freedom of speech based on facts should be universal.
To be fair that's not what we have in USA. For instance, a nurse who never even signed a private privacy agreement with anyone (unusual, but could happen) could violate HIPAA if they factually tell a patient's spouse the patient is being treated for AIDS and they ought to watch out.
Yes, they could and most definitely would be. The case you describe is one of the reasons it’s that way.
For what exactly would this fly-by-night nurse be telling me to “watch out,” in relation to my partner who’s living with and being treated for HIV?
One hopes this nurse, being medically trained and apparently working with vulnerable populations, understands the efficacy of the modern HIV therapies the patient is receiving. That, when managed, HIV is not transmissible by conventional marital means [0]; and that, until recently at least [also 0], concerted public health efforts have meant that most anyone who seeks medical attention ends up on those modern therapies.
That said, I hope said nurse would catch me in a charitable mood rather than a litigious one.
I said AIDS, not HIV. I am no AIDS expert but I would be shocked if a large portion of people AIDS had no detectable viral load, while people with HIV commonly do not have detectable one. Wouldn't people with no detectable viral load generally not being exhibiting AIDS?
In that case—and in re-reading the comment you were responding to—I think I’m agreeing with you and that I should have read more carefully before getting my dander up :)
It sounds like we’re agreeing that you’ve given a good example of why it both is and should be that way.
And that, in US jurisprudence anyway, speech tends to be allowed unless there’s a broader social interest that’s served by protecting the specific categories of facts in question.
With the slight caveat that I’m not sure that “should watch out” is a fact, it sounds like an opinion to me (and one that’s potentially unsupported by the facts). In fact, don’t people governed by HIPAA still have a duty to report situations of actual or likely physical harm—for example if a minor presents with signs consistent with abuse [0]? Or even, in your example, if the provider became aware that the HIV-positive patient, out of malice or negligence, were declining treatment, exhibiting substantial viral load, and asserting that they intended to continue with behaviors that put the partner at risk?
How could that happen exactly? In what circumstances could a nurse end up working for (or even volunteering for) a HIPAA covered entity without signing a privacy agreement?
And the privacy agreement isn’t required anyway. If you’re a doctor, and you treat your neighbor, you’re bound by HIPAA laws that cover the arrangement. All a privacy agreement really does is give the clinic a hope of being found not liable in a lawsuit or government action: “see, we have it in writing that the nurse knew this was illegal! Blame them, not us.” Even without the agreement, the practioner is still legally obligated to obey HIPAA.
And as a side note: sue the hell out of the hypothetical nurse spilling the beans on a hypothetical AIDE patient. Why? Because if you don’t, then other people who suspect they might have HIV are going to avoid going to the doctor, resulting in more deaths for them and their lovers.
I'm not sure if it's required, but it's a common retort used to argue why someone thinks HIPAA is a private contract law rather than regulation of factual speech, so I prefer to just nip that scenario in the bud from the get go.
In any case I wasn't arguing for or against regulating factual speech. Only pointing out that it is done in the USA. This seems to get peoples feathers real ruffled, for whatever reason.
Hah! Ok, fair, I could see that. There are sooooo many misunderstandings about HIPAA that make me cringe every time I hear them. “I can’t tell you if I’m sick. HIPPA!” “It’s illegal for you to ask me if I’m vaccinated. HIPPA!” “You can’t bill me for this. HIPPA!”
It’s like the medical version of a sovereign citizen legal theory, where it simultaneously applies to everything and nothing, depending on what’s most convenient at the moment.
I was a licensed healthcare professional and even I was shocked when my medical information was given to police without a warrant, a legal arrest, and without my consent. As it turns out, totally legal.
It's probably a good thing for Proven that they didn't get into this dispute the LockPickingLawyer instead. He'd wind up owning their company in the counter-suit...
That'd be an interesting channel, the "LockMakingLawyer" where the lock is highly lawsuit resistant, "Press the NDA button to always be informed when the next video comes out"
I am concerned about the public reacting aggressively agaisnt the lock company owner amd his family. The guy is definitely a toxic bully, but he was indeed violently harrassed by filing a lawsuit, however unjust it was.
The correct support for a just cause must have been constructive: providing financial support for the defendant, public manifestation campaign, professional lobbying, etc
Although this time I agree with the defendant cause, the response by the public was as toxic bullying as the plaintiff, only stronger.
That’s the internet these days. It’s been going on for decades. Game developers got death threats over minor changes to video games and nothing happened to them. Is it that surprising that tactic has continued?
People can make fun of the company all they want. That’s fair game. They shouldn’t be calling the guy’s personal phone or harassing his family, that’s totally over the line.
But nothing happens. The behavior gets a pass so it continues to become more common. That passes for debate now.
And I can find relatives/friends on Facebook to harass. Doesn’t make it ok.
Just like the fact we have agreed upon rules against using chemical weapons or attacking civilians in war (which some violate), the fact something is possible doesn’t mean society should accept it.
If we don’t have even the basic civility of not getting death threats over whatever minor thing someone on the internet is mad at, even mixing us up with their real target sharing our name, what’s left?
Everything becomes full force win at all costs, no matter how stupid or trivial. Who wants to live like that?
This all sounds great in the abstract. But reality is different due to the power differential. McNally is just one dude (albeit with a huge following). Lee is obviously a toxic jerk and his attacks and mockery of McNally triggered both McNally repeatedly proving the flaws in Proven's technology.
McNally obviously did the correct thing it seeking counsel and basically demolishing Proven's case in court. Too bad the SLAPP stuff doesn't work with DMCA takedowns.
And everyone else cheering on the sidelines (who isn't a paid shill of Proven's like the guy making the "liberal" comment)? Well giving Lee's company shit is fine IMHO. Call up the publicly available phone numbers, make service requests to flood his business etc. Fine with me. You poke the Internet bear, you get some claws.
As to the threats? If they actually occurred (which is questionable considering the BS Proven has been saying), then let the authorities know about them. That's not on McNally at all, it's more Lee being a jerk who doesn't know about the Streisand Effect, combined with social media companies that allow stuff like that to happen. It's also a good idea to not expose too much info about your personal life on social media that can be linked to your business, opsec ya know?
You’re getting downvoted which is unfortunate because I think you make a worthwhile point.
Emotionally I disagree with you. It feels like a bully is getting what a bully deserves. Logically, I think you are right though. Crowds just aren’t equipped to handle these situations. There are cases where the wisdom of the crowd is correct, but there are many more where it multiplies harms.
The underlying problem is that it never feels like justice is being served. Another comment mentions that there should be harsher punishment for false DMCAs. I don’t think the “wisdom of the crowd” approach is the best way to write those wrongs but I lament that modern justice has not been up to the task.
I’m going to border closely to blaming the “victim” here, but if the lawsuit had been filed without toxic, threatening, man-baby social media posts, we wouldn’t be hearing about it. Harassed because he filed a lawsuit? C’mon, there’s a lot more to it than that. When one goes swinging their dick around on Twitter in an attempt to garner support (from one’s equally toxic fans, I presume), one will also likely attract equally toxic folks who disagree. Talk enough shit, and you’ll eventually get a punch to the face. Right or wrong, such is the world long before social media.
> the lock company owner amd his family. The guy is definitely a toxic bully, but he was indeed violently harrassed by filing a lawsuit
I think you're confusing who filed the lawsuit here. That was also the lock company owner as well (Lee/Proven).
While I agree that flash mob harassment from the Internet is a terrible dynamic, filing baseless lawsuits has been a longstanding way to predictably summon them. So if the table stakes of launching or defending these type of aggressive attacks have gone from a significant amount of money for attorneys, to a significant amount of money for attorneys plus public relations and/or having a large audience, does that really actually change much? Either way most people simply don't file lawsuits, even if they've been actually wronged, due to the extreme personal stress.
The straightforward way of diminishing mob justice is to make people believe the system provides justice. If we lived in a society where McNally would predictably win the lawsuit [0], and be predictably compensated for his expenses/time/emotionalDistress for being on the receiving end of this baseless SLAPP, then there would be much less mob outrage to begin with. As it stands, everyone can imagine themselves receiving these types of legal shakedown letters, but having much less power to push back.
[0] it sounds like this particular suit was slapped down pretty hard and "quick" by the standards of the legal system, but there are many similar cases that don't go this way
There were locks that were secure against this attack, but they're more expensive. The cheaper locks vulnerable to this attack probably still makes them a load of money, though.
The question is "what do you want to secure against?" Describe the threat and then go from there. What are you securing? Is it meth-head or teenager? Or is it person determined to get in while making your insurance grill you over "did you lock it?"
In the case of a trailer, you do some combination of...
- Receiver pin lock similar to the one highlighted here (but probably not that exact one)
- Wheel lock / boot
- Receiver coupler lock (locks inside the cup-shaped receiver, preventing somebody towing the trailer with an undersized ball)
- Secured storage lot / garage
But, basically all options are only going to stop random opportunistic thieves. If somebody really wants whatever you're protecting, they'll find a way. That's why insurance exists.
Just clicked around after watching the vid and stumbled onto [0]. So there are locks he recommends... When it requires focus + several minutes to pick.
Suing someone because your product doesn't work correctly is diabolical. Instead of filing a lawsuit, they should have acknowledged the issue and released an upgrade to their locks.
Someone seriously needs to be taken to task for filing a false DMCA. DMCA is just another term for SLAPP these days. If anyone is a lawyer, they could still be despite retracting the case?
Anti-SLAPP is a great tool to have, but we do need slightly stronger ones. It’s a tough balance to find - to minimize the potential ways to abuse the system for all different kinds of entities/people.
YouTube’s TOS would be the most critical place to begin in terms of evaluating legal options. To file a “DMCA” (not really DMCA but YT’s proprietary version of it) claimants generally have to create an account and agree to the TOS. So it may bind both parties (the YTer and the abusive DMCA claimant). That might limit legal options for anti-SLAPP, tortious interference, etc.
But without either significant legal expertise or someone finding some particularly relevant case law, it seems like a nuanced enough domain that no one’s lay “legal” opinion would be particularly illuminating.
As the recipient of a SLAPP lawsuit (~decade ago) for truth I published online, the biggest problem with Anti-SLAPP statutes is that laypeople (particularly poorer ones) have limited access to attorney representation... the judicial system isn't accessible/friendly to the pro se litigant.
So even if the case is clearly being used to strategicly silence you, it'll probably still work (from plaintiff's POV). Same for DMCA.
With a strong Anti-SLAPP statute, the person who files the lawsuit is on the hook for the defendant's legal fees, which would (in theory) let the defendant hire an attorney on contigency fees.
Of course, one of the other issues is there's no federal Anti-SLAPP statute, and circuits are split as to whether or not state Anti-SLAPP applies to federal lawsuits, so if someone can diversity jurisdiction you into a federal SLAPP lawsuit, you're kind of stuck.
>which would (in theory) let the defendant hire an attorney on contigency fees
You'd better have a slam-dunk of a case if you're going to easily find contingency lawyers. The worst thing you can be is just "too rich" to qualify for pro bono representation... but even then, you still need a slam-dunk case.
I am currently in the process of suing somebody (plaintiff), for the first time in my many decades, and am a semi-retired electrician of average savings... and it is expensive and probably not worth my time but (in theory) hopefully worth it on principle.
So ready for this to be over with; the lawyers will certainly get their$.
My pitch for an improved system is to give defendants the opportunity to file a lawyer-less motion for summary dismissal, which is 1) geared towards being filled out by a layperson and 2) doesn't disqualify you from a subsequent filing for summary dismissal once you get a lawyer. Basically, an initial "this is a stupid lawsuit, here's why" type deal.
And then fine plaintiffs (and pay the defendants) that lose a summary dismissal, because if your case can be thrown out before trial, it was a shit case that should have never been filed in the first place.
The real problem with DMCA is that in theory it's under penalty of perjury, but in practice it's completely ignored. What is really needs is statutory damages for bogus takedown requests.
Part of the problem with the DMCA is that the "perjury" clause only applies to "claiming that some IP exists", not "claiming that this violates the IP".
> Lee’s partner and his mother both “received harassing messages through Facebook Messenger,” while other messages targeted Lee’s son, saying things like “I would kill your f—ing n—– child” and calling him a “racemixing pussy.”
Some people always go too far, undermining the good cause of the others
These kinds of results seem all too common. Like, why? Are companies just too used to using their general business attorneys for it, and those attorneys are just ignorant? Hungry for extra billable hours?
The answer, as succinctly as possible: cognitive dissonance.
This is exhibited in every human endeavor, but it's particularly acute, or at least more apparent to simple analysis, in business. In business, anything that diminishes the perception of value is a threat to earnings. Business people don't tolerate the existence of such perceptions in their minds. They readily adopt whatever mental state is necessary to deny realities that reveal a lack of value in whatever work product they sell.
In this case, someone demonstrated a weakness in a lock design. In the minds of the business people behind the product, this is impossible. Their locks are awesome. Best locks in the world! Therefore, the only conceivable possibility permitted, in their minds, is fraud or some other actionable offense that can be feasibly pursued in court.
The role of lawyers in this is a symptom, not a cause. Lawyers are paid to exhibit the necessary cognitive dissonance their clients require. Whatever aberrations or iniquities arise from this are simply denied by yet more cognitive dissonance.
Even if they know they would lose in court, lawsuits are expensive enough that threatening to sue or filing a lawsuit is often enough to get people without deep pockets to do whatever you want.
I don't know if that was the reasoning in this case though, considering that they didn't drop the lawsuit once it was clear that the youtuber wasn't going to give in to their demands.
LPL (Lock Picking Lawyer) has been making a fool of MasterLock and other physical security products/marketing for many years.
Guess ML realizes it’s best to be humiliated online where a small subset of population would never buy their products anyways. Rather than humiliate themselves in public like Proven Industries did (Barbara Streisand effect?)
Um...shouldn't Proven just hire Trevor McNally as a consultant or heck, make him a partner? I mean...can you imagine the next level reputation they'd have if they can adapt and make a Trevor-proof lock?
its a very confusing video to watch without sound haha, not sure if it gets better with sound. The fact that you do not see the lock pickers face makes you assume it is the same person doing the talking (the representative).
> In the end, Proven’s lawsuit likely cost the company serious time and cash—and generated little but bad publicity.
There's no such thing as bad publicity. People say this for a reason. It's true. I'm willing to bet that their sales have only increased since this started.
There's absolutely such a thing as bad publicity. Entire products and even companies have tanked because of bad publicity. I don't know why this myth continues to be so prevalent.
You're right! I'm off to the next Fyre festival and making sure my bag is secure with a Proven lock..... I wonder if Dassani still exist so I definitely can quench my thirst.
This reminded me of Matt Blaze's work on physical lock security back in 2003. He found a method of deriving the "master key" for a building (one key that opens all locks) from a single example: https://www.mattblaze.org/masterkey.html
When he published about this he was bombarded with messages from locksmiths complaining that they all knew about this and kept it secret for a reason! https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/kiss.html
It was a fascinating clash between computer security principles - disclose vulnerabilities - and physical locksmith culture, which was all about trade secrets.
In 'Three Days of Condor', Robert Redford's character locates the hotel room of a professional hitmat (who is after him) by going to a locksmith and asking him "which hotel and room this key belongs to?" and the locksmith asks him "are you in the trade?" and he responds, "No, but I read a lot".
Watched it a few months ago, such a great and under-rated film! RIP Robert Redford
It's a serious hacker film, actually. Redford is the ultimate hacker in that film: social engineering, picking locks, scrambling MaBell's circuits, and taking out the bad guys in the CIA.
[699BB20FD159089A03DD8935575805B1168A8E63 7.4G 1080 blu]
While I'm sure some people appreciate your link to pirated content, it seems inappropriate for HN.
That's not a link, it merely allows to confirm a specific file is the one you're looking for :).
That is protected speech. :)
I'm not sure it's really underrated so much as fairly old and not really in the classic canon. (Which may be more or less saying the same thing.)
I have to disgree here regarding the film's merit. There are a few quite interesting (and unique) films in that genre from the 70s that are little known to today's audiances. Most came out around Watergate ~'74 (so were topical in those days) but then have been kind of memory holed.
The Kremlin Letter, 1970 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065950/) - I recall someone saying this film really shows the ugly underbelly of intelligence services. This is an interesting film but it is very dark and somewhat disturbing. This one predates Watergate - it is a Cold War spy flick and makes Smiley's People look warm and cuddly ..
The Conversation, 1974 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/) - Gene Hackman's character resurfaces a couple decades later in Enemy of the State (1998).
The Parallax View, 1974 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071970/)
The Tamarind Seed, 1974 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072253/) - A subtle movie that superficially seems like a romance.
So that's from the top of my head. All are eminently watchable films and some possibly classic canon contenders.
I haven't heard of those films, but they sure seem interesting. Thanks for the recommendations!
"memory holed" implies a deliberate coordinated attempt by the mass media and/or powerful actors to suppress some information they don't want knocking around the ether
it isn't a "cool" way of saying 'forgotten'
"Who are you and how did you get in here?"
"I'm a locksmith, and I'm a locksmith."
Police Squad!
Perhaps the most important difference is that software — even after being purchased and used — remains relatively easy to patch, unlike a physical lock.
Tbf that's a new-ish principle. 2003 was Windows XP era and the early days of Metasploit. I.e. Microsoft and all the other companies were still figuring out this internet thing, while most computers were riddled with unpatched vulnerabilities. There was no such thing as zero day back then, because you could use many exploits years later.
But Windows Update was definitely already a thing back then, so I don’t think this “Microsoft was still figuring out this Internet thing” holds.
Software was updated all the time, and it’s much more difficult to do that with locks.
> But Windows Update was definitely already a thing back then, so I don’t think this “Microsoft was still figuring out this Internet thing” holds.
They had update mechanisms sure. But it was very much upto you to run. When XP came out most people used dial-up (at least in the UK), after 2002 ADSL internet started to become ubiquitous and computers were on the internet for longer periods.
They had to start baking security into every aspect of the OS. It was one of the reasons Vista came out several years later than planned. They had to pull people from Vista development and move them onto Windows XP SP2.
One of the reasons Vista was such a reviled OS is because the UAC controls broke lots of piece of software which ran under XP, 2000 and 98.
> Software was updated all the time, and it’s much more difficult to do that with locks.
YIt wasn't unusual to run un-patched software that come from a disc for years. You had to manually download patches and run them yourself. A software update / next version could take like 30 minutes or so on 56k dialup to download. If you didn't need to download a patch, you probably didn't.
It was a thing, but it was also a thing to have it disabled or simply not working. XP was famous for its hackability. And web frameworks were also far from what you see today with auto updates. It's hard to describe to people who were not involved how crazy ITsec was back then. It felt like the wild west compared to today. Literally every other DB had a critical unpatched vulnerability. Thankfully Shodan did not exist yet, so the barrier to entry was high for people without a particular skillset (which was also much harder to learn back then). But MSF pushed security awareness pretty hard once people realized how easy it can be if you just collect a bunch of scripts for common exploits in a simple framework that everyone can learn.
