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Why does most of the world continue to use the pin tumbler locks, when the disc tumbler lock (invented in 1907) is almost impossible to pick? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_tumbler_lock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_tumbler_lock
There is a guy on youtube called bosnianbill, his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/bosnianbill is full of useful information. You can also find Mike Gibson's "Lock Picking: Detail Overkill" which is a great book for starters!
Richard P Feynman, who, on having picked a certain lock, complained that "[t]he trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller[0] is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure!"
The volume »Surley, You're Joking Mr Feynman!«[1] contains many, at times only seemingly so, light-hearted reminiscences in similar spirit.
[0] Edward Teller (1908, Budapest – 2003), a Hungarian-US nuclear physicist known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb"; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
On a legal note; IANAL, but I did a little research before getting started in lock picking a while back. iirc, there are no federal laws against having picks. However, states often have laws against "possession of burglary tools". In my jurisdiction, if they can establish intent to burglarize -- ie, you're also carrying an empty duffel bag, a crowbar, and a map with the bank circled on it -- its a class II felony. I…
Why does most of the world continue to use the pin tumbler locks, when the disc tumbler lock (invented in 1907) is almost impossible to pick? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_tumbler_lock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_tumbler_lock
Burglars in general do not read MIT guides. Even if some might, security is still a weakest link problem. The easiest way into a house is by window, the letterbox, etc, speaking of locks in general it's easiest just to use a bolt cutter.
Locks are mere tamper-proof seals, lock-picking is the art of breaking into those seals without breaking them.
I have seen a lot of broken locks in my time (I worked in a the bicycle industry). I have also removed quite a lot of locks in my time (the days working in a bike shop).
Thieves just use those big bolt cutters that cost £10 or so and get the job done in seconds. Even the most expensive locks are fair game for this basic approach, the biggest fear is that there is some CCTV somewhere. The amount of 'pin tumblers' makes no difference.
In the bike shop where there is the choice of the bolt-croppers, the oxy-torch, the disc-cutter, the vice, the big hammer and so on one doesn't think for one moment 'oh, I will just download that lock-picking guide off the internet, follow the instructions and be in here in a minute...'. The feature I always found charming was how many bicycle locks have a plastic coating around the cable. This makes it very easy to use a normal saw. The plastic works as a guide meaning the saw does not slip.
Hence, for my own bicycle I use a £4.99 combination number lock for that short shopping trip to town and a £24.99 D-lock for the company bike shed.
Does anyone know of a link to download this resource? I'm not confident that it will remain active, especially after all of this attention.
wget -rkp -l3 -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 http://www.blurofinsanity.com/mit/lockpick.html
If on mac os you'll need to brew install wget or follow this tutorial to use curl http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/06/using-wget-or-curl-to-down...
After you've downloaded the website you can run a simple server in a terminal by navigating to where you downloaded the website and running
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Then navigate to http://0.0.0.0:8000/lockpicking.html in your web browser.
LPT: I do this with coding tutorial sites before getting on planes so I don't waste money buying internet and time browsing other content.
For a while tv shows commonly had people getting in using a credit card to push back the bolt. You don't see it anymore though
Does anyone know of a link to download this resource? I'm not confident that it will remain active, especially after all of this attention.
However I really like backing up things and making a local mirror so I'm not going to stop you. I hate it when something interesting like this vanishes from the internet and it turns out no one has a copy.
So I'm hosting a copy of it for you and anyone else that would like to help preserve it. I just downloaded the copy with:
"wget --mirror --page-requisites --no-parent --convert-links --no-parent --wait=5 --random-wait -U "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14" -e robots=off --progress=bar --level=8 --referer=$2 $1"
Here's a copy I just put on my server: http://www.ifnotequal.com/The-MIT-Lockpicking-Guide-Mirror/m...
I've included a download for it (also hosted on my server) at the top of that page. It's only 290.5KiB.
All the best and enjoy.