
The Document Which Was Formerly Called The MIT Guide to Lockpicking - jamesbritt
http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/lockpick/
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cleverjake
For those interested in the back story...

Back in the 40-60s(ish) people who are now commonly referred to as "hackers"
were getting their start in the MIT Tech Model Rail Road club. They would get
together and build model trains and tracks and hack together really neat ideas
(neat if you're into trains at least). A lot of these same people were
involved in the computer program, as well as general security. Lockpicking was
sort of a game between a lot of the students as a way to hack their way into
systems, just not in a digital sense. Many of them actually took mail in
classes to become certified locksmiths just to get the special tools that were
only legally allowed to be sold to locksmiths. In Stephen Levy's "Hackers",
there is even a story of how the school bought a new military grade safe to
keep components in the computer lab safe from prying eyes, but the installer
forgot to leave a key. One of the students that the safe was supposed to keep
out was asked to pick the lock, and did so with relative ease.

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mcantelon
MIT ordered the renaming of this? It's sad when learning institutions act like
corporations.

~~~
chaz
Why should anyone should be allowed to arbitrarily use an institution's name
as though they sponsored a publication, event, organization, etc?

~~~
gruseom
Because the students of MIT, and its freethinking traditions, are as much a
part of its name as its administrators are.

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jamesbritt
BTW, while this may be a overly paranoid, check your local laws before getting
a set of picks, especially if you plan on taking them anywhere.

When I got my set I lived in New York City and there you could plausibly be
charged with possession of burglary tools for carrying them around.

As a practical matter I never worried about it, but things being what they are
you should at least be informed about possible risks.

~~~
younata
In pretty much every state, it's not illegal to carry lockpicks, just illegal
to pick locks you don't have permission from the lock's owner to pick.

There are probably exceptions, but this holds true in at least California and
Florida. Also, ianal, so I could be wrong.

~~~
jamesbritt
This is the law in Arizona:

[http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/1...](http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/13/01505.htm&Title=13&DocType=ARS)

The key here is _intent_. As in, can a cop convince a judge you intended to
commit or aid a burglary.

When I got my set some years ago I was in New York, and you had to show that
they were legitimate tools for your job in order to buy them. (They were,
mostly.)

~~~
evilduck
It's a crapshoot though. Definitely look it up for each location. A lot of
state laws include verbiage like "with the intent to commit a crime", while
others word it such that possessing lock picks is the proof of intent, and
where I am, there is no statewide law.

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onosendai
Something only tangentially related to this, but neat nonetheless, and this
seems like a good place to plug it: how to open a kensington lock with a
toilet paper tube, some duct tape and a pen. Actually tried this once and it
worked.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as-CPdf-rKI>

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GermTheGeek-2
Unrelated, but take a look at what this publicity has done to his little
server: <http://www.capricorn.org/cgi-bin/status/capstat.cgi>

~~~
Luyt
FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE systems. Incredible. They still exist, churning for years
without complaint...

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sandycheeks
My wife still comes home from the flea market with old padlocks for me that
she gets for a quarter because they don't have the keys. They make excellent
cheap and sometimes challenging puzzles.

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cgag
Can anyone recommend a good lock pick set and maybe some locks to buy to
practice on? My mom expressed an interest in lock picking a while back and I
was thinking of getting her some stuff.

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nirvana
I don't know if this is really the case, but I thought lock picks were
something you couldn't easily buy. But my friend from MIT told me that the
Cambridge street sweepers used metal brushes and the bristles were long flat
pieces of spring steel, and showed me a lock pick set that he made from that
with a bench grinder. He had a few spare pieces and that's what I made mine
out. Both the tension wrench and the rakes can be made out of this kind of
spring steel.

~~~
burgerbrain
Lock picks are generally quite easy to acquire:
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EAME4W/>

I don't know if they will refuse to ship to jurisdictions where laws are
tighter.

~~~
evilduck
<http://s.dealextreme.com/search/lock+picks>

They definitely don't care about our laws. Worst case scenario is customs
snatches them, but that seems unlikely.

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mun2mun
Google already cached the pdf. Just paste
<http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/lockpick/mitlg-a4.pdf> in Google and
open in quickview. Then you can save it in Google docs if you want.

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DiabloD3
The MIT Guide to Lockpicking isn't about lock picking, its about how to think
as a successful programmer. At least, thats how I've always viewed it.

~~~
barrkel
If you want to extrapolate a more abstract lesson, I'd say it's less about
thinking like a successful programmer and more about learning how to tackle
problems while not following the "rules" of the problems. For example, a lock
might have very sophisticated mushroom pins to avoid normal lock-picking
techniques, and if you "play by the rules" with a normal tension wrench and
simple pick, it may take you a long time - or it might never work. But on the
other side, a sharp knock on the pins with a bump key refuses to play this
game, and requires a different countermeasure for the lock.

It's about looking at the whole boundary area of the problem, rather than the
generally accepted one.

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jwingy
I'm going to study this and use it. Not for malicious purposes mind you, but I
just moved into a new apartment where my door is ALWAYS locked. You can
imagine I've accidentally locked myself out a couple of times such as when a
angry gust of wind slammed my door shut.

I will call the landlord no more!

~~~
Bud
Just duct-tape an extra key somewhere weird.