Oh, the bugtraq era, when any grade schooler could download a 0day POC and force remote reboot his classmates' laptops. (I'm told)
Grade schoolers didn’t exactly have laptops in the 00s.
Thanks to the largess of a media company (read: school admin golfed with the right people), we had them issued ~97.
A lot of kids learned about cybersecurity and emulator config (and Harvest Moon) because of it, so net win?
Totally true. Also consider that although software can theoretically or technically be patched, sometimes patches just don't exist... the amount of unmaintained but yet useful software is just huge.
It just takes seconds to swap the core on most locks.
Long ago I used to maintain a door lock system. I was responsible for designing a new system to encode the room keys and it became obvious as I worked with the internals that it had a vulnerability that would allow anyone to open any lock from this vendor with the right tool.
When I quietly mentioned this, the response was that everyone knows this but we don’t talk about it.
When Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated with no signs of forced entry on his hotel room, let’s just say it wasn’t surprising. And no, I don’t think these security flaws are some conspiracy or by design - it’s simply the difficulty of updating firmware on 10 year old boards with a 20 year old design with millions of them out in the field. And they cost around $750 a piece to replace and that was back in 2010.
Securing the room's internal physical latch after the assassination was a nice touch.
There's a reason for the different cultures and information asymmetry: in most countries you need a criminal background check to be a locksmith. But not to operate a keyboard.
That only applies to access to modern electronic tools and digital codebooks requiring accounts. Nothing prevented people in the past from buying the physical books used.
Right. I’m in a structured trade right now and learning about _~hF.8f@,8zKub&&@(4’v but we’re not supposed to talk about it. At least they let us use the company computers for personal net stuff.
When my first house was under construction in 2001, I created my own key from the builder’s key. When I finally moved in, my key would then disable the builder’s key. Curious how this work, I disassembled my lock and found that there were (iirc) 8 keys which would open all my neighbors houses, even after they had moved in and had disabled the builder’s key. Of course I rekeyed my house to prevent that vulnerability, but in theory it remains on all my neighbors. I also didn’t disclose the vulnerability.
I don't know about builder's keys from that era, but modern builder's keys aren't vulnerable to this problem. The builder's key uses a deeper cut on one or more pins, but the owner's key can and should be pretty unique. The only real requirement is that there be at least one cut to a high enough number to allow for a builder's key. There's a good video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCW4OnE6Mc
Maybe they used a master key system instead.
"Although a few people have confused my reporting of the vulnerability with causing the vulnerability itself, I can take comfort in a story that Richard Feynman famously told about his days on the Manhattan project. Some simple vulnerabilities (and user interface problems) made it easy to open most of the safes in use at Los Alamos. He eventually demonstrated the problem to the Army officials in charge. Horrified, they promised to do something about it. The response? A memo ordering the staff to keep Feynman away from their safes."
Security through obscurity in a way…
Even as a computer nerd, I find computing culture to be often too radical sometimes.
In the long run, transparency always wins
> On July 7, the company dismissed the lawsuit against McNally instead.
> Proven also made a highly unusual request: Would the judge please seal almost the entire court record—including the request to seal?
Tough at first then running away with the tail between their legs. Typical bullying behavior.
> but Proven complained about a “pattern of intimidation and harassment by individuals influenced by Defendant McNally’s content.”
They have to know it's generated by their own lawsuit and how they approached it, right? They can't be that oblivious to turn around and say "Judge, look at all the craziness this generated, we just have to seal the records!". It's like an ice-cream cone that licks itself.
> the case became a classic example of the Streisand Effect, in which the attempt to censor information can instead call attention to it.
A constant reminder to keep the people who don't know what they are doing (including the owners of the company!) from the social media.
If you want an extreme example of this; go look at the Sacramento startup Sircles. 7+ year old "startup" that has sub $100k revenue after several years but 9 million in debt. The founder has an account there under u/Sirclesapp where he goes off on toxic and insane tirades to anyone who dares say anything but utmost praise at his app. Apparently he stalks their reddit accounts and sends threatening letters to their personal home addresses from his lawyer for "defamation". That I understand he sent one to some ex employees and one to some woman who I think is a paralegal and is now suing them in civil court.
He partnered with some radio program called radradio where the host had a lot of personal issues and the show ultimately got axed. The radio host was known for having issues with alcohol, but they kept partnering with him because he kept shilling their WeFunder. They've raised over $6m in SAFEs but considering they are $9m in debt, haven't broken $100k lifetime revenue after 7 years, and seem to have over a million a year burn rate, it's doubtful that the shares from those SAFEs (if ever executed) would ever be in the money.
> [...] go look at the Sacramento startup Sircles. 7+ year old "startup" that has sub $100k revenue after several years but 9 million in debt.
Going on a tangent:
Depending on your industry, taking a while to see any revenue is common. Eg look into biotech or the people trying to make atomic fusion a reality.
Debt is just as valid a way to finance your company as equity is. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo... for the theory.
> Depending on your industry, taking a while to see any revenue is common.
That is true. But Sircles, which appears to be just another social recommendation app, is not in one of those industries.
Oh, even without looking into it, I would assume that Sircles is probably pretty dodgy. I just meant that SacToHacker's original points against it aren't necessarily bad. But can be damning in the context of their industry, yes!
True. and a screwdriver is as just a valid tool as a hammer. Though their use isn’t always interchangeable .
This is cool. Love little tangential info bombs like this. Thanks.
Cool but Sircles isn't a biotech company. It's a social network. They arn't "trying to make atomic fusion a reality" either.
Oh, definitely. I was just nerding out about finance.
Yes, Sircles is probably pretty dodgy.
That is cool! Sorry for nerding out just then.
Wow, it seems like the whole purpose of the product is grievance based against yelp. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of yelp, but I get the vibe that maybe this person would be even more extractive if given the opportunity
I’m from Sacramento and I know of people who worked at Sircles. It’s comically mismanaged and run by a comic book villian.
The company who sued him is, still, embarrassingly, attempting to hold a social media presence, despite getting exposed as fraudsters and bullies:
https://m.youtube.com/@provenindustries8236
> Proven Is so secure that if they detect a robber trying to lock pick they sue them.
Incredible
They also made sloppy mistakes like naming the Proven owner's partner un-redacted in a document they submitted to the court (which is then available through legal search engines). If they were concerned with privacy they could easily have withheld her name.
The one time security through obscurity would have helped them?
Obscurity is often a valid security tactic, just not all the time and never by itself.
That would be more like: shuffling that document randomly between other documents, or using white font on a white page in Word.
Guy who paid someone to throw a brick through his ex wife's window is insensed at being intimidated.
There is delicious irony in the owner of a lock company being so insecure.
One thing Proven might have done is to analyze the attack. Then see if the lock could be improved to prevent it. Offer exchanges for the old locks (most of which are unlikely to be requested). Instead they resort to Lawyers, refuse to solve the problem and waste everyones time and money.
Shushh, don't tell people about Streisand Effect.
That article just kept getting better and better.
Also:
> “Sucks to see how many people take everything they see online for face value,” one Proven employee wrote. “Sounds like a bunch of liberals lol.”
So when a great product is not a great product, it turns out to be great alone for the fact of being built by republicans.
I think their point was that the lock picking videos were faked. But it’s still a silly comment from the Proven employee.
I’ve also seen people use “liberal” as a literal curse word before. On one “reality show”, a member of the cast broke down while highly intoxicated and started screaming at other people saying:
“You’re worse than a beep! You’re a liberal”
It’s insane just how far the political divide has become.
Othering is easier than improving. An old philosophy professor taught me that at a community college when we started getting on the subject of philosophy in politics. This was probably 20-something years ago, now, but one of the many things that stuck with me from his teaching, and makes even more sense now than it did then.
Surely this philosophy has great value if you still believe your adversary is misguided but still well-intentionned
But if your adversary is lying knowingly to everyone saying you are a criminal and should be locked up or deported then I wonder what's there to improve
The game of cooperation only works if you're not playing with someone who is constantly trying to exploit your cooperation attempts
Surely both sides are responsible even though it only started happening once a certain political figure popped up started calling his meekest opponents murderers and criminals and having crowds chant for them to be locked up
You're right, it's the other side that's feeding the political divide!
I wouldn’t say it’s a recent phenomenon. It’s just reached absurd levels.
As for who’s responsible, there’s plenty of blame to go around. However it’s hard to deny that conduct of one party is far far less professional than the other party.
I honestly think politicians should be thrown in jail for lying. But that will never happen because they’re all too busy being corrupt; the entire lot of them.
Is “Basket of Deplorables” ringing any bells?
That was proven correct, so what are you saying the problem is?
If I remember right, she said that half his supporters were a basket of deplorables. This right after a study was published suggesting that about half of conservatives were unconsciously racist.
So she wasn't wrong, but saying that out loud was pretty stupid.
This was a once unscripted statement that she never repeated again her entire campaign. She expressed regret immediately after making it (not after losing) explaining how it was grossly generalistic but stood by that it does describe a large chunk of Trump's base.
Can you name one time Trump immediately regretted what he said about the Left and explained that it was an overgeneralization? Also again, in Clinton's case it was a single unscripted statement. By contrast Trump has a pattern of calling opponents vermin, the anti-christ, evil, warning of a bloodbath to come... Yea the left's attacks on the right just don't seem nearly as bad especially if it is just being called "deplorable" once. I could write a book that is just hateful Trump quotes. Ganna print it and give it to my son one day as inspiration for how to be an honourable leader. /s
I say all this as a Canadian that would have voted for Trump in 2016 if I could have.
That was probably the final straw for me. Well, one of the final straws. Imagine trying to politicise this.
Yeah, I noticed that. I’d put money on not a single person in this whole dispute being a liberal at all.
> A constant reminder to keep the people who don't know what they are doing (including the owners of the company!) from the social media.
I'm just guessing based on the contents of the article, but it sounds like a typical "hard-fist founder-run company" so good luck convincing the founder to not sit on social media and argue their points.
also known as the 'double down on stupid' and 'triple down on stupid'
We recently had an example of that with Automattic and the WordPress drama. Where the founder was here on HN hurting his own legal case despite people here repeatedly told him to stop posting for his own sake and asking him to talk to his lawyers.
Seeing someone post here a screenshot of case filings that included a screenshot of that founder's HN comments thereafter was golden.
This is known as the “Randy Pitchford” social media strat.
I once worked for a company that kept its passwords locked in a safe. One day, all other copies of the password were lost, and they needed it, but the safe's key could not be found.
They expensed a sledgehammer and obtained the password through physical modification of the safe using a careful application of force. Some employees complained that meant the safe wasn't... well, safe.
The security team replied "Working as Intended" - no safe is truly safe, it's just designed to slow down an attacker. At that moment, I was enlightened.
I worked on port facilities. Everything corrodes quite quickly, and locks and keys need to be replaced fairly regularly. Once, there was a problem with key management following the replacement of locks on a building containing emergency diesel generators.
The doors were heavy, 45-minute fire-rated security doors, aka "Fucking heavy doors that can cut your fingers just from inertia or wind.".
These doors had to be opened quickly in the middle of the night. There was no locksmith on call, but there were boilermakers. Supports and a chain were welded to the doors, and a T-Rex container mover was used to carefully pull the doors off the building.
The whole operation took less than an hour. Physical security is a matter of time and resources.
However, for good safes, there's a rating on how long it takes.[1] Ratings start at TL-15, for 15 minute resistance against hand tools. They go up to TXTL-60: torch, explosive and tool resisting for 60 minutes. Safes with these ratings will have a metal plate indicating UL testing and approval.
If there are any rated safes on Amazon, I can't find them. A real TL-30 1 cubic foot safe sells for about $2000 and weighs about 500 pounds. Amazon sells something that looks similar for about $100 and weighs about 15 pounds.
There's a separate set of ratings for fire protection, from the NFPA. Fire safes are much simpler. They have more insulating materials and less steel.
[1] https://www.vaultandsafe.com/vault-safe-classifications/
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (movie).
Obligatory xkcd
https://xkcd.com/538/
please stop mention this anymore, I gonna crazy
Please mention/link it even more. All security nerds _need_ to see this comic once a month.
Why? Everyone knows about rubber-hose cryptanalysis. The whole point of cryptography is to reduce them to this.
If they want our information, they should have to become literal tyrants, send armed men after us and violate human rights in order to get it. Not push a button on a computer to tap into their warrantless global dragnet surveilance networks and suddenly have our entire private lives revealed to them on a computer screen.
Yes, people will fold if they are kidnapped and tortured. That's not news. Forcing them to stoop to that is the entire design. Once the situation has escalated to that level, you are justified in killing them in self-defense. Torturers don't make a habit of allowing their victims to live and testify about it.
>Everyone knows
Don't make me link 1053 ;)
Petition to ban all xkcd links and references effective immediately.
It's really pretty stupid. Your encryption is there in case your laptop gets stolen. If you have people willing and able to kidnap and torture you to get your data, you have much bigger problems than the fact that they'll probably get it.
once a month???? I literally see this once every 2 days
every comment that has little bit content of security/cryptography/secure/blockchain/CIA etc always mention this particular entry
Just wait until you discover '10,000'.
It’s tonyhart7’s lucky day https://xkcd.com/1053/
Why? There are actually valuable takeaways from this.
One would be that people are the weak point in your security system. If all your organizational security hinges on one guy not folding, that guy is the natural target. Whether a literal 5$ wrench is used or they bribe him makes no difference.
That means you could consider shaping your org in a way that is resistent against this by e.g. decentralizing secrets. That means instead of bringing a "5$ wrench" to one person (which may even work without raising suspicion), you now need to convince multiple people at once which is much more unlikely to work without being detected.
All you need to do is s/wrench/social engineering/ and you will understand exactly why it's such an effective--if not infallible--vector of attack.
The only defence is to not have the secret at all.
In a similar way sometimes the best way to protect data is not to collect it of if you collect it not keep it around in its raw form.
As for secrets, you sometimes need to have them for very good reasons. If you can reach the same goals without a secret while having the same protection going without a secret is a good choice.
But let's assume if you want the cryptographic protections of confidentiality (through encryption), authenticity (through signatures) and integrity (also through signatures or hashes) chances are someone somewhere has to store a secret. If that someone isn't you it is someone else (or something else).
But if you want to protect data with encryption and you should be the only one who can decrypt it I don't really know how you would do it without any form of secret.
https://xkcd.com/538/ LOOK AT IT
I thought maybe cwsx was posting this often but that doesn't seem to be the case. Is it that that xkcd is basically a HN trope at this point?
If you do a site search you'll find 700+ comments linking to it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the number one most frequently linked page in HN history.
And Randall deserves EVERY single one of them, IMHO!
Slow down -- sometimes. But for the most part, locks are more like envelopes. They produce evidence of tampering.
Which is why McNally (the youtube in the title) demonstrating poor locks that can be opened by simple bypass attacks like shimming or whacking is especially damning for those locks. You can always destroy a lock with brute force, preferably power tools. You also spend years honing your lock-picking skills and open any keyed lock in less than a minute, but good locks make this a difficult craft. But shimming a padlock or whacking a masterlock with another masterlock takes no skill, doesn't leave evidence and allows you to relock it when you are done. It defeats every protection the lock was supposed to provide
Yep. There’s a safe engineer on YouTube who was explaining the history of dial combination locks commonly used for government filing cabinets, etc. He pointed out that you can drill them in minutes but you’d need several hours to make good the damage such that the break in wouldn’t be easily detected. The combined time is therefore the ‘strength’ of the security. (Also, why it might be a good idea to have open sensors on safes, cabinets, etc)
Not sure if you're referring to DeviantOllam or someone else, but here is his awesome talk on safes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z_Jv7vuiqg
He is a great source of knowledge on physical security for laymen and professionals alike, and leaves an impression of an extremely amicable and well-rounded human being.
> They produce evidence of tampering.
That's why one of the more advanced challenges in lock picking is to minimize the amount of evidence you leave. Eg even a normal pick can leave some scratches on and in the lock in different places than a normal key.
If I remember right, 'bumping' is an interesting technique partially because it leaves even less of a trace.
Yup, I've got a three bolt break in resistant front door in my house, but right next to it is a window that can be breached in .5 seconds by yeeting a brick though it. But both will leave traces if they've been forced so my home owner's insurance should cover any losses / damages.
That seems to be a rather weak security, especially relying on “…should cover…” to save you, which I presume you have also never been able to test. And that’s without addressing common mistakes like not realizing the policy is for cash value and requires evidence; which people do not have, is not updated, or is not compliant. That can leave people with effectively no coverage at all, with the only test being run in deployed systems… the first time you check if your arms supplier provided quality arms, is when you’re facing the enemy trying to kill your at the front lines.
"Having windows in your home is weak security": The trade-off between usability and security incarnate.
Some windows are more resilient than others.
When I lived in a less than stellar neighbourhood in Germany, we had windows that you couldn't throw a brick through. (Some tougher than usual glass.)
No. You can get security glass. There’s no trade off.
You’re right, they should board up all their windows or live in a concrete box.
Ever heard of security glass? No need to be snarky and unlikable.
Most locks are there to keep honest people honest.
From what I remember, the quality of a safe is measured in minutes, with "15-minute" safes being OK for general use.
It kinda fits how I feel sometimes.
Folks come up with some super secure idea for securing my account and I think "Yeah but maybe I forget the thing ... I do still want to access it."
When the theory hits reality with a sledgehammer
Excellent koan
reminds me of how a few years ago it became fashionable to say that "walls don't work"
I mean theoretically ever the hardest encryption just buys you time. That time may be long past the lifetime of our own sun, but it just buys you time.
The same is true for locks and safes as well.
Being one of the few people who never had their bicycle stolen in a city where this is common, the trick that always works is: Just make your lock harder to attack than other locks that safeguard comparable things.
Unless your stuff is unique and high stakes that means regular criminals won't pick you since the surrounding stuff looks more intersting and is the easier target.> Good lock + old looking bicycle = no theft
"I parked my old, crappy bike and started locking it. Some guy went past and said, "Don't worry, love - no-one will nick that", and a passing crackhead said "I fuckin' would", and we three strangers shared a moment of humour together. "
I think 'one time pad' encryption can't be decrypted unless you get the key, even given infinite time.
Depends on the length of the key vs the message, but if the pad is 100 percent and has something approaching a random distribution, and the message length is suitably padded, and the results roll over in a modulo that is close to the information distribution, then all valid results become close to equally probable, so, while you may decode a message, it is very unlikely to be the message that was sent.
Still lots of ways to crack a poorly executed OTP.
I’d say
> Under questioning, however, one of Proven’s employees admitted that he had been able to duplicate McNally’s technique, leading to the question from McNally’s lawyer: “When you did it yourself, did it occur to you for one moment that maybe the best thing to do, instead of file a lawsuit, was to fix [the lock]?”
Sometimes a single question tells you how the entire case is going to go.
Back in 2007, I published the first YouTube bypass of the Master Lock #175 (very common 4-digit code lock), using a paperclip.
