10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea

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.

Thritto.

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.

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 got a £50 pick set from https://x.com/martin__newton

https://imgur.com/a/sbXoBCK

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.

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’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.

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...

> 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).

It's like we forget rocks can easily go through windows.

In this case, the right tool is an empty can and scissors

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.

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.

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.

Certainly not at reasonable prices!

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.

Any lock can be forced through given the right tools and enough time.

You need to be more specific with what "truly secure" means.

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.

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

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.

Same solid principle as homeopathy

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.

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.

Aha, a legitimate use for those things!

Saw the same, except it was bolt cutters.

> 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.

> 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 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?

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.

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.

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.

but then it's obvious the locked thing in question had been defiled. To exfiltrate without detection is the real skill

That's when people can get away with it in broad daylight :) Because everyone thinks like you.

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.

> 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.