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Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

bbc.co.uk

11–20 of 118 posts

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#11
post #4

"The fact that the combination was in a specific pattern and did not appear to be a random combination of numbers could also factor into a calculation of the odds, he added." Hehe. I guess he'll have to produce a list of non-random numbers to work those odds out.

Randomness produces patterns all the time, and if we cut out the patterns that appear, then we are selecting the pattern that we’ve labeled as ‘random.’

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#12
1 in 216000... seems like you could build some robotic device to brute force that pretty easily... or you know, introduce it to a thermic lance.

EDIT: sorry, my research suggests that safe-cracking with thermic lances is plausible but not practical (source; Mythbusters, of course)

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#13
"he noted that some combination locks allow for wiggle-room and if this one had a three-digit leeway, Mr Rosenthal put the chances at 1 in 8,000, "which is still a small chance"."

If this is the case, and there have been museum visitors having a go at opening the safe each day... this becomes a non story, right?

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#14
Reminds me of the time I was playing a computer game, and right at the beginning you are presented with a door 5-digit combination lock. The objective of the game was to explore the game world and eventually discover all 5 digits of the code.

First time I played the game I just randomly entered 5 digits, and the door unlocked.

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#15

Reminds me of the time I was playing a computer game, and right at the beginning you are presented with a door 5-digit combination lock. The objective of the game was to explore the game world and eventually discover all 5 digits of the code. First time I played the game I just randomly entered 5 digits, and the door unlocked.

Myst series?

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#17

"he noted that some combination locks allow for wiggle-room and if this one had a three-digit leeway, Mr Rosenthal put the chances at 1 in 8,000, "which is still a small chance"." If this is the case, and there have been museum visitors having a go at opening the safe each day... this becomes a non story, right?

Humans are terrible at picking random numbers, it's quite likely many people tried the same thing (more or less).

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#18

1 in 216000... seems like you could build some robotic device to brute force that pretty easily... or you know, introduce it to a thermic lance. EDIT: sorry, my research suggests that safe-cracking with thermic lances is plausible but not practical (source; Mythbusters, of course)

+1 for using a robotic cracking device, I would go as far to say that a good hacker could whip something up in a weekend that would have cracked this.

Re: Tourist's lucky guess cracks safe code on first try

#19

Reminds me of the time I was playing a computer game, and right at the beginning you are presented with a door 5-digit combination lock. The objective of the game was to explore the game world and eventually discover all 5 digits of the code. First time I played the game I just randomly entered 5 digits, and the door unlocked.

Perhaps you applied a buggy crack or patch.
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