After the video reached 1.5M views (over a couple years), the video was eventually demonetized (no official reason given). I suspect there was a similarly-frivolous DMCA / claim, but at that point in my life I didn't have any money (was worth negative) so I just accepted YouTube's ruling.
Eventually shut down the account, not wanting to help thieves bypass one of the most-common utility locks around — but definitely am in a position now where I understand that videos like mine and McNally's force manufacturers to actually improve their locks' securities/mechanisms.
It is lovely now to see that the tolerances on the #175 have been tightened enough that a paperclip no longer defeats the lock (at least non-destructively); but thin high-tensile picks still do the trick (of bypassing the lock) via the exact same mechanism.
Locks keep honest people honest, but to claim Master's products high security is inherently dishonest (e.g. in their advertising). Thievery is about ease of opportunity; if I were stealing from a jobsite with multiple lockboxes, the ones with Master locks would be attacked first (particularly wafer cylinders).
Actual thieves don't give a shit to learn lock picking, they can use a fine toothed sawzall or oxy-acetylene torch and defeat any lock just as fast without having to youtube the particular brand.
I used to rent a storage unit. I lost the key to it, and went to the manager. He came back to the unit with a small battery powered grinder. Cut the padlock's loop through in a few seconds.
Most locks are only good if the attacker doesn't have any tools.
I bought a giant pair of bolt cutters a while back for a use case other than bolt cutting (shark fishing; cut the big hook instead of putting your hand near the mouth).
I never caught any big sharks like I thought, but now my wife runs a restaurant and occasionally employees just don't show up to work and leave things in their lockers. Once in a while it's clear it's to be annoying (locking supplies in their locker).
Never met a padlock or combination lock I couldn't shear through easily. Totally has paid for itself.
Now, for a similar price, you can buy a hydraulic cutter powered by a hand pump. They also come with replaceable jaws so you dont wreck your cutters when attacking a hard lock.
https://www.amazon.com/Lothee-Hydraulic-Cutting-Portable-Han...
And there are powered models too. The 3-foot snippers are long out of date for thieves.
I remember the faghetbouditt of Kryptonite that broke the blades of that exact hydraulic cutter.
Generally speaking, the hasps on employee locks aren't big enough to hold anything truly sturdy... I doubt even the most resistant lock you could put on a typical locker hasp would hold up to the giant 3 foot bolt cutters.
Oh this is about double what I paid. But good to know!
There's quite a few, many hardened locks will bend or mar bolt cutters... we're not taking bolt cutters off of the rigs because they're relatively small but a K12 and a pair of pliers is way more reliable.
> Most locks are only good if the attacker doesn't have any tools.
The Louvre security staff similarly just learned this lesson.
For surprise of tool used the saw vs safe are the best:
https://youtu.be/2guvwQvElA8
The main thing locks do is make it noisy to get in.
To be fair to Sentry Safe, this product is designed to be resistant to fire. A better name for this product would be ‘fire resistant box’ instead of ‘fire safe’ but that’s what they call it for marketing reasons.
A hardened metal safe designed to be resistant to cutting can still be cut through, just not in seconds with a screamer saw (trade name for a metal cutting circular saw)
If you want truly secure, encase your metal box in concrete like John Wick. Access is difficult but security is high :)
> encase your metal box in concrete
FYI, most safes already have a decently thick concrete layer — that’s most of why safes are heavy! (Or, I guess you could say, adding a concrete layer is cheaper than making the steel thicker.)
But they also have a rubber or foam (often styrofoam in cheaper safes) layer, to “smooth out” the force from a sledgehammer, jackhammer, or just dropping the thing out the window.
And a layer of compressible wet(!) sand, to spread out the point stress from a hammer and chisel, impact gun, gunshot, or small explosive configured for concussive force. (The goal here is essentially to replicate the behavior of a bulletproof vest.)
Plus, they often contain a layer to bind and foul and dull (or even break) the teeth of drill bits and reciprocating/chain/band saws. This can be any number of things — low-melting-point plastics, recycled broken glass, etc — but look up “proteus” for a fun read.
If the safe’s designer is clever, just a few materials can serve several of these functions at once. But more is always better. Which is why good safes (and vaults) are so dang thick. It’s not to solve one problem really well; it’s to mitigate N problems acceptably well, for a frighteningly large value of N.
It's fun looking at the machinery of old fashioned bank vaults. Very impressive.
So carefully applied thermite to defeat all of them at once? Probably not directly down to drip into the valuables, but some tangent application.
Even not dripping directly on to the goods, there's not a lot of stuff that you would be interested in getting out of a safe, but you will still be interested in even after being exposed to thermite. The list is basically "precious metals" and not much more, though that is admittedly a valid entry on the list.
In an analog to the somewhat frequent observation on HN that if you don't care whether the code is correct I can make it run arbitrarily quickly, if you don't care if the contents of the safe survive there's a lot of high-energy ways to blast it to smithereens. This is generally not considered a problem to be solved with a safe, though. If you want to prevent "being blasted to smithereens" that you'll need a completely different approach.
so... if i were a suitably evil billionaire, would i be able to shop for a safe protected by a layer of compressed mustard gas, that is released upon attempted breaching?
This would be a Booby Trap and is illegal, so it's not worth it for that chance of going to prison no matter the value in the safe, if you are a billionaire. It would be hard to find someone willing to help you.
Is it still a booby trap if the safe displays a prominent warning, "CAUTION: EMITS DEADLY GAS WHEN DAMAGED"?
Depends on your lawyer.
The law is someone less picky about armed guards, though, so you may just want to pay some thugs to watch your safe.
Gandalf - “But men are better than gates, and no gate will endure against our Enemy if men desert it.”
That's too bad - life would be better if we had a few fewer criminals around.
Is it perhaps called after the movie Screemers ? Some of the combat robots had circular saws, but they used to to cut through people instead of locks.
Unless they have an inductive heater.
Powered by what?
Battery for stealth.
https://youtu.be/VTIWcK14tQE?si=uNNbgWgASpAcgStB
With these locks you do not even need a grinder, just some really small tools that fits in your pocket, for example a "rake".
See https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ (LockPickingLawyer).
To be fair, a lot of people don't have tools.
Just found out my unit was robbed. The thieves ignored the lock and just destroyed the unit's latch which the padlock secured.
There went Uncanny X-Men 94 through 300.
A car jack across the door frame at latch height works to.
That's exactly what I've seen too, either a grinder or just a crow bar.
Aha, a legitimate use for those things!
Saw the same, except it was bolt cutters.
That is a subset of thieves. There are still plenty of situations where it is beneficial to have a lock that can't be opened in 5 seconds with a paperclip, like a school or gym locker room for example. Nobody is bringing a sawzall into the gym while it's open.
Similarly, I know the lock on my front door is not going to stop anyone who really wants to get inside, but it does stop drunk people or bored kids from wandering in because it's easy.
> Nobody is bringing a sawzall into the gym while it's open.
They are bringing in bolt cutters to locker rooms. The locker metal loop that the lock threads through is easier to cut than the lock. I've first hand seen lockers destroyed to remove the lock. Not while the break in is happening but it's easy piece the crime scene back together to understand their tools.
Manual bolt cutters are almost silent except for the "thunk" when it breaks the metal, and there are even battery operated bolt cutters that are quick and compact.
> I've first hand seen lockers destroyed to remove the lock.
A neighbor secured his expensive bike with a hefty lock and chain around a tree in our courtyard. Bad guys brought a saw. I still miss that tree.
I'm convinced there is basically no foolproof way to secure a bicycle in public.
I've seen everything from braided steel being cut clean to combination bike locks getting picked (by the attacker actually figuring out the correct combination, not just brute-forcing it apart or wangjangling a paperclip).
They just need to steal 1 good bicycle to more than pay off the cost of their equipment. One stolen bicycle could feed a family for a week. In some place like the Bay Area where $1000 bicycles abound, the economics are just too appealing.
Sure there is, but you need to understand the variables involved. How expensive is the bike, how safe is he area, how long are you leaving it there for?
At its worst, people get their fancy bikes robbed as they're riding them in big cities like London; at its best, nobody in small villages locks their bikes because they all know each other.
In terms of locks, general advice is to get an angle-grinder resistant U-lock and lock it through the rear frame triangle+wheel+some solid object.
Since a U-lock like that is impossible to defeat with anything that's not a power tool, and you'd need to spend several minutes grinding through it [0] [1], most thieves will not bother. If they cut through whatever the bike is locked to, they still have a bike that's locked to itself.
For extra security you may want to do the same with the front wheel using something like a chain lock. Locking the saddle is also a good idea. Locks with alarms that notify you could be a decent idea too. And/or just get bike insurance.
[0]: https://youtu.be/v_0DB3gBM3Y?t=475
[1]: https://youtu.be/LD32NMCGDF0?t=2440
From what I've heard, the way to go about it is to not have a very nice bike, make it identifiable and loud (eg ripped up neon tape and graffiti), and then use both a chain lock as well as a U lock that're both thick enough. Also perhaps throw on extra locks to make other bikes look attractive.
Of course none of these work if the thief is part of a ring that is targeting your bike because it's high value.
> use both a chain lock as well as a U lock that're both thick enough
No, thickness is an irrelevant property to an angle grinder. You're adding something like a second of grinding per kg of material. Makes no sense. The trick is to use grinder-resistant locks. Those extend grinding time to minutes.
Even those are variable in quality. Do you have a lock that takes 2 grinding discs to cut through or one that takes 26 grinding discs to cut through?
https://thebestbikelock.com/security/angle-grinder-proof-bik...
Or a tough chain slack enough that it’s hard to press the grinder against.
I think there might be a common myth that having a tatty looking bike means it won’t get stolen.
Unfortunately I don’t think a lot of bike thefts are opportunistic and the value of the bike isn’t the motivating factor.
I don't doubt that a bad looking bike isn't the biggest deterent. But it's the combination of factors that's practically helpful.
A tatty bike with 2 (or even 3!) high quality locks is a much lower target than a half decent looking bike with just a single cheap lock.
The more opportunistic the thief, the better your chances of not getting your bike stolen if you have 2 more locks than everyone around you. Heck, I'd argue, due to their unusual nature of being (not) used as a lock, a dozen zip ties might be more effective than a 3rd of 4th lock, simply because no thief is expecting to encounter it. They want a quick getaway, spending 20 seconds per tie * 10 ties is likely much longer than what it's worth for them, especially if your bike isn't that nice.
I think the most stolen cars are Hyundais and Toyotas (and maybe F-150s, these days).
They are often stolen for parts.
I don’t think bikes are stolen for parts, but commodity bikes are probably a big target.
Sorry there’s a (hopefully) obvious typo in what I wrote.
I 100% agree with you, most bike thefts are opportunistic.
I know that high end bikes do get stripped for parts but I think that’s got to be mostly after they are taken and pretty rare.
There’s been some raids in London where they found scrapyards full of stolen bikes. Most are still whole. Even those stolen to order.
Surely Hyundais (in the US at least) top the list because of how easy they've been historically to steal?
There is a new generation of bike locks which have the shackle wrapped in a composite coating that mostly destroys angle grinder cutting discs and similar cutting tools. This is likely the best current outdoor bike locking approach as it requires thieves to have either 1) lots of spare discs or 2) a torch or 3) picking skills, and very few thieves have any of those.
I have a Brompton and no bike lock for this reason. When I’m on my Brompton it goes where I go.
Actually I do have a “cafe lock”. Its purpose is just to slow someone down enough for me to catch them on foot. I’ve once successfully used the strap on my helmet for the same purpose in Barcelona too.
The illusion of security is really all you have.
In Japan they have bike theft sorted with mandatory registration with the local police force. A sticker on the bike and a corresponding bit of paper in the wallet provides proof of ownership, which may be requested by police at any time.
This costs money to administer but it means that nobody in Japan needs to overly worry about their bicycle being stolen. Huge locks are not needed, nor is GPS tracking or third party registration schemes.
The idea of getting a 'hack bike' that looks undesirable is often touted as a solution to cycle theft in the West. However, thieves just want money, so the 'hack bike' that can be easily sold trumps the hard-to-sell expensive bike if money is needed now, for tonight's high. More money can be tomorrow's problem.
[flagged]
Self driving cars won’t fix the real problem - cars take up too much space for the number of people they carry in any reasonably dense city. I’d be quite confident bike lanes should be improving traffic by taking cars off the road more than they are causing “headaches” for traffic.
There are well studied effects that show good bike infrastructure gets more people (especially the young, old, women etc.) cycling who would be too fearful to cycle in traffic, because separate cycle lanes are both in reality far safer but also feel far more safe.
And bike lanes are actually really good for mobility scooters and other kinds of ways for elderly and disabled to get around!
the fat controller laughed, “you are wrong”.
* https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0
* https://youtu.be/2DOd4RLNeT4
Slightly disappointed that neither of these videos are about Thomas the Tank Engine.
My school had bolt cutter just sitting in the locker rooms because kids forgot their combinations.
Most people would be absolutely astounded how bold you can get with a safety vest and/or a clipboard, and how passive most people are to an obvious suspicious situation.
I have used a grinder to take off a bike lock (I owned the bike) in broad daylight in Downtown Denver on a main street. A local business even allowed me to use their power outlets. Not one person questioned me or asked me to see proof of ownership. I was fully prepared to have to deal with cops or at least a good samaritan, but nope, plenty of people watched me do the exact thing a bike thief would do and didn't ask any questions.
Used liquid nitrogen to freeze and break a lock off my bike once. The one person who saw us was like "Whatcha doing? Cool, can I watch?"
> Most people would be absolutely astounded how bold you can get with a safety vest and/or a clipboard, and how passive most people are to an obvious suspicious situation.
I don't think they'd be surprised at all.
What the hell am I supposed to do if I see someone stealing a bike or whatever? Stop them? Hell no, if they have tools then it's a good bet they have weapons. Call the cops? They don't care; recently they don't even pretend to care.
Pretty much all you can do is say, "knock it off" and maybe they stop (they won't).
You have to hope a stubborn, but surprisingly fit, 60+ year old man is nearby to assert himself into the situation and tell the thief to bugger off.
Don't do this and don't let anyone else do this. Intervening in a crime in progress is likely to lead to immediate execution. Even police squads get shot at, and they are armed to the teeth and well trained.
That mentality is precisely what lets criminals gain the power to commit crime with impunity.
In any shithole society in which that's become the attitude, the solution is citizens becoming at least as brutal themselves.
That approach is going to get people killed.
If you're not ready, able and willing to whip out a pistol and instantly put two bullets right between the eyes of each one of those criminals, you're probably better off pulling out your phone and covertly dialing 911... After you have gotten as far away from those people as possible.
> the solution is citizens becoming at least as brutal themselves
Becoming a brutal, violent person capable of ending another human being's life is a long process. It's not a switch that people just flip. Especially civilized people from developed countries where it is likely they will go their entire lives without experiencing violence.
Even if they do manage it, they'll have to pay the price. There are professional soldiers out there who are traumatized by the lives they have taken. Normal citizens will have it that much worse... And that's if they don't screw it up and end up going to prison for excessive use of force which can easily turn self-defense into cold-blooded murder.
> In any shithole society
I'm brazilian. I live in exactly that kind of shithole society. You should see the hilariously violent liveleak videos this country produces. Way too many of them are the result of people trying to fight their way out of a robbery, or intervening in a crime in progress. I remember this particularly cartoonish video where a child is running away from something, pistol in hand, and some guy randomly decides to trip him up. He gets up, shoots the guy dead and resumes his escape as though absolutely nothing had just happened.
This is a country where the population is prone to brutally lynching criminals, by the way. Ironically, the drug traffickers are the most effective at it. They routinely dispense brutal violence against the lesser criminals who hurt their drug trade by scaring off potential customers. It's gotten to the point they have formed parallel governments, complete with laws, tribunals and taxes.
I get it. The sheer audacity of criminals is offensive and the impunity is truly soul crushing. This sense of impunity permeates the life of every brazilian. It feels like there's no justice. I'm just saying that if you aim to fight this impunity, you need a far more sophisticated approach than telling random bystanders to be "fit" and "stubborn". That sort of thing will accomplish nothing but the eventual deaths of well meaning people.
Yes I assumed you were Brazilian, which is where most of the "off duty cop" shooting videos come from - sounds like a Mad Max state. But in other countries, people don't get executed for standing up to crooks.
Of course, if you ever get a Bukele in power all the leftists will be out in force crying about the poor criminal's human rights etc - always a good reminder that these situations are intentionally inflicted from above.
> But in other countries, people don't get executed for standing up to crooks.
That belief will get people killed. A simple web search yields numerous results. For instance:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/home-depot-worker-fatally-shot-ca...
> if you ever get a Bukele in power all the leftists will be out in force crying about the poor criminal's human rights etc
Current president of Brazil literally makes excuses for them. "I'm so tired of watching people die just because they robbed a phone", he says. "It was just to buy some beer", as though crime was an actual legitimate profession. That is the absolute state of this country. Mad Max would be an improvement over this shithole. In the Mad Max universe it's literally kill or be killed but you don't have leftists worshipping the criminals and shitting all over the "fascist" police defending them.
Police is powerless to stop it. If they try, they are tried and imprisoned by the same government that hired them to do it. It is already common knowledge that military police is one of the worst career choices you can make. The country is losing police officers at a rate of thousands per year. Not enough people are signing up for this shit. Meanwhile, drug gangs dominate over a quarter of our territory. The current speculation is that they finance judges and politicians. In other words, it is not only possible but probable that this is a literal narcostate.
At some point, it becomes war. The criminals are sufficiently organized that they should be treated as enemy combatants and gunned down on sight. Trump ordering US ships to nuke drug boats out of existence is the correct course of action. The only problem is the "civilized" people who cry about it instead of thanking him for his service and thanking god they have people willing to commit extreme violence against others in order to protect them from the evils of this world. That is a luxury I would love to have myself. Instead I live in a extremely leftist country where drug traffickers spray paint threats on people's homes, giving them 24 hours to leave on pain of death.
Sadly the power of drug gangs in Latin America and Brazil can be traced as much to the war on drugs itself as the lack of war on drugs.
I do believe your assertion is correct that literal war would probably be better than the status quo, but regulating powerful drugs as basically "sell to adults and it needs to meet some sort of purity standard" would bring the drug trafficking portion of gangs into looking more like Petrobas than Comando Vermelho.
As a doctor I can't support full legalization of drugs. Nobody who's seen up close what opioid addiction does to a person ever could. It's not even a question of allowing people to ruin their own lives. The drugs themselves absolutely cause crime all on their own. Many violent robberies are perpetrated by people whose reward systems are so warped by drugs they'd sell their own mother for their next dose. I had one such person as one of my neighbors for decades.
I'll admit I'm unable to fully calculate the total devastation between the three of
(1) Absolute war against drug traffickers
(2) Full legalization
(3) status quo
I'd rank (3) as the absolute worst. I don't see (1) nor (2) as avoiding crime and infliction upon innocents, though, rather choosing which lesser poison to pick.
I claim (1) is the only possible response. We're already at war, and innocents are already dying.