(Make sure it's weird enough. A block down the street underneath someone's
front steps, under a mailbox that is not yours, something like that.)

~~~
Deestan
That's horrible advice.

Firstly: Leaving your key in someone else's property is a good way to lose it.

Secondly: Burglars are very aware of people leaving extra keys around, and
what you may think is a super hiding place is actually #4 on the burglar's
Typical Clever Hiding Place list.

Duct-tape a set of lockpicks somewhere weird instead, if you're going with
that. No biggie if you lose them, and a burglar is either not going to have
the skill to use them, or carry his own, better set instead.

~~~
cagey
Doesn't seem like horrible advice to me. Sure, if someone finds it, you're out
your backup key. But unless the thief SAW YOU put it there (and you hid it a
block away from your abode as instructed) how is a thief gonna establish the
necessary link between the key and the lock it opens? Try it on every lock in
the neighborhood? And a backup key costs what, $3-$4, and can be operated by
anyone, neither of which are properties of a lockpick set.

~~~
gjm11
> Try it on every lock in the neighborhood?

Yup, quite possibly. The return/effort ratio for doing that is pretty good.
The thief doesn't need to get in the same day as s/he finds the key, after
all.

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jevinskie
Locksport is a ton of fun! You can make your own starter set consisting of a
hook pick and a tension wrench with nothing but a bench grinder and some
hacksaw blades. With that pick, you can learn the basics of picking and (given
patience) actually pick most any lock.

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wtn
The author could run this through spellcheck…

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logjam
_My last encounter with Richard Feynman was not long before he died. Richard
and Carl ate dinner with Julie and me at our house. We spent the rest of the
evening practicing lock picking with locks from my rather extensive
collection. I still sorely miss my friend, Richard Feynman. When thinking
about interesting ideas, from either physics or computation, I often ask
myself, "What would Feynman think of this?"_

\-- Gerald Jay Sussman, MIT AI Lab, co-author of SICP

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nirvana
I remember very fondly my experience with the MIT Roof and Tunnel Hacker's
club. I didn't attend MIT, but was there visiting a friend over a weekend that
happened to be "Alumni Weekend"... so the Roof & Tunnel hackers were taking
old Roof and Tunnel Hacker Alumni along the new routes... and I managed to get
to tag along.

It was great to see the foyer under the great dome, looking down _from_ the
great dome, thru a spot in the fantastic lit stained glass ceiling where
they'd removed one piece. I loved crossing a roof, very late at night, and I
know the story behind "No Toad Sexing!" Though I didn't get to see any of the
apparently few locations where Toad Sexing was authorized.

I was quite struck by the ... ethical system that the Roof & Tunnel hackers
followed. They were careful to keep us civilians in line, and at one point we
came close to a lab where there was vibration sensitive experiments going on.
To keep the Hackers out that lab had installed super sophisticated alarms, and
the hackers told us about a couple ways they thought they could defeat them...
they also discussed the fact that putting those alarm systems in created a
greater challenge than most locations, and thus was an attractive target to
try and hack, and how that was a bit ironic... but they didn't hack them
simply because anyone who cared enough about to do that was someone whose
experiments they didn't want to disturb.

I remember running across roofs after midnight, going thru steam tunnels.

And later, I learned to pick locks myself, and back in Louisiana, at my High
School, which was a statewide magnet school on a certain College Campus, we
picked our way into old abandoned buildings and even found a steam tunnel.
(Yes, I've probably just outed myself to a select group of people.)

Anyway, I wanted to take this time to publicly thank the Roof and Tunnel
Hacker's club at MIT for a very nice night of criminal trespass. We left
things the way we found them, and no property was destroyed, and a fun time
was had by all.. and the patience thy showed to use "civilians" was greatly
appreciated... even if, at the time, I was too awed and shy to properly thank
them.

In the year since, I've trespassed on many a building, crossed many a roof,
and enjoyed quite a few experiences. I've always respected the property I was
trespassing on, and have adopted the ethics I saw displayed that night.

Plus, if nobody knows you were there, they're less likely to take steps that
would make it harder for you to get back.

PS-- Just remembered one "crime" from those years. I was out on a date,
bragging about how I'd learned to pick locks and my date said something
indicating dubiousness... we were passing a FEDEX dropbox at the time and I
said, hey, wait a minute... flipped the lid and found the FEDEX secure lock
and.... managed to open it almost instantly. This was about %50 luck and %50
figuring that the fedex guy was working a route and the combo would be an easy
to remember one, which made it a lot quicker to guess, and I got it on the
third try. Opening the box and showing her all those Fedex Packages sure made
an impression! (then I closed the box and we continued on....)

I think there's a lot of good lessons to be learned by young hackers in
learning to pick locks, seeing the level of security that exists in practice,
and the vulnerabilities. I hope the culture of this kind of hacking is still
alive and well.

~~~
artursapek
_we were passing a FEDEX dropbox at the time and I said, hey, wait a minute...
flipped the lid and found the FEDEX secure lock and.... managed to open it
almost instantly._

You made me want to read the guide just to get free newspapers.

~~~
windsurfer
No need to pick locks - newspaper vending machines can usually be opened by a
strong pull on the door. It makes quite a noise but doesn't break anything,

~~~
rescripting
If I recall correctly you can also open them by tipping them back so they are
about 20 degrees from the ground. You should hear the locking mechanism fall
open and the door opens easily. Your milage may vary.

~~~
artursapek
But imagine how badass you would look picking a newspaper box.

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wyclif
_Anyone can learn how to pikc locks._

There's an error in the second sentence of Chapter 1. Not promising.

~~~
mvalle
teh guide has lots of typos.