I claim that the drug gangs have launched a stealthy secession. They have gotten sufficiently organized that they have laws, tribunals, taxes and territory. Is gang territory really brazilian territory? I don't think so. In such areas police is executed on sight, like enemy combatants. The brazilian government is not really there guaranteeing any of your so called rights. So are you really a brazilian citizen if you live in gang territory? Don't think so. These drug gangs have formed a government so barbarous they kill you if you don't pay your taxes.
When São Paulo tried to secede last century, war was declared and they were massacred. So why are these gangs tolerated? It's just a completely stupid status quo. This government needs to recognize the gravity of the situation and react accordingly. Instead the government and the gangs are merging into one.
I'm intrigued by your take, and it is quite convincing.
What are the effects you predict would happen if drugs were legalized, therefore eliminating most of the profits of drug traffickers, and simultaneously declaring war on the groups controlling seceded territory?
What's your calculus on the over under of fighting a war against drug-funded vs non-funded drug traffickers? I'm willing to take at face that they are de facto seceded and have already started a war, but I don't see how it can exclude (2) since even if you defeated them there would still be yet the same underlying incentives and the seceding drug traffickers could emerge again.
Legalization depends on the drug. We could certainly afford to be more lax than we are now. We could legalize and control the use of many drugs. Certainly not all. Drugs like fentanyl cannot be allowed to circulate freely. Even if we completely ignore the safety of the individual, the safety of society as a whole is threatened by such drugs.
Legalization will wipe out the drug gang operations due to simple economics. I don't think criminals can compete with actual pharmaceutical laboratories operating in the clear. Drugs would be cheaper and higher quality. In fact I seriously doubt drug gangs would support legalization of drugs. It would destroy their ridiculously high profitability. Their prices would be squeezed. They'd have to compete on quality and price. They wouldn't be able to eliminate the competition, impose cartels and control prices. Drug companies get rich due to patents which are government-granted monopolies, once they expire it's a literal race to the bottom, you actually need regulation in order to protect consumers. Some drugs actually disappear from the market because they are too cheap to be profitable.
Drug gangs are the career path of the favela denizens. Drug operations have lots of "employees" and they pay ridiculously well. Wiping them out via economic or military means will also wipe out all of those "jobs". It will do nothing to solve the underlying problem of a poor and disenfranchised people forgotten by society. They're likely to turn to other forms of crime if society doesn't integrate them, and it probably won't.
The hope is that whatever criminal activity they turn to will not be as profitable as the drug trade. Robbery isn't that big a problem in the grand scheme of things, drug gangs moving billions and billions of dollars absolutely is. All wars come down to money. Make enough money and you can have better equipment than police, militaries. You can raise armies, just like the middle ages. You can hire actual professional soldiers to train your men. Crime that's too profitable is literally a matter of war. Common criminals are a thorn on our side but in the grand scheme of things they are mere nuisances. Well-funded criminals are an existential threat for civilized society.
War on these groups would require enormous political capital. Television networks would probably have to spend years manufacturing consent for it. The fact is left has infiltrated the entire country and they practically worship these "victims of society". Literally days ago we were forced to listen to our president say that drug traffickers are victims of their consumers. I have no idea what it takes to reverse this sort of brainwashing but whatever it is we'll need lots of it.
If by some miracle the military is deployed against the drug gangs, the gangs will be routed. It's happened before and will happen again. Drug gangs do not have the training, the discipline, the sheer organization required to stand up to actual armed forces. Even our pathetic military has managed to prevail against them. It's the politicians who get in the way. There's no point in "pacifying" an area and then retreating from it, thereby allowing the enemy to occupy it again.
Find a way out then man.
Believe me, there are a large number of countries where, if someone was shot for standing up to a crime, it would be national news for months. Not in the Americas, obviously, but they exist.
The drug war is the stupidest thing humans have ever done. It literally fuels the criminals, and even entire criminal states like north Korea. State illegalisaion (mostly the US) of drugs is to put guns right into the hands of gangs and create competing states. Drugs should both be 100% legal - so they cost the same as sugar, gutting the money that empowers the gangs - and simultaneously drug users should be pushed to the edges of society with wide open discrimination.
Sure, don't get yourself hurt, but also don't live in irrational fear. Intervening in a crime in progress has never led to my execution, so it seems that likely is the wrong assessment of chance.
I have stopped bike thieves, car break-ins, and harassment in multiple cities in North America. I have stopped a racist situation escalating into an attack on a subway in Rotterdam, and stopped a pickpocket in Barcelona. I have shooed away people clearly up to no good in Central and South America. Certainly there was the possibility of violence, but the worst of it in reality was criminals cussing at me as they retreated.
If you don't feel comfortable with direct confrontation, something as simple as yelling "I already called the cops" has worked, or you know, actually calling the cops is an option.
I'm well aware that there are parts of the world where intervening will get you into trouble (and have been in situations where I have held back), but I also believe pretty strongly that doing the right thing is a virtuous feedback loop, and the risks do not outweigh the benefits.
I don't want to live in a world where good people won't do the right thing out of fear. So I choose not to live in that world by being a good person that does the right thing.
> I'm well aware that there are parts of the world where intervening will get you into trouble (and have been in situations where I have held back)
You clearly have more street smarts than the average person. The average person doesn't know when to hold back. They will say and do dumb things, and they will be killed.
There are examples right there in your comment.
> the worst of it in reality was criminals cussing at me as they retreated
You allowed them to leave even though they were insulting you, thereby avoiding violence.
Plenty of people out there who would do the opposite of what you did: they'd go out of their way to insult and humiliate the criminals as they were leaving. "Teach them a lesson", as they say. This can easily escalate the situation into lethal force.
If you insult a man in front of his peers, tell him he's a pussy right in front of his friends, you almost leave him no choice but to come back and escalate just to prove you wrong. It seems obvious but there's plenty of people out there who have died over disrespect.
> something as simple as yelling "I already called the cops"
You were smart enough to back up your threat before confronting the criminals.
Plenty of people out there who threaten the criminal with the 911 call itself. "Stop or I'll call the cops". Not only is it a direct challenge to the criminal, it also provides them with the solution to their problem: kill the guy and he won't call the cops.
It all seems obvious when we're academically discussing this stuff here but in a rapidly escalating, potentially violent situation where emotions and adrenaline are running high, people will do and say all kinds of stupid shit. And they are going to die for it.
How did we come to this as a society.
Anarcho-tyranny. In places like Brazil or California, thief is armed at will with ease, person defending themselves instead have to pass licensing and background check which is difficult for poor people or those convicted of BS crimes like possessing a pot plant 20 years ago when they lived in Texas.
Thief only faces lukewarm prospects at prosecution, and moves around from address to address, and stranger-on-stranger homicide conviction rate in places like Chicago well below 50%. Honest citizen has mortgage, child in school ,and a day job, very easy for police to fuck with them if they dare fight back, which makes criminals even more violent and bold as they rely on many of them overwhelming the tiny minority that will fight back.
Yeah I know, but how did we collectively decided to be in this situation? Aliens didn't impose this bs on us, we voted and accepted it somehow.
Lack of violence.
All of civilization exists due to the threat of violence. There's no need to negotiate peacefully when you can just take what you want. It's the violence that makes it happen. Negotiate, because if you don't there's no telling who's gonna be left standing.
If people are breaking locks and stealing property in plain sight right in front of other people, it's because they think society has become so soft they won't do anything about it.
And frankly, the average person won't. They'll probably just stand there shocked at the event unfolding before them. Or they'll try to "stand up" to the criminal, only to end up insulting his masculinity or something, thereby getting themselves killed for the insult. Yes, criminals kill people who disrespect them.
If you're gonna do this, you have to be prepared to use lethal force against another human being. The vast majority of people are not. They're better off calling the cops, whose entire purpose is to be that person.
> If you're gonna do this, you have to be prepared to use lethal force against another human being.
Many people, me included, would gladly do that, if they were allowed to. The problem is that when dust settle, the criminal will remain a criminal with one more record in his file, but the whole legal system will steamroll me if I don't precisely calculate force in split second and apply 3N more than absolute necessary minimum.
Here in Canada there were cases when people defended themselves and ended up in legal kafkaesque hell, imposed by country. Even after acquitted of all charges, they would spend lifetime savings, lose jobs and actually have to rebuilt their lives from almost zero.
We voted for all of this and I don't understand how it happened. Aliens dispersed something so we all became that stupid?
> Many people, me included, would gladly do that, if they were allowed to.
Doubt. Many people certainly think they would. In a real situation, they'd hesitate.
I don't even mean that in a disrespectful way. Taking lives traumatizes professional soldiers. It has enormous psychological costs. If you do it, you will live with it until the end of your days.
I'm not speaking out against guns and self-defense either. Better to be traumatized than dead. Weapons are a requirement for basic human dignity. Just pointing out the fact that it's not that simple.
> Here in Canada there were cases when people defended themselves and ended up in legal kafkaesque hell, imposed by country.
My country is the same. The absurdities produced by the "justice" system are maddening.
I remember one case where a person had his house burglarized dozens of times. The "justice" system didn't do shit about it. He got so fed up he booby trapped his own home and killed the criminal when he tried to victimize him again. Suddenly police, prosecutors and judges found the will to act and vigorously condemned him for cold blooded murder. It's the kind of thing that makes me wish a meteor would strike this country and reset it back to the stone age.
As for why it happens... I've thought about it for way too long and I don't have a definitive answer for you. I think it's because people want to prevent the abyss from gazing into them as they combat the darkness. My conclusion is that we should have some very dark people of our own, pointed right at the abyss, perpetually staring it down into submission.
I fought in the Syrian Civil War (with the YPG) and the effects on the ISIS enemy has not bothered me a single day of my life. This is over a decade ago and I've never lost a single second of sleep over it. In fact I often dream about going back and fucking them over even more, as it was one of the happiest moments of my life, even though like 10%+ of the people I was with ended up dead.
The tracer rounds flying at the enemy at night, absolutely exquisite, brings a joy like the 4th of July.
Civilization depends on people like you in order to continue existing. It's definitely not a universal trait.
Your characterization of Brazil leads me to believe that "people like me" would be better off just living in the favela and joining a gang, as at least then you could have some chance to defend yourself and the government would not be able to enforce their anarcho-tyranny. Which sucks, but leaves me wondering if they're even acting irrationally.
I suspect, somewhere in brazil, there is a group of people that have adopted the practices of the drug traffickers of soft secession, but actually do it for a righteous cause, and are getting away with it, as long as they are not too noisy about it. They have learned the tactics work, and rather than trying a seemingly futile effort to steer the government in their favor they ultimately likely came to the same conclusions as the drug traffickers as to how to gain control of their community and perhaps even their own lives.
Sad part is... You probably would be better off joining a gang. We'd all probably be better off. They just keep winning. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to just give up and become a criminal myself instead of insisting on this upstanding-citizen-in-corrupt-shithole life. My father didn't raise me to be a criminal and sometimes I curse that fact.
Rio de Janeiro is in a state akin to civil war literally right now. Apparently the drug gangs have discovered drones. They're using drones to drop grenades on top of each other and on top of police. Nearly a hundred dead as of right now.
Check out this war zone:
https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/sudeste/rj/operacao-no...
I don't even know what to say anymore. I'm just... Tired.
I have nothing useful to add, but just wanted to say that I appreciated your insight through all your comments in this thread. Best of luck to you!
> like a school or gym locker room for example
We broke into our own lockers the whole time with metal rulers back when I was in school because of forgotten keys or just because it was quicker opening them that way than actually unlocking and relocking them. (And of course the more students did this, the more worn the metal became and made it even easier the next time)
Yeah as long as we don't have unrealistic expectations from our $30 deadbolts and our $5 combo locks it's fine. But people sometimes buy the cheap thing and expect it to perform as well as a really expensive thing.
I suggest watching LPL then to see how often the expensive thing fails just as quickly as the cheap thing.
That's usually with skills that few have the time to acquire. But I also saw on LPL where he tested a cheap Chinese lock, where the "hardened steel" had a visible groove after just a few strokes of a file, and you could use pliers to rip off the plastic cover around the keyhole, after which all the little parts of the lock mechanism came tumbling out...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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'd bet that if you're stealing a $50-100k bike, it already is.
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.
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.
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.)
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 discourages casual trespassers.
So the whole Breaking Bad cash hoard on pallets thing is not a good idea?
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
Actual thieves are most interested in low effort/fast methods of bypassing locks. Master single pin picking to LPL's level and the thief might as well just turn locksmithing into a career instead of stealing. Low effort attacks like shimming, raking, bumping though might be worth a thief's time to learn.
It’s much more difficult to tell if someone bypassed the lock if they picked it (and relocked it), as opposed to cutting it off completely
Which is relevant when you're defending against Ocean's 11 or the Mossad, but for the other 99.999% of us, the lock is there to keep a bored teenager or a meth junkie out.
Or, more realistically, to convince an insurer that we've made a token effort to keep them out.
This is exactly the point.
The lock is there to keep the honest people out AND leave a trace that someone came in forcibly when they want to do so.
Which is why stuff like bump keying those stupid flat-keyed American locks is so scary because it requires almost zero skill and leaves very little traces.
Unless an expert takes apart the lock investigating for traces, there's no way to tell it was opened without a key.
These jobsite storage boxes [0] are typically too heavy to steal (and can also be anchor-bolted), and the locks are highly-recessed within an enclosure... practically the only exposure is the keyway... and then there's thousands of dollars of tools inside.
Worth it for smarter crooks. I'm a former IBEW electrician, and I've seen both stranger and more-miraculous occurrences — but I've seen it all.
[0] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/H-10011/Tool-Storage/Kn...
Oh man, reminds me of one project where theives rolled up with a truck, hotwired a forklift and loaded up 3 of these boxes.
The National Guard Depot at Ocean Docks?
Nah just an unremarkable subdivision development in middle america.
I trained a few years as an IBEW electrician in large government data centers, but have done decades of residential side work (mostly 500k-2M suburbia):
The stuff you actually witnessed on both types of jobsites often isn't believable. But I've seen [your comment] many times, in the middle of nowhere, with trailcams rolling and tweekers not giving AF, smiling as they roll away with your belongings...
----
We caught a burglar once in our wire warehouse... huffing our marking paint, but on his way to scoring a five-figure copper haul. As foreman, I had to pull a few of my electricians off of the young man (~20~white~highAF) — I sent my guys to their jobsites, keeping myself and two larger others to detain the guy until the police arrived: arrested. Drawn out court proceedings 5x. Dismissed =( "Adjudicated"
That little twerp ended up having already become a career criminal, at just two decades on this earth. He needed good guys like mine to beat his ass a few times, like his family never did the favor of helping him learn.
Next time my guys will not be calling the police, with blessings.
Some are still resisting this kind of attacks. The hiplok D1000 has a thick rubber like abrasive coating that makes it super hard to cut through the metal with power tools
I had one of these for my e-bike in Oakland. The thieves used an angle grinder to cut through the bike stand instead
The solution in the east bay seems to be “don’t use a valuable bike”
That's why I have a dirty bike with a motorbike's chain wrapped around the wheels and stand. So they would have to cut through the wheel too.
A battery powered angle grinder with a zip wheel is the best lock picking tool out there. Hell, a cordless Dremel with a zip wheel might do it.
It depends on where you live. I guess it's not uncommon to hear about someone entering a building "as the delivery guy" just to try to pick a lock and see which one opens.
If you make too much noise people will get suspicious and might call the police.
most thieves don't even go that far. they find stuff that isn't locked or they kick in the door.
Yes. I once saw a guy open a bike U-lock using a car scissor jack and he was done in about 20 seconds and the bike was gone. Nowadays there are very good battery powered grinders that can take a cutoff wheel and no padlock is going to resist that.
But there are a handful of new U-locks that are quite difficult to cut using angle grinders.
No one is doing that in a nice residential neighborhood
That's when people can get away with it in broad daylight :) Because everyone thinks like you.
Get a used pickup, get some vinyl letters at home Depot, put something like "a+ home services" on the side, and you can probably break into a few dozen suburban homes without anyone reporting you
Walk around in a hi-viz jacket, and you can pretty much be ignored by everyone except specialized security.
>except specialized security
That's when you add a clipboard and/or hardhat to increase odds.
I also have a few tools from CI so I don't know what that makes me
A portable plasma cutter? What is this, Star Trek? Are there some extremely-high-power-density battery-operated plasma cutters available on Aliexpress that I haven't yet run across? Or maybe I should locate my safe far away from my stove/dryer receptacles?
Like muffler fluid, the battery powered welder has gone from a joke to reality recently.
Not a plasma cutter, but same power class, and certainly able to heat a padlock shank to melting. https://www.dewalt.com/product/0447800880/esab-renegade-volt...
But people have been welding with batteries for ages. The most primitive welder is a car battery and a couple of wire leads. Tons of videos of it on YouTube.
Yeah, fair enough. Two car batteries in series is even better. Not easy on the batteries, but it will get the jeep out of the bush.
You can also make your own stick electrodes from coathanger wire tightly wrapped in paper.
I couldn't tell you how many pairs of sunglasses you should parallel to protect yourself...
This rig, on the other hand, is something you could pack into just about any plant and fix something with without raising any eyebrows. If you have $5,000 to spend, that is. Super handy for small jobs in hard to access places.
Hearing about it did ruin the "cordless welder" jokes my coworkers used to share.
Reminds me how the Sinclair C5 failed because the inventor couldn't source a 15 mile long power lead.
Shouldn't the sunglasses be in series?
Batteries in series, typical stick welding voltage is ~27v. You might be able to light up on one battery, but you will quickly learn why it's called "stick" welding.
I wouldn't arc weld with any number of pairs of sunglasses, that was firmly tongue-in-cheek; but yes you are right, stacked glasses would be series.
Also, if you try this, before pulling the battery from the non-broken jeep, drive it to the top of a hill so you can bump start it later when the battery is too dead to turn the engine over.
Damn, didn't know that existed but it makes sense with how much power lithium ion can deliver.
I'll have to keep my eye out for the Home Depot buy a battery and get a free tool deal on those.
Heh, I'll have to watch for that sale.
4x12AH batteries, that's gonna be over $1200.
I doubt you could charge them faster than the welder can run them down, so you might want three sets and two gang chargers if you want production anything like a plug-in machine.
Matt's Off Road Recovery uses one to stick broken Humvee steering rods back together about once every four or five episodes.
You're right, I've mixed them up with portable oxy-acetylene torch, unless they're just backing up to the lock in a pick-up.
Damn, I was hoping I was wrong. Going to need some kind of energy weapon to use against the coming robot armies.
You can pick up a wholly self-contained plasma cutter in Lidl or Hofer in their "cool tools week" for about £100 these days.
It wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to hook that up to a biggish inverter and 24V worth of deep cycle batteries on a small trolley, maybe a wheelie suitcase.
Always be red-teaming.
Depends on how portable.
A while back I was making a point about the border wall farce--and found everything I would need to do "portable" plasma cutting on said wall on Home Depot's website. Not pick it up type portable, but put it in a wagon type portable. (Generator, not batteries.)
I don't know how anybody can look at those rusty metal pylons and not think their natural habitat is at home on top of a 40 year old white Toyota pickup with a suspension that long ago achieved sainthood. Like if I were looking to attract illegal immigrants, those pylons would be exactly what I would use. But then again isn't this just the standard fascist pattern? Propose a comically self-defeating solution to some problem, and build a tribal identity around aggressively denying the obvious. It's like the social justice preaching to the choir writ large.
A plasma cutter needs a pretty decent supply of compressed air
A 5lb bottle of Nitrogen would do the trick.
Entirely depends on what manner of thief we are talking about here, what they're going after, how important it is to them, and how much they care about the owner knowing the lock was tampered with.
This is why I don't like such black-and-white opinions... I think the answer is rarely so simple.
I think it's largely a class or educational divide. I come from a very hick, redneck, working class area. People use black-and-white statements and course language with the understanding that corner cases will exist anyway. My use of this type of language common in more middle America is something I find the more silicon valley or tech centered HN constantly finds issue with.
It's common in more upper-crust / educated circles to shit on people that use more course, black and white language. I believe it has more to do with cultural divide than misunderstanding that rare/corner cases exist.
In another recent exchange on HN, I was damned for using the word 'never.' They didn't even explain why, just said they wouldn't believe people that used it. I was using it in the redneck sense "you'll never get that girl" as in it's extremely unlikely to the point it's hardly worth even considering, rather than the nerded out version that it means the chance is literally precisely 0.
FWIW I come from a non working class background ( but am not American ). My friends and I routinely debate in such a manner, and don’t see any problem with this. If confronted with a stranger we might be a bit more cautious ( basically we’ll state the rules of the conversation) but that’s about it. If needed, we’ll sometimes be a bit more accurate.
I understand your statements as you mean them - I default to giving you the benefit of the doubt, and automatically assume that black and white statements are shortcuts. Only, and only if you seem to not understand nuance then I will adjust my stance, but I usually assume you do!
I think the problem can be described as assuming good faith in the argument - that is, that you're talking with someone who you are presuming is attempting to communicate, not just "win" the conversation.
The difference becomes clear very quickly - if there's a genuine misunderstanding, someone will clarify and move on; if someone is trying to rules lawyer the conversation, it won't.
Exaggeration is not 'hick, redneck, working class.'
People from "hick, redneck, working class" areas don't say "hick, redneck, working class".
They might say "hick" if they're from rural northern New England, the upper midwest, rural Canada, or Cascadia, usually with self-deprecating facetiousness. Most of these people are smart enough to do whatever they want in life, but just choose to live by their standard of normalcy and just like their friendly small towns best.
If they are from the lower midwest or south, they will sure as hell just say "redneck", and most take it as a compliment even though many of them deep down are just compensating because they don't have any other options.
But nobody calls themselves "working class". Not in the rust belt, not in the rural midwest, and not in the south. That's more of a politician's word, and a condescending slur from the white collar crowd that usually ends in a broken jaw.
I don't think that's what it is.
> Low-intelligence people are masters of black-and-white thinking. It's also part of a psychological defense mechanism called "splitting."
> They only seem to think in terms of opposites, ignoring the grey areas in between. Reality is too complex to be interpreted only in opposites.
> As a result, they tend to simplify everything. While simplification is useful sometimes, not everything can, or should be, simplified. Knowing what does and doesn’t require simplification signals high intelligence.
The problem is when you speak in absolutes while simultaneously "not meaning it" that way, is that this is not conveyed to the people you are speaking to, so we can only assume that you did mean it, and now we think you're being unreasonably generalizing.
And I think it's pretty hard to have a useful conversation if we cannot use agreed upon terms to convey what we mean. If you know that not everyone will understand your intention by saying it that way, then why do it?
.
no, and I don't see how you could possibly deduce that from my statement
.
I'm saying that some people don't understand that some cultural uses of black-and-white English indicate practical precision rather than absolute theoretical precision.
It's not cultural.
Issues with master locks are hardly new- back in the 1980s, I downloaded a file from a BBS explaining how to open a combo lock (basically by pulling on the shackle while turning, and a few other tricks.
It's still online: https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/anarchy_and_privacy_contro...
Oh my god, I remember doing this technique on my lock, I remember doing this in the early BBS days, I remember learning this from a short text file. I'm 80% sure it was this file!
Thanks for unlocking this memory for me!
>if I were stealing from a jobsite with multiple lockboxes, the ones with Master locks would be attacked first (particularly wafer cylinders).
If you were stealing from a job site you'd just bring bolt cutters.
[dead]
The most absurd thing is the original video response from the company was good, and with a very compelling argument: their customers never saw shimming in the field. Their user base don't need shimming resistance: security needs to be adequate, not perfect. And they follow-up by presenting options about people requiring the lock to be shim-proof.
Granted, in this day and age, it's a disgrace to still make locks that can be shimmed. Especially when the shim-proof alternatives they show just have an additional notch to catch the shim.
> their customers never saw shimming in the field.
This is arguably good PR, but a terrible response. Shimming is so quick and hard to detect that even if you had 24-7 video of the lock, you probably wouldn't notice that the lock had been shimmed. You would just assume that someone lost a key.
It's a trailer hitch lock. If someone steals your trailer then you definitely do notice. And if they just shim the lock and put it back then it doesn't really matter.
Also the company sold a picking-proof version… at a higher price.
shimming proof not picking, sorry just noticed the entirely wrong word
This guy shims a $100+ lock in 10 seconds with a liquid death can, all without speaking in the video, just replays and then destroyed their claims and GTFO. Absolutely masterful.
If you don't know him already, I highly recommend videos by LockPickingLawyer — he routinely destroys bogus claims of various companies within seconds. It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
I wonder if anybody tried suing him…
LPL owns Covert Instruments, who employs McNally, the YouTuber who got sued in this case. Probably not a coincidence that Covert Instruments wasn't named in the lawsuit.
I wonder if McNally knows a lawyer familiar with lock picking ;-)
Oh sweet never knew there was a connection between LPL and McNally - I just notice they always cut their shims from cans the same way
There aren't that many ways to cut a shim from a can that work and don't take excessive effort. It's a rounded hook shape, with a handle piece trimmed so you don't cut yourself.
Well they make it look easy I always end up cutting myself
I think McNally was in at least one of his videos if I remember correctly.
That explains so much. Done to well for a goof channel, eclectic assortment of skills ("tactical garden trowel" vs fully equipped metal shop vs perfect video production), all fat trimmed off the videos.
I kinda want tvtropes to put a name on his slapstick humor. It's like looking over the shoulder of that weird uncle that seems to live in an entirely different world.
In addition I've seen LPL refer to "my friend Trevor McNally" in a couple of videos.
> Probably not a coincidence that Covert Instruments wasn't named in the lawsuit
What's the non-coincidence?
That they avoided naming the lawyer or the lawyer's company in their bogus lawsuit and instead only named the non-lawyer.
He can still defend his employee, right?
My understanding is that LPL is not still practicing (he says he's retired, to focus on security work), but I'd guess he knows someone, if McNally didn't already have his own lawyer.
Even if he was practicing, if he were to take this case it would pretty obviously expose who he was.
So no matter what I would expect LPL would get someone he knew/equivalent to take the case.
I mean, it's not exactly a secret. If you really want to know you can look it up online. He even has a whole talk he gives about why he generally doesn't reveal his identity. People send him packages with trackers hidden in them, hire private investigators to follow him with bogus stories, etc.
> he routinely destroys bogus claims of various companies within seconds
I watched his video on high-security shipping container locks. Jeez, two minutes long? They must be tough!
No, it was two minutes long because he bypassed ten of them, one after the other.
My impression of most locks now is that they're really just to stop something from being casually broken into or even just falling open by accident.
My dad's wisdom as he cut my bike lock off when I lost the key in middle school: "locks keep honest people out."
I have a friend who says "gun control keeps law-abiding people unarmed."
Gun control gives cause for arresting any law breaking people. See how such parables go both ways?
Point is, gun control has led to a reduction in gun crime in every country I know of. Thats hard evidence against your qippy one-liner.
Crime had already been falling consistently for several hundred years throughout Europe when the first gun-licensing and gun-control laws were being passed in the Wiemar Republic. You don’t need control over weapons to reduce crime, you just reduce crime.
Incidentally, a few years later a certain political party got their candidate elected Chancellor. He more or less immediately ordered the police to use the gun-licensing records to identify Jews who owned guns and had them arrested. It’s actually pretty hilarious, in a very dark way, to read some of the arrest reports. When Jews were ordered to surrender their weapons to the police, many of them brought the weapons to a police station as instructed. They politely stood in line while the officer at the desk wrote out arrest warrants for them one after the other. The crime? Carrying an unlicensed weapon. The location? The police station in such-and-such precinct. The witness? The officer at the desk. The prisoner? Turned over to the SS.
USA has no gun control and has just had a similar political upheaval, with zero armed resistence.
lets not pretend.
There is nothing even remotely similar about it.
People who think it's a good idea to walk around with weapons should be arrested.
Yeah, but criminals do not care, law-abiding citizens do... so who ends up being the victim in such scenarios? Typically the law-abiding citizen.
Not in any civilised country. Criminals do have guns in my country but firearm use is incredibly rare and use is restricted to crim V cop and crim v crim because police response and enforcement are so harsh for gun crime it isnt worth it unless it quite literally becomes life or death.
So then non criminals, while not armed with guns, face no real gun violence because even getting access to guns requires critical thinking and intelligence at least sufficient to understand risk vs reward well enough to understand civilian pop isn't a reasonable use case for firearms. Any firearm related incident here is a multi week news item. Stuff thats everyday in the USA and doesnt even make local news.
So, our cops and our criminals are armed, and i can trust my kids wont get shot up in school, i wont get shot in a store robbery, or by a disgruntled coworker etc.
You dont quite understand how bad it is I think, USA americans who move here have an adjustment period and usually need mental health support coping with leaving a country where getting shot in a road rage incident, for example, is a real risk. I had a colleague driving break down after cutting someone off accidentally, the cut off swerved ahead of us aggressivly stopped traffic got out and started shouting. Eventually wore themsleves out, as they do, got vack in car and kept driving. Didnt stress me too bad but my coworker driving totally shut down. Why? A year earlier a coworker in the USA did something similar and the person with road rage got out and started shooting at their car.
That's not normal. Not even close.
It’s also extremely rare here, when looked at rationally. Those kinds of shootings are limited to specific areas of the country. The other 99% of the country faces nothing like that, ever.
> police response and enforcement are so harsh for gun crime it isnt worth it
That's the key right there. USA enforcement is far less than what it needs to be, especially in (dare I say it) Democrat-controlled local districts.
The number of soft-on-crime DAs elected has increased significantly in the last 30 years, and the fraction of violent crime cases that are left unsolved has also increased significantly.
It's gotten so bad that a lot of conspiracy theories are circulating, like "Davos people want to destabilize the US, so George Soros is donating millions through his Open Foundation to soft-on-crime DA local election campaigns."
I like my 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendment rights.
I don't want to live in a world where cops can stop people for speeding and use it as probable cause to search my car.
I also don't want to live in an environment where when I'm seconds away from danger, my only protection is minutes away.
Warren v. DC also clearly established that police departments cannot be held civilly liable for even gross negligence of duty.
"You can all go to hell. I'm going to Texas."
-Davy Crockett
With guns being uncontrolled police have plausible deniability on demand to gun down anyone they like. No free unrestricted gun access means gunning down people as they please isnt justifiable anymore.
so if its about safety, in a country actively descended into facism, aren't you worried about freedom of political expression given you can just be gunned down at a moments notice and it gets brushed away?
You're more worried about some hypothetical apocalyptic scenario where lawful firearm owners suddenly lose their minds and fall into mass-psychosis than you are about existing known violent criminals committing more violent crimes.
I can guarantee you that those "backwards" wheat farmers from Salina, KS with $10k worth of hunting rifles and shotguns just don't think about people like you on a daily basis. Their minds are on the wind, rain, beetles, and grain futures, not "how can we launch a successful invasion against Somerville, MA?".
Frankly, I'm a lot more worried about my Greek classmate being assaulted by a "Free Palestine" moron who can't tell the difference between the flags for Israel and Greece:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14004125/TikTok-Gre...
As for mob violence in general, I'm just not worried about complete strangers wanting to risk their lives in a firefight to kill me. The kind of people who are attracted to angry mobs are not the kind of people volunteering to drive the Waffen SS out of Eindhoven or chase the Japanese out of the Philippines.
Likewise, the people violently assaulting Jewish pre-med students in America are there because the IDF in Gaza scare them.
If the kind of people you most fear and hate wanted war, they could just stop growing your food and let you starve to death.
Not trying to belittle you, so much as reassure that if Trump supporters really wanted to hurt you, they would have done it already in 2015.
> Point is, gun control has led to a reduction in gun crime in every country I know of. Thats hard evidence against your qippy one-liner.
That's a tautology - of course it did. The real questions are - what percentage of violent crimes were committed with guns after after gun control, how much did overall violent crime decrease after gun control, and to what extent was gun control provably responsible for the reduction of violent crime (when statistically controlling for other factors that reduce violent crime)?
The overall slope of the violent crime curve has been negative, but the value may have been more negative if it were not for gun control.
Also, I think history will bear this out in the coming centuries -- totalitarianism and terrorism can flourish far better when citizens are unarmed.
Youre missing an important detail - how many deaths / maimings per violent offense. If violent offences dont drop but those do, worth no? How about school shooters - will people no longer crash out and attack their classmates? No. We havent solved the underlying issue, however, such a crashout sans guns seems siginificantly more preferable to me.
besides, the usa has proven that freedom to access guns doesnt protect you from dictatorships / authoritarian governments. That was the main stated constitutional reason for having that right.
So the USA hasn't seen any benefits from free gun access ans has lost uncountbaly many lives to death and trauma. How is it still justified?
> Gun control gives cause for arresting people who are armed
FTFY
Yup. I think that is a neat and internally consistent statement that doesnt omit facts. One can do with that statement what one wants, but if carrying arms becomes extremely risky, if using arms carries an burden akin to dying, you can bet that criminals who are quite good at weighing risk v reward will not be running amok.
Your friend should look at almost any other Western, developed nation for counterexamples
Your friend sounds like a good guy. Hopefully you're with him when you're out in public, and some sicko goes postal or some bum with a drug addiction starts waving a knife at you.
I definitely feel safer when I'm around him :)
He has very carefully rehearsed a lot of situations in his mind, and I'm confident he would only draw his weapon when actual lives are in imminent danger (like an active armed assailant situation).
I used to be a competitive marksman through JROTC, and the FUD around firearms is so overblown compared to the fear most people should have while driving their car or doing certain jobs.
A chem lab staffed only by trained professionals is still a lot more dangerous than an indoor range in a red state. A firearm in Cletus' hands is a lot safer than a beaker of sulfuric acid in anybody's hands, let alone piranha solution.
And all of that is nothing compared to the danger of being on a road with other cars, many of which are operated by people who simply do not give a f***.
100% agree. But - firearms (combined with training and skill) carry far more risk asymmetry compared to cars, sulfuric acid beakers, or even explosives. I think that's why there's more fear around letting people carry them. The potential damage to personal risk ratio is higher with firearms.
But the root public policy problem is the same no matter what the weapon is: violent criminals will harm people, others generally won't. So the most effective policies have to lean heavily on good police and DA behavior, to make sure violent criminals aren't able to keep harming people. Going after the weapons criminals use is effectively a red herring if known violent criminals are still generally at large. Any policy intended to reduce violent crime will fail insofar as cases continue to go unsolved, and police, DAs, and courts don't enforce the law when the identities of violent criminals are known.
I assume your friend never bothers to lock their door?
Locking doors makes legal follow-up easier: "The deceased - do you know if he broke and entered?" "Yes, your honor. I always lock my doors at night. Exhibit A is a video of him busting the door down after trying the doorknob."
That's a really well put. We are expecting a son soon and as I was reading this read and your comment, I couldn't help but asking myself will I ever say anything that my son will remember for years. And how can I be prepared.
Your dad sounds like a very wise man.
I've watched LPL videos and practiced on regular locks, I can pick something that is about 10$ or less, but these expensive locks with good tolerances (Abus) or disc detainer cores (kryptonite locks,) no amount of practice and fiddling with the correct tools has ever opened one of these. I lack the skill or touch.
I can hold a 18v grinder with a cutoff wheel just fine though, I lost the keys to one of those kryptonite locks on my bike and I was riding my bike again 30 seconds later.
Or to make it clear that if someone does break the lock, they didn't have your permission to get at whatever it was protecting.
Yep, it’s like those security screws, they’re not used to stop you opening the box, they’re used to prove that you knew you shouldn’t be opening the box.
Most of the time they’re just there to make you _think_ that you shouldn’t be opening the box. In the US the Magnusen–Moss Warranty Act of 1977 explicitly prohibits companies from voiding any warranty merely because the owner opened up the device, repaired it, or had it repaired.
you are adjacent to the concept that locks are an honest persons way of communicating to other honest people that an invitation is required.
This one? https://youtu.be/_goIYP3FfO8
That’s McNally rather than LPL.
You are using a Master Lock model 606. It can be opened with a Master Lock model 606.
Can he pick an Assa Abloy lock though?
Many, often, quickly.
LPL is a crown jewel of YouTube. His April Fools' Day videos are hilarious, too, like the one where he gets into his wife's beaver [0] (SFW).
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRozAbaKs9M
The Dutch translation is NSFW though as it translates “beaver” as suggested.
Does the Dutch word for beaver also act as a euphemism for the body part in Dutch?
~No it sadly doesn’t, so the double meaning will be lost in translation. If the lock depicted a pussy it would’ve worked though.~
After going over https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seksuele_volkstaal_en_eufemism... it seems that “bever” is apparently also used as euphemism. As is “floppy drive” TIL!
More explicitly so. The Dutch go rodent where Americans go feline.
> It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
Yeah, one of my conclusions after years of watching LPL is ironically to start buying cheaper locks.
The difference between a $3 and a $300 lock is just about a minute of time for an experienced lockpick. No lock is capable of dissuading a determined thief, but any lock is equally capable of dissuading a lazy one.
The best policy is to have a lock that is resistant to cutting and destruction, with a trivial key. Nobody tries to pick a lock, and if they do, they're winning. Most or all breakins happen through brute force not technical sophistication, so a decent chunk of metal is a fine adaptation.
About the only thing I've seen that qualifies is the no-car, metal gates to walking/camping trails in State Parks (PA, anyway.) The key-lock is surrounded by a 1/2" steel can, with only the bottom open and some distance to the lock itself. Attempting to pick that would mean being upside down 2 feet off the ground. The steel shroud would thwart a casual angle-grinder for long enough not to bother.
Most other security for locks I've seen could be defeated with 60 seconds and a 3" cutoff tool that fits in a pocket.
Good old "sketch-resistant materials". If a tweaker can't get through your lock/chain before the cops (might) show up, you're probably fine.
When all else fails, drummers are the best security anyway: https://loudwire.com/sleeping-drummer-stops-band-trailer-the...
[dead]
I use the locks my insurance company recommends. That's who it's there for anyways.
The other side is "career" thieves will know how to pop-can shim a lock but most of them are not going to use or break out a set of picks. One main reason it's an additional felony charge if you get caught using them. So a _slightly_ better lock is sometimes warranted for outdoor applications.
The final piece is they'll just steal a car and then drive that car through your shop front to get what they want. Up here in Northern California a gang pulled off the same heist as the movie "Casino." They drove a van up to a wall and then knocked out a small segment of the wall to gain entry.
>The difference between a $3 and a $300 lock is just about a minute of time for an experienced lockpick.
How about non-experienced lockpick? Or the one who gonna brute force everything? I think there's value is expensive lock (Assume you buy the high quality one, not the over-price one)
Yep. The low hanging fruit principle in action. You can’t make anything completely secure so you put up more obstacles than your neighbor so the attackers go visit the neighbor instead.
Or in the case of targets with no neighbors like missile bases, you know approximately how long it might take an attacker to succeed, then put big guys with guns within that distance measured by time.
Unless you're a retail jewelry store. Then you are absolutely the main target in your area.
I'm considering an angle grinder resistant lock for the bicycle. They are not totally uncuttable but it means you have to be stood there for a couple of minutes changing worn cutting disks and the like. Quite expensive though.
I came to the same conclusion with my bike. What's the point of an expensive and heavy chain lock, when the thief will break or bypass it anyway.
So I just fot a cheap wire combination lock, just so you can't just jump in the bike and ride away.
Oh, this is where I disagree. A wire can be quietly and discreetly cut with wire cutters in seconds. This is no protection at all. It's just inconvenience for you.
What I've been using for years is a heavy chain with a lock (disc-detainer style). The chain weighs around 3.5kg. You can of course cut it with an angle grinder, but have you ever tried cutting a chain with an angle grinder without a vise? The chain slips away and it's really difficult to hold it in place for the cutting, which would take more than a minute.
All those Kryptonite-style U-locks have the disadvantage of being easily fixed in place for the cutting. They are also useless for attaching your bike to large trees, street lights, etc.
Remember that if a bear is chasing you, you don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun your friends. If there are 4 bikes and my bike is the most difficult to steal, I'm fine.
It's completely different to snip a cheap wire lock or even just pull hard on it and have the lock break versus pulling out the angle grinder and making a huge racket for a minute.
LPL is superb. He inspired me to get a lock pick kit and a few simple padlocks - a cheap and fun hobby during COVID lockdowns.
I picked up and started practicing with Lishi lock tools, and I cannot recommend them enough. Pocket Tool Warehouse out of Texas has been good in my experience for sourcing them, no affiliation. Like an automatic transmission for lock picking.
https://www.classiclishi.com/about/lishi-history
https://www.originallishi.com/what-are-lishi-tools
Ditto. I was even able to put my lock picking skills to use one fine summer day when the dog park was locked due to "rain from yesterday" even though the grass and everything was clearly fine. We had a lovely time running around as a family, along with a couple other families, for about an hour before the groundskeeper came and shooed us away.
When we moved last time, our "financials" filing cabinet accidentally got locked (one of the ones with button lock) and I wound up having to pick it. The ability, even at a basic level, comes in handy more often then you would expect.
At a previous company, a power outage knocked out our router, which knocked out the card access system, which locked us out of the server room where the router was. Good news, there was a physical key bypass. Bad news, nobody knew where said key was. Lucky for us, I could pop out to my car, grab my picks, and then got the thing open in a couple of minutes.
Definitely the most above-the-board use those picks ever got (Though obtaining access to my university dorm's AC controls definitely made me more popular).
Heyyy, guerilla HVAC team!
In high school I didn't even have lockpicks, I just carried a super tiny pair of needle-nose pliers along with some other tools in my Five-Star zipper binder, and the tips of the pliers were fine enough to stab into the holes of those stupid snake-bite security screws that held down the thermostat covers in the classrooms.
Once teachers realized I could open the thermostat covers and adjust their setting in seconds instead of the hours it took to go the official route, not only was I very popular, they would occasionally send hall passes to summon me from other rooms to perform the service. I was doing fine in my studies and this was not an academic impediment, it was just hilarious. Eventually I just started leaving the covers loose, a fig-leaf that the custodial staff seemed content to ignore.
...
Fastforward a few years into my career, still not carrying lockpicks, but much more familiar with the art. A shipment of cabinetized network hardware arrived, but the cabinet keys were not ziptied to the doors as was customary. The installers were looking at having to go home with a short timesheet because they couldn't work.
I was in the NOC for another reason entirely, but I asked the supe to cover me for a minute and trotted out to the equipment room. I swiped a couple pins from the corkboard (for some reason, the office used dissection T-pins instead of regular pushpins), bent the tip of one, used the other as a turning tool, and proceeded to rake open one of the cabinets. The install crew lead's jaw hit the floor. I insisted on teaching him to do the rest, and moments later not only had he opened the rest of the cabinet doors, he had scared himself with how easy that just was, and stood in silence for a minute, shocked by his newly-acquired skill.
Very Harry Tuttle, although to be fair everything feels a little Brazil these days.
Early in our dating, my (now) wife moved into a new apartment and accidentally turned in the key to the back patio storage room with the keys to the old place. She was embarrassed to ask the old landlord, so she asked me to ask him. Instead, I popped home, picked open the patio storage lock, and then re-keyed the lock to match the front door. When I was a teenager I bought a (apparently lifetime) supply of assorted lock pins.
Picking filing cabinet locks is part of the genesis of modern hacker ethos. Feynman would be proud.
See also: https://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/MITLockGuide.pdf and the book "Hackers".
Er... that's a crime?
The ethic, IIRC, is that you only pick locks that you own, or that you have permission to pick.
Also, maybe the groundskeeper knows things about groundskeeping that you don't, on account of how much time they spend doing their job, which is keeping the grounds.
I had to use my lockpicking skills when my grandma moved across country to live with my mom. She put her stuff in a "Portable On-Demand Storage" container and accidentally put the key to the lock with her stuff inside the container.
Luckily, she used the shitty round lock that a lot of storage companies recommend. I was able to pick it in just a couple minutes. Someone like LPL would have had it open in mere seconds.
Thritto.
Thinking of doing the same! Which kit did you order? I see a FNG, FNG+ Bundle, and "Learn lockpicking bundle". 3rd one seems the most likely candidate. Any tips you can share? Thanks!
Start with a cheap kit from e.g. Amazon which includes a couple of perspex locks so you can see what you're doing. Get a real set of picks for real money once you graduate from that.
I got the Learn Lockpicking bundle a few years back, it's a solid customizable lock - six slots, a few different pin styles, and the springs to make it work. I got practiced enough to get a 3-pin opened, but I'm definitely out of practice now.
I’ve got a German practice lock and boy was that a hard wake up call. That thing was so hard to pick that I gave up. (The keyhole is really slim)
My bad though, LPL did warn about this.
I did the same (also during COVID, after doing it for a bit in my youth). I haven't tried Covert Instruments gear, I bought some other pack from China, but whatever pack you can find with the basics (and maybe some variety so you can try different techniques) plus a training padlock so you can see what's going on inside, and it'll be a walk in the park.
I got a £50 pick set from https://x.com/martin__newton
https://imgur.com/a/sbXoBCK
Same here. It also inspired me to teach my kids. Watching my nine year old daughter pick a lock warmed my subversive little heart.
Putting the lock in lockdown I see.
> It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
Physical locks are for honest people. They signify that something is not meant to be accessed and at best slow down someone actively trying to access the other side of the lock.
I recall either "The lock picking lawyer" or McNally explains that only in 3% of cases are locks picked during a burglary. In all other cases windows or doors are simply forced open. So at best locks are meant to prevent of crimes of opportunities.
One day I came into the office and noticed that one of our neighbors doors had a triangular hole cut into it near the door handle. It was a solid core door on an interior hallway. One of our cameras picked up the sound, someone brought a chainsaw and in about 30 seconds cut a hole in the door so they could reach through and open it from the inside. They took the safe, but I was told the safe was empty.
Oddly, this is a case where they would have had plenty of time to pick the lock as well, and it would have been much quieter.
> at best locks are meant to prevent of crimes of opportunities
A lock forces the thief to either spend time defeating it or physically break something. Even if it doesn't slow him down it should hopefully make it visibly obvious that he's doing something illicit.
IIRC there's a legal distinction between mere unauthorized entry and unauthorized entry that involves circumventing any kind of lock
You know those super secure double-glazed front doors, with the kind of hook things that engage when you push the handle up?
You can spudger one of the glass units out and back in from the outside, without leaving a mark.
They look better than they are.
Most uPVC windows and doors should have the beads on the inside and a solid profile on the outside.
I have heard of someone cutting through all the plastic and pulling the glass out that way, though.
Both rather more obvious that surreptitiously jiggling the obscenely crappy Eurocylinder that the door came with.
Yeah my understanding of burgling is it’s all about speed. One of the best deterrents you can have is I think called “laminate glass,”that doesn’t shatter into a bunch of pieces when it’s hit. It has a tendency to hold together so they have to spend precious seconds knocking out more of it which almost always makes them run away rather than risk it.
If I can go out on a limb here, I also think I recall that they have very specific things they look for. For instance they will often run straight for the master bedroom and start pulling out drawers/checking closets because people tend to keep jewelry in there. They want small items.
Anything that slows them down tends to deter them even if they make an initial attempt
Impact glass is one option. Another option is to have security film installed on your existing windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_APQ3CzQno
Security film! That’s the one I was trying to find it first but then I found laminate glass and assumed I was mistaken.
This is why the complaint about smart locks being hacked is so utterly ridiculous to me. A thief isn't going to hack your lock, they're going to bash a window in
Even if I can unlock a hypothetical 90% of physical locks, I still need to go in person to every house that has one. On the other hand, if I crack one smart lock I now have remote access to every home that has one, and I can operate on all of them simultaneously. Anything internet-connected makes doing damaging things at scale much easier.
Smart locks potentially give access to things that windows don't, like upper floor apartments.
They're also effective against incompetent thieves. Anecdotally that's a pretty high percentage of thieves you'll ward off that way.
Exactly. There's a lot of strongly worded stuff in here about how easy locks are to defeat, but that's only against someone who's practiced the art, which is a very small percentage of the population. And in my experience they're mostly honest people interested in the technical challenge, rather than criminal exploitation. A typical modern lock is going to massively slow down or outright stop nearly everyone who comes up against it.
Yeah, moar burglars aren't the kind who spend 10000 hours honing their skills.
People with that kind of dedication can often find gainful employment :)
I think that it's more useful to think of all defenses against physical intrusion as increasing the cost of intrusion in some way, be that time, skill, risk of being caught, access to specialized devices, etc.
Most "normal" locks don't increase the cost too much but they do raise it - perhaps enough for a thief to pick another target, or perhaps enough for the thief to choose another method of entry such as kicking in the door (which itself comes with additional risk of detection).
Exactly it is about layers. It is the same with computer security. Is my network "unhackable" no. But I've put up enough layers of basic security that script kiddies and the like won't be able to get in.
It requires a fair amount of skill to pick a lock quickly. Someone capable could probably make more money doing something legit.
Depends, do you count wave-raking as picking? I bought a cheap lock-picking set, takes me about 5 minutes to get their basic perspex lock open. "Masterlock", wave rake opens it in a few seconds -- even my then 10yo could open it in <30s.
Yeah, like running a Youtube channel on lock picking.
Or like being a lawyer?
Or both :)
Having heard of a typical locksmith's rates, if you can pick locks well then you really, really do not need to resort to burglary.
Security is about layers. If I have a basic lock, all I want to do is stop an opportunist.
I have a vehicle that is extremely simple to steal (you can unlock everything with a screwdriver), to protect it I use both a pedal lock, a secret second key and a steering wheel lock.
Will it defeat a determined thief or a team of thieves? No way. However it will put off most opportunists and slow down a more experienced thief enough that they may choose another target.
Apparently these days it’s sufficient car security simply to have a manual transmission. :D
I live in the UK. Almost anyone that can drive a vehicle knows how to change gears.
And even still, whenever I or a friend has hired a locksmith, they try for 5-10 minutes with no success and drill thru the lock destroying it.
That is to make it look like the job is hard
Or to sell you an overpriced lock they conveniently have for sale and in stock in their vehicle.
> overpriced lock they conveniently have for sale and in stock in their vehicle
I object to the word overpriced in this context. It costs a lot of money to keep locks, tools, and other spare parts in a vehicle (including the cost of the vehicle). If you need a lock now and they have one it should cost a lot more than if you need a lock in 6 months and can wait for the factory to get around to making it. When you call their locks overpriced you are failing to understand the costs and value of having a part on hand.
Don't know why you are being downvoted because it's true. Lots of people wouldn't try to break past a lock but if you leave a door open many people would fall for the temptation.
If a lock takes more than 20 seconds to break it’s basically Fort Knox
No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door given the right cutting tool. Yet people seem to act surprised and betrayed to learn that a normal lock can be picked or broken given the right tool.
And that's fair and reasonable. Of course you can cut a hole in a door. Everyone capable of forming thoughts on the subject has seen someone use a saw at some point in their life. However, locks greatly exaggerate their abilities, to the point you can forgive someone for believing that they actually mean them.
I just now went to masterlock.com, clicked HOME & PERSONAL > View All Products, and picked the very first product[0]. It says:
> The 4-pin cylinder prevents picking and the dual locking levers provide resistance against prying and hammering.
The very first thing it says is that it prevents picking. To someone who isn't familiar with LPL, and who doesn't want to have someone pick their lock, this seems like a great product. It prevents picking! And it must, because otherwise it would be illegal to say that, right? But alas, it does not, in fact, prevent picking.
Compare that to a random product page for a household front door[1] that says "Steel security plate in the frame helps to resist forced entry" and "Reinforced lock area provides strength and security for door hardware", which indicates that this might be a strong door, but doesn't claim that it "prevents someone kicking it in". It helps to resist forced entry, but doesn't say that it prevents it.
[0]https://www.masterlock.com/products/product/130D
[1]https://www.homedepot.com/p/Masonite-36-in-x-80-in-Premium-6...
Very good points. Nobody can even legally claim Vitamin XYZ prevents cancer/etc even if the lack of it causes such.
Big Lock needs to be taken to task…
> No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door
The definition of “normal” varies by region. In European cities, it means a pretty heavy door of multiple layers of steel (and pretty unpleasant stuff in the middle) that would probably take 15 minutes of deafeningly loud cutting with a circular saw. I understand the standard for US suburbs is much lower (as it might as well be, given windows exist and the walls aren’t all that sturdy either).
A very long time ago I worked in an office building that had several suites of offices. One of them was a biotechnics company that did things like genetic analysis of farmed fish for selective breeding, massively commercially sensitive stuff. They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other. One key in the possession of the CIO, one in the possession of the CEO. CEO was at a fish farm in Norway. CIO was in the office, getting paperwork out of the safe in the secure room, got a phone call, stepped out of the room to get a better signal, slam <CLICK> <KACHUNK> as six spring-loaded bolts about as thick as your thumb pegged the door shut.
Rude words.
Can't get a locksmith that can pick that particular Ingersoll lock. Can't get a replacement key because the certificate is in the room, and you'd have to drive down to England to get it. Can't jemmy the door open, it's too strong.
Wait.
There's a guy who parks an old Citroën in the car park, I bet he has tools, doesn't he work for that video company downstairs? Let's ask him.
So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.
A swift appointment with an interior decorator was made by a certain C-level exec, and a day or two later there was a cooler with about 25kg of assorted kinds of salmon and a bottle of whisky left in my edit suite.
I know it's OT but I wanna know what your old Citroën was. My first car was an S1 BX. Plasticky 80s goodness. I know it's not everybody's idea of a classic (at least in Australia where Citroëns aren't particularly common) but I loved it.
At the time I had a 1989 XM 2.0, but at various times I've had a couple of CXes, several XMs, a couple of GSAs, a BX briefly, and an AX GT.
One of the XMs was the 3-litre 24-valve one which would sit comfortably at twice the legal limit, with the only real difference being the stereo had to be a couple of notches louder and the trees and road signs came up twice as fast. Oh, and the trip computer showed an astounding 8MPG - you wouldn't be doing 147mph for long because you've got less than an hour of fuel in the tank at that speed.
The AX GT was the carby one, basically their 950cc hatchback with the 1.4 out of a BX dropped in and a lumpy cam and twin-choke 2x32mm Weber carb. It was a little pocket-size tin of hooliganism.
The CXes were probably the most refined of the lot. Look up DIRAVI steering - fully powered, no mechanical connection between the steering wheel and road wheels when it's working normally.
Our uncle had a CX when we were kids. When he would visit we loved waiting in the driveway for him to start it so we can watch the air suspension engage and lift the car a good foot up.
Hydropneumatic suspension :-) There's a hydraulic pump about the size of a coffee cup driven off the end of the camshaft, which provides power to the suspension, braking system, and steering.
The suspension has no springs or shock absorbers - there's a "sphere" screwed into the end of each suspension cylinder with a bubble of nitrogen trapped by a rubber sheet that acts as a spring, and a set of spring-loaded valves kind of like the ones in a shock absorber piston to set the damping rate.
For the brakes, the hydraulic pump fed the ABS block through a shuttle valve under the pedal. When you press the pedal it does not move! Or, hardly at all. I takes a little getting used to and the brakes feel really harsh until you realise you don't need to welly it down hard - just gently touch it. The back brakes use pressure from the rear suspension, so they're more effective the heavier the car is.
The steering is amazing. When the engine is running the road wheels and steering wheel are not really connected. There's a linkage through a shuttle valve and when you turn the steering wheel it acts as a servo, with the wheels being moved entirely by hydraulic pressure. The Danfoss valves in normal power steering systems work a bit like this but they use a bendy spring, and the hydraulics only "help".
To make it respond properly at speed there was a heart-shaped cam in the steering box, with a sprung piston pushed into it by hydraulic pressure from a speed governor on the gearbox. The faster you go, the more pressure on the piston, and the harder the spring presses a roller into the cam. At idle with the car stationary you can move the steering wheel and it'll spring back to the middle by itself, and at 70mph you can barely move the steering wheel at all.
It's really sensitive and the first time you drive one you find yourself zig-zagging down the road until you get used to just leaving your fingertips on the rim of the wheel and basically just touching the side you want it to turn to.
They're not terribly fast but you can gobble up the miles surprisingly quickly, and I've never driven anything where you arrived so relaxed.
That is amazing, thank you for this note!
Not OP but my dad drove a CX for a while, but the real treat was our friend's DS.
If you hadn't been there to fish them out of the situation, they would have been boned to a scale they weren't prepared to deal with. You deserved the reward for getting them off the hook.
To think I usually gotta go on reddit to fish for puns.
drum_sting.wav
> They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other.
Wow, that sounds like a pretty secure entry! I wonder how they secured the walls, that’s a lot of steel plate, enough to require structural reinforc—
> So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.
Haha, that was my guess. This is like constructing a safe with a super heavy reinforced steel door on the front and construction paper on the sides and top! He could’ve kicked his way through 5/8” (prolly 16mm to you lot) drywall ;) Your solution was a lot cleaner and you earned that tasty reward!
Hah, I love this sort of story. Recently I was on site and we needed some electrical as-built drawings. They’d been stashed in a tool box, which was locked (and pretty well designed to protect the padlock from bolt cutters / angle grinders). Unfortunately one of the guys had taken the key with him and it was now a two hour plane flight away. They already tried and failed to cut the lock, and were getting an angle grinder to just cut in through the lid (it was ~3mm steel sheet, so hardly impenetrable, but destroying the toolbox would not have been ideal) when I pulled the pin out of the hinge and recovered the drawings that way.
Turns out watching Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t a waste of time after all. ;)
Ahh, the classic Kool-Aid Man attack.
Right - the quality of your locks matter a lot less if your average 5-year-old tee-baller can through brick through the wind and climb in. One always needs to consider their threat model when considering what security to invest in getting.
Bang on. LPL himself uses a slightly modified Kwikset lock. The modification seizes the lock if someone tries to pick it. I'm the video, he says it isn't to stop all break-ins, but to stop non-destructive break-ins.
So a tamper-evident system not a (particularly) tamper-resistant one.
It's like we forget rocks can easily go through windows.
Bought my teenage son a couple lock picking kits, he's picked almost every single lock we have in our house.
I then picked up a sizable rock, and told him I could get into the house faster than he could. He didn't understand for a few moments, but the lesson was learned.
And if you try to put bars in the window; you'll have a really bad day if your house catches fire!
Same with a moad full of piranhas, it's not fun to fall in by accident :)
Best and cheapest option is a dog, or simply giving up.
Dog is not the cheapest option. The amount of work that goes into taking care of a dog is quite substantial. I know from experience. While many/most people do not mind doing the work/expense, some of us prefer cats because they are a lot less work, among other reasons. I do however admit that cats suck at scaring away intruders.
A large dog is one of the few things that can actually prevent most break-ins.
Story time: There was a serial killer in CA a few decades ago. The police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with dogs, next victim had a small dog. Next the police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with medium or large dogs, next victim had a 30lb dog. Next the police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with large dogs. His next victim didn't have a dog. If its 80+lbs, very few people will mess with them and they will love you forever.
Most of the world don't construct their homes out of flammable materials, so the risk of the entire place going up in flames is quite low. In some places your home is uninsurable if you dont have burglar bars on all windows.
Regarding dogs: some organophosphate mixed into minced meat and lobbed through your fence/gate/open window is an instant and quiet way to get rid of a dog - personal experience taught me this lesson.
Best and cheapest option is a dog, decent insurance, and off site backups that regularly get restores tested.
And maybe a little bit of not getting too attached to "stuff" - there's very little stuff that's truly irreplaceable. I'd miss my first guitar if my house was robbed and they took it or if my place burnt down. I'd miss the HiFi gear I bought in 1988 and still use, and maybe my modded espresso machine. But I'd get over that loss and my sentimental attraction to those things just fine, especially after I'd replaced then with my insurance settlement.
Or "diversify", basically don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Can be done at any scale too, from storing backup copies of important documents at your parents house to buying a few apartments in Indonesia.
Reminds me of high school when people were buying expensive locks for their lockers. These locks, no matter how tough, all still locked onto a flimsy 1.5mm steel hasp that you could bend with your fingers.
The difference here is that cutting a hole in a door is a destructive operation, like applying bolt cutters to a padlock. Lockpicking just operates the lock as designed.
The analogy is probably closer to someone entering your home by pushing the doorframe open so that the door opens without unlocking the lock, or that many automatic doors can be opened by spraying some compressed air through a thin sliver, triggering the internal door sensors. Both are feasible in practice, leave little evidence behind if done well, and do actually surprise a lot of people.
In this case, the right tool is an empty can and scissors
Are there any that are truly secure?
Folks that really care about security go for tamper evidence.
For example you can get a filing cabinet which has a lock and a counter that ticks every time it is opened. You pair it with a clipboard where you note the counter count, why you opened it and sign.
It can be picked, that can't be avoided. But the act of opening it creates a trail which can be detected. Adding a false clipboard entry is detected by subsequent users, there typically aren't many people with access.
Determining that you have a breach allows it to be investigated, mitigated. The lock is an important part of that, but it isn't perfectly secure so you manage that flaw.
Of course filing cabinets are getting rare and replaced by digital document stores, with their own auditing and issues.
Nothing is secure against an oxyacetylene torch.
But if that's not the threat you are trying to protect against, there are locks that are sufficiently secure that picking or other "low-impact" defeat attempts are considered pretty much pointless. Abloy protec2 comes to mind.
The Canadian Mint in Ottawa has a rather impressive large gold bar on display in the gift shop for people to lift and take photos with. It's not in a case or anything. It's chained down with a Protec padlock - and there's a cop a few feet away to deal with you trying something un-subtle.
I think it's a pretty good endorsement for Abloy.
To me that sounds more like a good endorsement for having a guy legally authorized to use force against you standing guard. Any old padlock is probably safe when a uniformed agent of the state with weapons of varying lethality is standing next to it.
Hopefully it's a well paid guy, or I wouldn't be surprised if they helped the bar disappear for how much gold that is.
> Nothing is secure against an oxyacetylene torch.
Can't be stuck if it's runny.
You don't even have to go that far. Firefighters have core pulling kits that take care of 90% of all locks in 2 minutes tops. And for most other locks, the thing holding the lock tends to be less of an issue than the lock.
Add metal for extra fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance
I had an Abloy Protec2 malfunction while locked (PSA don't use them for key-only sashlocks) and the locksmith drilled it out in ~10 seconds. That is the last time I spend that kind of money on a lock!
If you want to reply, check this accounts post history and decide if you think it worth it.
Huh?
Yep! Or a plasma torch!
Many locks fail quickly with just an angle grinder and a cut-off wheel. (as you can see on Storage Wars)
Doesn't even need to go as far as using power tools.
Every lock I've been unable to pick (usually due to the fact that it's a pile of rust) has been susceptible to bolt-cutters. Big lock? Bigger cutters. Still cheaper than an angle-grinder.
>Nothing is secure against an oxyacetylene torch.
I want to build a front door with reactive-explosive armor. The team might get through the door, but not the guy with the cutting torch.
pretty sure trophy systems are generally not legal in any jurisdiction
If there's a guy trying to go through my door with a cutting torch, "legal" is way, way over at that point.
Not in the sense of "can't be opened without the key".
Good locks buy you two things: Deterrence (maybe), and a set minimum of time and noise requirements to bypass them. If your lock reputably takes 3 minutes to pick or a Ramset gun to blast them open, make sure your guard comes by every two minutes, and otherwise stays in earshot.
Also 3) intrusion detection.
It's obvious to the owner and the whole world that an intrusion has occurred if the door is sawed open or the lock is cut off. It's nice to know your home has been broken into vs. some of your jewelry is gone and you don't know whether to blame your teenager, a relative, someone who did work on your house since you last checked, etc.
Photos of your sawed open door will probably help in your insurance claim too. Telling your assessor "the cops say they might have picked the lock" isn't something I'd want to rely on to get my claim approved.
It depends on what "secure" means. Any lock can be destroyed with tools. Most locks can be broken with a big pair of bolt cutters, a drill, or, failing that, melting.
If secure means "without leaving evidence of tampering," things get a lot more interesting, but that has narrow practical use cases outside of stuff like espionage. Once you're in this space, we can start talking about how difficult something can be without specialized tools. But now we're leaving "I am protecting my stuff" territory and entering "this is just a sport and we're agreeing on a ruleset" territory.
There are a couple of lock designs out there that I don't think anybody's successfully ever picked. The ones that first come to mind are a couple of the "smart" electronic locks. Many of those are junk, but a few are very well thought out.
Secure against what? You might be surprised at what a wench and a truck can pull / destroy. If that fails, there are shotguns and also explosives, jackhammers and the like.
There are always assumptions built into lock design. A simple lock is very secure if a fence is jumpable, most people will jump the fence rather than mess with a lock.
Even a complex lock will never be secure for national secrets (like nuclear missiles), you need to just assign guards. Locks exist but are basically a formality (IIRC, many tanks and airplanes are left unlocked because all the security posture is with the military and the lock itself is too much of a hassle for logistics).
------
Fort Knox itself was designed to be safe from Nazi invasion. If the Nazis invaded New York City, they won't find any of the governments gold. The 'lock' in this case is the miles and miles of geography the Nazis would have to navigate before reaching Fort Knox.
> what a wench and a truck can pull / destroy.
According to legend, a wench can destroy a whole city state (Troy)!
Evil villains trying to destroy the world know it too, it's why they hire so many wenchmen.
"In 1933, the U.S. suspended gold convertibility and gold exports. In the following year, the U.S. dollar was devalued when the gold price was fixed at $35 per troy ounce. After the U.S. dollar devaluation, so much gold began to flow into the United States that the country’s gold reserves quadrupled within eight years. Notice that this is several years before the outbreak of World War II and predates a large trade surplus in the late 1940s. [...] In 1930, the U.S. controlled about 40% of the world’s gold reserves, but by 1950, the U.S. controlled nearly two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves."
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/f...
> If the Nazis invaded New York City, they won't find any of the governments gold.
Is that because it’s not actually in Fort Knox? :P
At some point something else becomes the weak link, so a truly unpickable 100% secure lock is a meaningless concept.
Security is a practice, not a destination.
Certainly not at reasonable prices!
Assa Abloy’s Cliq (electromechanical) keys aren’t able to be picked as far as I know (I could definitely be wrong!), the local international airport uses them to secure doors. The keys aren’t cheap, we have to put up a several hundred dollar deposit when checking them out from airport security for projects. These sorts of locks are useful in places with 24-hour operations or in public spaces that lead to private spaces, an unpickable lock falls to a drill pretty quickly if that’s an option.
Virtually any lock can be destroyed with tools and most doors/walls can be busted through with enough effort and equipment. I think the airport police would notice that, though ;)
Any lock can be forced through given the right tools and enough time.
You need to be more specific with what "truly secure" means.
There's a few that are pretty good but at a certain point you can just grind off the shackle or blow the door off its hinges.
It’s similar to the idea that the only truly secure computer is sixty feet underground, encased in concrete, turned off, and ground into dust.
All the digital forensics experts I know suggest the bottom of the ocean FYI.
I can't get hacked if I live a self sufficient hermitic lifestyle in an off the grid cabin with no electric devices.
Tell that to machete-bear.
The fact that he is actually a lawyer probably helps greatly, both in terms of what he can legally do, and as a deterrence to others trying to sue.
This also works on places like HN. I will often make an argument in my normal, working class low educated redneck hick sort of writing style. People will assume I have an unsophisticated basis for my argument and are way more likely to debate me on it. They like to attack an 'easy' target and even better if they are culturally seen as different.
If I use my pretend upper well-to-do white guy rhetoric with precise and deep vocabulary, I can make claims with a lower likelihood someone will challenge it, even if they are equally well backed.
Great channel, and yes the ineffectiveness of nearly all commercially available locks is depressing. At best it would briefly slow down a skilled picker.
Opening a padlock by hitting it with another padlock has to be one of my favorite bits.
"This is a Master Lock XYZ. It can be opened with a Master Lock XYZ."
Same solid principle as homeopathy
this is HN; its a monad.
https://youtu.be/qL_MeobAp5s?t=1487
For those interested in the actual case, here's some deeper coverage of this bruhaha including how Lee may have perjured himself during deposition.
That guy sure isn’t in a hurry to get anywhere. Good one to watch at 1.25x speed.
One of my favourite lock pickers is Marc Tobias. He was also sued by a number of lock companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NadPAE6BDbA
It is interesting to see that these companies still don't know about the Streisand Effect or they choose to think that it won't happen to them.
He just dropped a new video. Totally roasted the cunt out of that Easilok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lS5_6D4q9k
The entire field of locksmithing has a failing culture around security. They still rely on security by obscurity, they sue attackers, and they never improve
If a company’s first reaction to a flaw is to sue instead of fix it, the problem probably goes beyond the lock itself. A real security company would appreciate someone pointing out a weakness rather than trying to take the video down. That kind of openness would actually make people trust them more.
The weird thing is, they actually had someone competent dealing with the issue:
> The strange thing about the whole situation is that Proven actually knew how to respond constructively to the first McNally video. Its own response video opened with a bit of humor (the presenter drinks a can of Liquid Death), acknowledged the issue (“we’ve had a little bit of controversy in the last couple days”), and made clear that Proven could handle criticism (“we aren’t afraid of a little bit of feedback”).
> The video went on to show how their locks work and provided some context on shimming attacks and their likelihood of real-world use. It ended by showing how users concerned about shimming attacks could choose more expensive but more secure lock cores that should resist the technique.
Sounds to me like someone professional in the company with a cooler head was on this and was handling it well, but someone else higher up got angry and aggressive and decided that revenge was more important.
This reminds me of the CEO of a cyber security company that challenged Anonimous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary. If you work for any kind of security company, do not ever ever ever challenge any kind penetration specialist. Everything is hackable, it is only a matter of cost vs reward, but when you challenge someone that goes out of the window.
Generalizing the advice..
Don't challenge people. Don't insult people. Don't humiliate people. Don't threaten people. Allow them to maintain their self-respect even when they lose. Don't rub it in. Give them a face-saving exit.
Plenty of violence and aggression is caused by violation of the above rules. They seem simple but they're broken on a daily basis. Famous last words: "you don't have the guts".
Lock-makers should start including RFID and a software key checking mechanism, then sharing the key would be illegal
Here in Finland mechanical locks with electronic keying are pretty common in some places. Some of them like iLOQ or Abloy eCLIQ are actually pretty clever: electrical bits of the lock are powered from mechanical action of inserting and turning the key, so you don't have to worry about batteries. In theory, they promise significant cost savings in scenarios like rental apartment buildings where tenants move in and out, need access to common areas, lose keys, etc, without compromising security or having to replace or recode locks - they just give you a generic key, click some buttons in the admin panel, and your key could be provisioned accordingly once you first enter the building and interact with one of the "smarter" locks that are externally powered and networked to the mothership.
In practice, in addition to the usual bugs you would expect from a software-based system managed and maintained by a plethora of organizations and contractors, they tend to become very annoying as parts wear out, so you have to fiddle with the key reinserting it repeatedly trying to find just the right angle so it will make a good contact to be recognized by the lock (for example the iLOQ system by my landlord communicates over a thin contact strip molded into the key opposite of the cutting and separated from the rest of the key with a thin layer of plastic).
Sounds about right for Abloy. They own Yale and their app-based alarm is subcontracted dogshit (by https://mobilepeople.dk) that didn't get updated for years on end, logs you out constantly, has less functionally than a 90s keypad model and even the hub thing sometimes just falls over and needs a power cycle, etc etc etc. Presumably they are entirely unable to handle any of it in house and are at the mercy of the contractor to fix anything.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
That's an illegal number mate. Straight to the slammer!
(for those missing out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...)
Thabk you so much this is a beautiful rabbit hole to go down
plz stop! my hddvds...
Could you make access illegal using the DMCA, by putting some copyrighted content inside, with the physical key also being the license key?
This is how Nintendo engineered a legal argument disallowing 3rd party cartridges original GameBoy. The cartridge needed to display the Nintendo logo on startup which was checked pixel for pixel, otherwise the GameBoy wouldn't proceed with booting. Third party carts couldn't do so without infringing trademark.
Note that the courts ruled this technique invalid in Sega v. Accolade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
But that was in a pre-DMCA world, before the anti-circumvention provisions gave these companies more legal weapons to criminalize fair use and competition.
What criminal mastermind could possibly defeat the DMCA? :D
> sharing the key would be illegal
How so? And what region are you referring to? There are many countries in the world with vastly different laws.
Unfortunately, the "region" would be the 193 member states of WIPO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
So, you are right, the laws in Micronesia, Palau and South Sudan might be vastly different.
I don't really "get" locks. If you want something to be closed forever, seal it shut. If it should be opened and closed, leave a hinge. If it should only be open and closed by a select few, leave it in a trusted environment
Don't you live in a good neighborhood?
I've lived in a fair few places, but I've never lived in a place where an unlocked bicycle wouldn't be stolen. I'll keep using locks, thank you very much.
I think they were probably making a joke about software security.
I think the post was just really bad, myself.
A trusted environment, even in a "good neighborhood", requires a lock at least to the front door of your house, or gate, or w/e.
But where will you park your car when you go to work? You have to lock it.
> A trusted environment, even in a "good neighborhood", requires a lock at least to the front door of your house, or gate, or w/e.
I don't think that's a trusted environment or "good neighborhood". But then I basically use "can leave front door unlocked with zero worries" as the threshold for "trusted environment".
But those environments and neighborhoods definitively exists today across the world, although they're probably becoming less and less common.
The whole case is up on RECAP:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70036390/proven-industr...
If anyone is interested in the legal side, I'd also recommend 'Runkle of the Bailey' who has a series on this saga but with a focus on the legal shenanigans [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3WVme9LAcQ&list=PLo0bMOObfk...
I wonder how many stories like this are caused simply because a corporate lawyer is looking for some work to do, and maybe to meet some kind of internal KPI.
Former in-house lawyer here and in my experience the answer is something like "probably less than you think." The job of the lawyer is to advise the client and (within the bounds of ethical rules) advocate for their position, not to come up what the company's position should be.
Honest question.
Is it the job of an in-house lawyer (or any lawyer) to say that this appears to be a vexatious or SLAPP case, and the client should not pursue it?
Is there an ethical obligation not to get involved in a case that you know is being prosecuted in bad faith?
Within the limits of their knowledge/ability, yes. Some bosses make it clear they do not like being told no, however. YMMV if you continue to work for such people.
The bar there is very high. This case might be embarrassing but probably isn’t sanctionable. And the only lawyer that would get sanctioned would be the ones that signed the papers not the drone that hired them.
Interesting, thanks for the insight!
Once came back to work after 4 week holidays (not USA) and realized I forgot the 3 digit code to my locker.
But I remembered that friend's locker (he was on holidays then) used US police code for murder. (Police in US use codes for crimes when communicating on the radio).
I googled the code, used friend's locker for the day, and by lunch the next day I've bruteforced through enough codes to learn that my code was the embarrassing 420.
https://youtu.be/PVhYhLQ4Y64?si=5UrMMeovCkP2J3Nr
The internet : sees thoughts challenging facts
Someone : “Sucks to see how many people take everything they see online for face value,” one Proven employee wrote. “Sounds like a bunch of liberals lol.”
The company : Proven also had its lawyers file “multiple” DMCA takedown notices against the McNally video, claiming that its use of Proven’s promo video was copyright infringement.
When did facts and enlightenment started to be for "liberals lol" ?
Freedom of speech based on facts should be universal.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."[0]
0: https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?si=cIcawm3U5-55nI2D&t=252
I just saw grokpedia results, which include a gay-free description of gay novels (Banana Fish) and forged or curated accounts of war on Iraq, Thatcher and Duterte.
So yeah, reality is liberal nowadays
They're all a tough guys act. It's the type. Many American men love playing soldiers. What is Liquid Death? It's water LOL. See?
I like liquid death because their water is delicious and not high in sugar. I usually drink a sparkling water with dinner and I definitely prefer liquid death over la croix. They are technically different products though.
That their marketing is so edgy is just fun. I don't take it seriously, and it doesn't seem like they do either.
But Proven is definitely full of toxic masculinity internet tough guys.
"water is delicious"
That is strange. Water is water. Delicious water. Expensive water. Filter?
FWIW in my experience is less the monster energy / black rifle coffee audience, it's actually the red bull / white claw audience.
It still feels wrong to me, but that's how it is.
> When did facts and enlightenment started to be for "liberals lol" ?
It didn't. That's one employee of the company, who has a clear bias in the matter, being ridiculous. It has nothing to do with liberal ideology, nor critique of liberal ideology, nor whatever sort of person that employee thinks should be considered a "liberal", nor their ideology. It's only the employee who even suggests that, and probably not even seriously.
>Freedom of speech based on facts should be universal.
To be fair that's not what we have in USA. For instance, a nurse who never even signed a private privacy agreement with anyone (unusual, but could happen) could violate HIPAA if they factually tell a patient's spouse the patient is being treated for AIDS and they ought to watch out.
Yes, they could and most definitely would be. The case you describe is one of the reasons it’s that way.
For what exactly would this fly-by-night nurse be telling me to “watch out,” in relation to my partner who’s living with and being treated for HIV?
One hopes this nurse, being medically trained and apparently working with vulnerable populations, understands the efficacy of the modern HIV therapies the patient is receiving. That, when managed, HIV is not transmissible by conventional marital means [0]; and that, until recently at least [also 0], concerted public health efforts have meant that most anyone who seeks medical attention ends up on those modern therapies.
That said, I hope said nurse would catch me in a charitable mood rather than a litigious one.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/global-hiv-tb/php/our-approach/undetecta...
This is an entirely different argument than the fact at hand, which is making the factual statement is illegal.
You're just explaining why stating the fact should be illegal.
>[0] https://www.cdc.gov/global-hiv-tb/php/our-approach/undetecta...
I said AIDS, not HIV. I am no AIDS expert but I would be shocked if a large portion of people AIDS had no detectable viral load, while people with HIV commonly do not have detectable one. Wouldn't people with no detectable viral load generally not being exhibiting AIDS?
In that case—and in re-reading the comment you were responding to—I think I’m agreeing with you and that I should have read more carefully before getting my dander up :)
It sounds like we’re agreeing that you’ve given a good example of why it both is and should be that way.
And that, in US jurisprudence anyway, speech tends to be allowed unless there’s a broader social interest that’s served by protecting the specific categories of facts in question.
With the slight caveat that I’m not sure that “should watch out” is a fact, it sounds like an opinion to me (and one that’s potentially unsupported by the facts). In fact, don’t people governed by HIPAA still have a duty to report situations of actual or likely physical harm—for example if a minor presents with signs consistent with abuse [0]? Or even, in your example, if the provider became aware that the HIV-positive patient, out of malice or negligence, were declining treatment, exhibiting substantial viral load, and asserting that they intended to continue with behaviors that put the partner at risk?
[0] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/2098/if-doct...
How could that happen exactly? In what circumstances could a nurse end up working for (or even volunteering for) a HIPAA covered entity without signing a privacy agreement?
And the privacy agreement isn’t required anyway. If you’re a doctor, and you treat your neighbor, you’re bound by HIPAA laws that cover the arrangement. All a privacy agreement really does is give the clinic a hope of being found not liable in a lawsuit or government action: “see, we have it in writing that the nurse knew this was illegal! Blame them, not us.” Even without the agreement, the practioner is still legally obligated to obey HIPAA.
And as a side note: sue the hell out of the hypothetical nurse spilling the beans on a hypothetical AIDE patient. Why? Because if you don’t, then other people who suspect they might have HIV are going to avoid going to the doctor, resulting in more deaths for them and their lovers.
I'm not sure if it's required, but it's a common retort used to argue why someone thinks HIPAA is a private contract law rather than regulation of factual speech, so I prefer to just nip that scenario in the bud from the get go.
In any case I wasn't arguing for or against regulating factual speech. Only pointing out that it is done in the USA. This seems to get peoples feathers real ruffled, for whatever reason.
Hah! Ok, fair, I could see that. There are sooooo many misunderstandings about HIPAA that make me cringe every time I hear them. “I can’t tell you if I’m sick. HIPPA!” “It’s illegal for you to ask me if I’m vaccinated. HIPPA!” “You can’t bill me for this. HIPPA!”
It’s like the medical version of a sovereign citizen legal theory, where it simultaneously applies to everything and nothing, depending on what’s most convenient at the moment.
It's partially because it's so complicated.
I was a licensed healthcare professional and even I was shocked when my medical information was given to police without a warrant, a legal arrest, and without my consent. As it turns out, totally legal.
Haven't laughed so much reading an article recently. Wow, this story looked taken right off a comedy movie.
It's probably a good thing for Proven that they didn't get into this dispute the LockPickingLawyer instead. He'd wind up owning their company in the counter-suit...
That'd be an interesting channel, the "LockMakingLawyer" where the lock is highly lawsuit resistant, "Press the NDA button to always be informed when the next video comes out"
I am concerned about the public reacting aggressively agaisnt the lock company owner amd his family. The guy is definitely a toxic bully, but he was indeed violently harrassed by filing a lawsuit, however unjust it was.
The correct support for a just cause must have been constructive: providing financial support for the defendant, public manifestation campaign, professional lobbying, etc
Although this time I agree with the defendant cause, the response by the public was as toxic bullying as the plaintiff, only stronger.
That’s the internet these days. It’s been going on for decades. Game developers got death threats over minor changes to video games and nothing happened to them. Is it that surprising that tactic has continued?
People can make fun of the company all they want. That’s fair game. They shouldn’t be calling the guy’s personal phone or harassing his family, that’s totally over the line.
But nothing happens. The behavior gets a pass so it continues to become more common. That passes for debate now.
Phone numbers are public not personal secrets. If you have a number someone can call it.
And I can find relatives/friends on Facebook to harass. Doesn’t make it ok.
Just like the fact we have agreed upon rules against using chemical weapons or attacking civilians in war (which some violate), the fact something is possible doesn’t mean society should accept it.
If we don’t have even the basic civility of not getting death threats over whatever minor thing someone on the internet is mad at, even mixing us up with their real target sharing our name, what’s left?
Everything becomes full force win at all costs, no matter how stupid or trivial. Who wants to live like that?
To be clear, threatening people in person is against the law too.
Let's all say it together: just because you can doesn't mean you should
This all sounds great in the abstract. But reality is different due to the power differential. McNally is just one dude (albeit with a huge following). Lee is obviously a toxic jerk and his attacks and mockery of McNally triggered both McNally repeatedly proving the flaws in Proven's technology.
McNally obviously did the correct thing it seeking counsel and basically demolishing Proven's case in court. Too bad the SLAPP stuff doesn't work with DMCA takedowns.
And everyone else cheering on the sidelines (who isn't a paid shill of Proven's like the guy making the "liberal" comment)? Well giving Lee's company shit is fine IMHO. Call up the publicly available phone numbers, make service requests to flood his business etc. Fine with me. You poke the Internet bear, you get some claws.
As to the threats? If they actually occurred (which is questionable considering the BS Proven has been saying), then let the authorities know about them. That's not on McNally at all, it's more Lee being a jerk who doesn't know about the Streisand Effect, combined with social media companies that allow stuff like that to happen. It's also a good idea to not expose too much info about your personal life on social media that can be linked to your business, opsec ya know?
You’re getting downvoted which is unfortunate because I think you make a worthwhile point.
Emotionally I disagree with you. It feels like a bully is getting what a bully deserves. Logically, I think you are right though. Crowds just aren’t equipped to handle these situations. There are cases where the wisdom of the crowd is correct, but there are many more where it multiplies harms.
The underlying problem is that it never feels like justice is being served. Another comment mentions that there should be harsher punishment for false DMCAs. I don’t think the “wisdom of the crowd” approach is the best way to write those wrongs but I lament that modern justice has not been up to the task.
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I’m going to border closely to blaming the “victim” here, but if the lawsuit had been filed without toxic, threatening, man-baby social media posts, we wouldn’t be hearing about it. Harassed because he filed a lawsuit? C’mon, there’s a lot more to it than that. When one goes swinging their dick around on Twitter in an attempt to garner support (from one’s equally toxic fans, I presume), one will also likely attract equally toxic folks who disagree. Talk enough shit, and you’ll eventually get a punch to the face. Right or wrong, such is the world long before social media.
> the lock company owner amd his family. The guy is definitely a toxic bully, but he was indeed violently harrassed by filing a lawsuit
I think you're confusing who filed the lawsuit here. That was also the lock company owner as well (Lee/Proven).
While I agree that flash mob harassment from the Internet is a terrible dynamic, filing baseless lawsuits has been a longstanding way to predictably summon them. So if the table stakes of launching or defending these type of aggressive attacks have gone from a significant amount of money for attorneys, to a significant amount of money for attorneys plus public relations and/or having a large audience, does that really actually change much? Either way most people simply don't file lawsuits, even if they've been actually wronged, due to the extreme personal stress.
The straightforward way of diminishing mob justice is to make people believe the system provides justice. If we lived in a society where McNally would predictably win the lawsuit [0], and be predictably compensated for his expenses/time/emotionalDistress for being on the receiving end of this baseless SLAPP, then there would be much less mob outrage to begin with. As it stands, everyone can imagine themselves receiving these types of legal shakedown letters, but having much less power to push back.
[0] it sounds like this particular suit was slapped down pretty hard and "quick" by the standards of the legal system, but there are many similar cases that don't go this way
The company who sued him is, still, embarrassingly, attempting to hold a social media presence, despite getting exposed as fraudsters and bullies:
https://m.youtube.com/@provenindustries8236
Sounds like the guy had rude awakening that his lock wasn’t as good as he thought it was.
Another way of responding to this is… to improve the lock?
Could even explore a positive collaborative social media campaign promoting the new lock.
Ship has sailed now…
There were locks that were secure against this attack, but they're more expensive. The cheaper locks vulnerable to this attack probably still makes them a load of money, though.
So... what should we be using for physical security?
The question is "what do you want to secure against?" Describe the threat and then go from there. What are you securing? Is it meth-head or teenager? Or is it person determined to get in while making your insurance grill you over "did you lock it?"
In the case of a trailer, you do some combination of...
- Receiver pin lock similar to the one highlighted here (but probably not that exact one) - Wheel lock / boot - Receiver coupler lock (locks inside the cup-shaped receiver, preventing somebody towing the trailer with an undersized ball) - Secured storage lot / garage
But, basically all options are only going to stop random opportunistic thieves. If somebody really wants whatever you're protecting, they'll find a way. That's why insurance exists.
Just clicked around after watching the vid and stumbled onto [0]. So there are locks he recommends... When it requires focus + several minutes to pick.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrV86GqlY8o
I do lockpicking and swear by "Abus" locks
Long (often an hour long) with significant snark videos going over the filings: https://www.youtube.com/@RunkleOfTheBailey/search?query=Prov...
Suing someone because your product doesn't work correctly is diabolical. Instead of filing a lawsuit, they should have acknowledged the issue and released an upgrade to their locks.
Ah, but the truth came out here; the can't sell a lock that is upgraded, because they already do sell one at a higher price.
There are cheaper locks if you don't care to defend against shimming.
Someone seriously needs to be taken to task for filing a false DMCA. DMCA is just another term for SLAPP these days. If anyone is a lawyer, they could still be despite retracting the case?
Anti-SLAPP is a great tool to have, but we do need slightly stronger ones. It’s a tough balance to find - to minimize the potential ways to abuse the system for all different kinds of entities/people.
YouTube’s TOS would be the most critical place to begin in terms of evaluating legal options. To file a “DMCA” (not really DMCA but YT’s proprietary version of it) claimants generally have to create an account and agree to the TOS. So it may bind both parties (the YTer and the abusive DMCA claimant). That might limit legal options for anti-SLAPP, tortious interference, etc.
But without either significant legal expertise or someone finding some particularly relevant case law, it seems like a nuanced enough domain that no one’s lay “legal” opinion would be particularly illuminating.
As the recipient of a SLAPP lawsuit (~decade ago) for truth I published online, the biggest problem with Anti-SLAPP statutes is that laypeople (particularly poorer ones) have limited access to attorney representation... the judicial system isn't accessible/friendly to the pro se litigant.
So even if the case is clearly being used to strategicly silence you, it'll probably still work (from plaintiff's POV). Same for DMCA.
With a strong Anti-SLAPP statute, the person who files the lawsuit is on the hook for the defendant's legal fees, which would (in theory) let the defendant hire an attorney on contigency fees.
Of course, one of the other issues is there's no federal Anti-SLAPP statute, and circuits are split as to whether or not state Anti-SLAPP applies to federal lawsuits, so if someone can diversity jurisdiction you into a federal SLAPP lawsuit, you're kind of stuck.
>which would (in theory) let the defendant hire an attorney on contigency fees
You'd better have a slam-dunk of a case if you're going to easily find contingency lawyers. The worst thing you can be is just "too rich" to qualify for pro bono representation... but even then, you still need a slam-dunk case.
I am currently in the process of suing somebody (plaintiff), for the first time in my many decades, and am a semi-retired electrician of average savings... and it is expensive and probably not worth my time but (in theory) hopefully worth it on principle.
So ready for this to be over with; the lawyers will certainly get their$.
"if someone can diversity jurisdiction you into a federal SLAPP lawsuit"
Sounds like a CivPro hypothetical exam question that would give law students nightmares.
My pitch for an improved system is to give defendants the opportunity to file a lawyer-less motion for summary dismissal, which is 1) geared towards being filled out by a layperson and 2) doesn't disqualify you from a subsequent filing for summary dismissal once you get a lawyer. Basically, an initial "this is a stupid lawsuit, here's why" type deal.
And then fine plaintiffs (and pay the defendants) that lose a summary dismissal, because if your case can be thrown out before trial, it was a shit case that should have never been filed in the first place.
then this will get filed by every corporation against every lawsuit
Is that not an absolute win?
The real problem with DMCA is that in theory it's under penalty of perjury, but in practice it's completely ignored. What is really needs is statutory damages for bogus takedown requests.
Part of the problem with the DMCA is that the "perjury" clause only applies to "claiming that some IP exists", not "claiming that this violates the IP".
They turned a one-minute critique into a PR disaster that millions of people now know about
The wohle article reads to me like: "AMERICA FKK YEAHHH BROO, HE GOT PWNNNDD, SON!" eagle sounds
Gotta admit its entertaining, though.
Yeah saw this - I can't believe a company would steer so far wrong...
> Lee’s partner and his mother both “received harassing messages through Facebook Messenger,” while other messages targeted Lee’s son, saying things like “I would kill your f—ing n—– child” and calling him a “racemixing pussy.”
Some people always go too far, undermining the good cause of the others
It would be funny if all this was just a liquid death marketing campaign
Who knew shaking a juice box could be so intimidating!
Saw the headline, knew it was going to be McNally.
God Bless McNally
These kinds of results seem all too common. Like, why? Are companies just too used to using their general business attorneys for it, and those attorneys are just ignorant? Hungry for extra billable hours?
> Like, why?
The answer, as succinctly as possible: cognitive dissonance.
This is exhibited in every human endeavor, but it's particularly acute, or at least more apparent to simple analysis, in business. In business, anything that diminishes the perception of value is a threat to earnings. Business people don't tolerate the existence of such perceptions in their minds. They readily adopt whatever mental state is necessary to deny realities that reveal a lack of value in whatever work product they sell.
In this case, someone demonstrated a weakness in a lock design. In the minds of the business people behind the product, this is impossible. Their locks are awesome. Best locks in the world! Therefore, the only conceivable possibility permitted, in their minds, is fraud or some other actionable offense that can be feasibly pursued in court.
The role of lawyers in this is a symptom, not a cause. Lawyers are paid to exhibit the necessary cognitive dissonance their clients require. Whatever aberrations or iniquities arise from this are simply denied by yet more cognitive dissonance.
> Lawyers are paid to exhibit the necessary cognitive dissonance their clients require.
Thanks for answering this FAQ.
While IANAL: even people who have done wrong deserve to be treated fairly. "Cognitive dissonance" has nothing to do with representing someone.
Businesses don't have to delude themselves to succeed either.
Even if they know they would lose in court, lawsuits are expensive enough that threatening to sue or filing a lawsuit is often enough to get people without deep pockets to do whatever you want.
I don't know if that was the reasoning in this case though, considering that they didn't drop the lawsuit once it was clear that the youtuber wasn't going to give in to their demands.
clearly proven needs to sue whoever initiated that lawsuit for "mockery produced for the purpose of humiliating plaintiff”.
Interesting story but surprisingly bad write up. What happen to arstechnica.
so they were even asking for it themselves? ahah, geniuses
LPL (Lock Picking Lawyer) has been making a fool of MasterLock and other physical security products/marketing for many years.
Guess ML realizes it’s best to be humiliated online where a small subset of population would never buy their products anyways. Rather than humiliate themselves in public like Proven Industries did (Barbara Streisand effect?)
OMG
Wait, what if a hacker found an exploit and then published it without giving the company a chance to fix it?
> Proven argued that it would be difficult for an untrained user to perform.
That’s are exactly the people who usually break locks. All others fail on simple locks too.
What a snowflake.
Um...shouldn't Proven just hire Trevor McNally as a consultant or heck, make him a partner? I mean...can you imagine the next level reputation they'd have if they can adapt and make a Trevor-proof lock?
I'd buy it.
This is the stupidest thing I read today.
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the YouTuber in question doesn't talk. that's the representative from the lock company - basically the infomercial
its a very confusing video to watch without sound haha, not sure if it gets better with sound. The fact that you do not see the lock pickers face makes you assume it is the same person doing the talking (the representative).
> In the end, Proven’s lawsuit likely cost the company serious time and cash—and generated little but bad publicity.
There's no such thing as bad publicity. People say this for a reason. It's true. I'm willing to bet that their sales have only increased since this started.
There's absolutely such a thing as bad publicity. Entire products and even companies have tanked because of bad publicity. I don't know why this myth continues to be so prevalent.
I think the saying is for people who can take the bad publicity and use it to their advantage.
I didn’t buy a Juicero back in 2015. Seems like I was not the only one.
Bad publicity doesn't guarantee success for a bad product. But it doesn't doom a good one either.
Who is in the market for a product that doesn't work as advertised?
Lockpicking youtubers? But I guess that market got exhausted early on.
You're right! I'm off to the next Fyre festival and making sure my bag is secure with a Proven lock..... I wonder if Dassani still exist so I definitely can quench my thirst.
Humane Pin?