These look amazing! For anyone not aware: lock picking is already easy on most locks. I was locked out of a keyed door in my last apartment once and was able to pick my way back in with no experience, a friend's lock picking kit, and a few YouTube videos. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes.
Since then I've thought of locks more like deterrent than bulletproof security.
>> Since then I've thought of locks more like deterrent than bulletproof security.
Remember, a rock to the window will get someone into your house. A bolt cutter will take off small padlocks. So yes, most locks are there to protect from the casual or opportunistic thief. That doesn't mean we don't need the of course.
>Remember, a rock to the window will get someone into your house.
Security films that dramatically up the ante on what it takes to go through windows are getting cheap and easy to install. If I had thought about it when I got my windows tinted a few years back I would have just had them added on, especially for my downstairs windows (not sure I would bother with most of the upstairs - I have no trees or easy access to most of them).
There are many simple things you can do to dramatically up the ante on what it takes for someone to molest your stuff. A recent news story talked about people using coat hangers to trip emergency garage door releases so a quick re-security it with a zip tie that will break with a solid tug for it's real use, but be too hard to break with a wire from outside is all that was needed to close that "hole".
Need a place to share this kind of stuff for homeowners. I recon it would probably be a small percentage but still a large number.
Indeed. I've also had to bolt cut my way into a storage unit I forgot the combination to. Bolt cutters could be rented from the local Home Depot and cut my way into my own storage unit with no knowledge from the staff. It was my lock so no damage to the owners.
Yes, my wife was really insistent on our front door being locked while we were inside our apartment. I pointed out to her that our front door was nearly top to bottom glass panes and if someone with ill-intent wanted to gain entry, all they had to do was bust a pane and unlock the door themselves.
That's exactly what you are doing. In a large majority of the cases. You can lookup security videos all day long on youtube, thieves will commonly go door to door just looking for an unlocked door or more often, car to car looking for an unlocked door so they can steal the contents.
The exact thing is happening in my neighbourhood on a regular basis in the last year. And in some cases the burglar managed to get away with notebooks and other valuables while the owner were just upstairs for 5 minutes.
I'm sorry, but your anecdote smells. If you are robbing houses at random, the last thing you want to do is rob an occupied home. You rob an occupied home for a reason specific to that house or the owner of that house.
Most burglaries happen in the daytime when people are at work and their houses would be locked regardless.
And the most common form of home theft nowadays is package theft. Which isn't going to be thwarted by locking your home since, you know, the package is just sitting on the porch.
The old saying is that locks are for keeping the honest people out[1]. Over 10 years ago I was able to pick my garage door lock with a pen cap, a bobby pin, and a youtube video. Around the same time I realized how locks were important as I had friends and family walk into my house because I wasn't answering the door or my phone.
[1] i tried to find who said it, but it looks like there are a ton of variations.
Most people also forget that the security is vulnerable even before you get to the lock itself. One time I was at the beach with my in-laws and they locked themselves out of the beachouse rental. I just whipped out a credit card and slid it in the door jam. The door opened right up. Another time I misplaced the key to a storage unit in my apartment complex. I just took a small hacksaw and was through the thing in a couple minutes. The only thing it was protecting me from was people who didn't want to steam my stuff in the first place. Anyone with an ounce of determination would have been off with my stuff.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on other vulnerabilities, like the hinges of doors being on the outside. Just take a screw driver and hammer and pop the pins out.
Yep, my first pick on a standard lock took fairly little time. If you're talking about something like a normal house door lock, even a beginner picker, with darkness as a cover, can get through without risking the sound generated by an entry through physical force.
My view is that you choose lock cores based on how difficult you want it to be to pick before it makes more sense to resort to destructive entry.
For a bike lock on the street, a few minutes of picking won't look much different to pedestrians than someone simply struggling with their own bike lock. But destructive removal is much more obvious. (Unless it's a physically flimsy lock, or even a beefy one with a simple bypass vulnerability)
It's much more obvious, but nobody is going to give two craps about you taking an angle grinder to someone else's bicycle lock. Bystanders don't want to get involved, and police don't pay any attention to bicycle theft.
My experience is that the cops don't care a bit about thefts into the mid thousands, even if there's a high likelihood the culprit and their car, probably including the plate were caught on camera multiple times. "We'll have your report for insurance in a week. No, we're not even going to make a couple phone calls to investigate."
Hell, one time a small company I worked for had five figures of gear stolen in a break-in... and then several other businesses in the area did, too. Well over $100,000 (retail) of equipment stolen by the end. Multiple cameras at multiple businesses caught them, including their van and plate number. The cops did the same, "yeah, yeah, here's your report, we don't care" until someone called them while sitting directly behind the van in question and told them they'd found the guys and to get off their asses and do something.
AFAIK nothing was recovered anyway, but I think they were at least arrested. Yay?
I honestly don't know what they do aside from give out traffic tickets and harass people.
That depends-- it's not a great idea to confront a thief, but I think there's at least a fraction of the population that would walk on for a bit & then call the police, and if there's a unit in the area it might at least take a drive-by. Or the thief might be unlucky and have a cop stumble on their effort.
So, yes, destructive lock removal can still be fairly safe for the thief, but there is still a lot of increased risk if you employ a proper lock that would require an angle grinder, and most thieves probably don't bother to carry around tools like that and will simply move on to one of many ample opportunities for an easier target: A handheld compound bolt cutter will cut through inferior locks faster than opening with a key, so why bother bringing bulkier more obvious tools that increase risk even a little bit?
It's not about whether your bike can be stolen: it almost certainly can. It's about making other targets more attractive.
A neighbor of mine recently posted on Nextdoor about his bike being stolen from the Safeway in Menlo Park. Apparently two men looked on from their Teslas and did nothing while the thief used bolt cutters to remove the lock. A nearby woman did go after the thief, but unsuccessfully. The bike was worth several thousand dollars.
I am thinking of getting a Boosted Rev (escooter, $1,600) and have wondered how I would secure it when going into stores. It seems as if any lock under $120 can be snapped by 3-foot bolt cutters (and the more expensive ones can still be easily picked).
I think I would probably get a decent u-lock and also a lock that makes noise and is triggered by even slight motion (to draw attention if someone is fiddling with it.
How does one know that the person trying to cut a lock off isn't the owner of said lock that simply lost the key? And if someone calls the police and they show up, and it is actually the owner of the lock, how does that owner prove it to the cops?
I was surprised to see just how easily this Master Lock key safes are to unlock with a bit of practice. However, when you consider it's not much more effort to pick the door lock anyway I don't suppose it matters much.
> Since then I've thought of locks more like deterrent than bulletproof security.
To be fair most american houses are built such that a reasonably burly person could punch through the wall. I’ve seen friends leave big holes in the wall just from falling down some stairs. Glass windows also are easy to get through.
The problem with lock-picking is that it doesn’t leave signs of a break-in.
I'm sure your friends have probably made holes from the interior drywall and into the wall cavity, but I doubt that hole went through the exterior sheathing or siding. The interior drywall is basically decorative. To get all the way through the wall, you're going to need a bit more than a punch. It could be done with basic tools, but regardless, breaking a window is still a quicker way inside, and most houses around the world have that as a weakness.
However I’ve heard fun stories from my part of Europe where most people live in apartment buildings and own their apartment. Armored doors are a popular upgrade.
But nobody upgrades the thin brick wall holding that fancy $3000 armored door ... you can guess what started happening as thieves realized the doors are too difficult and a window on 5th floor isn’t very accessible.
> The problem with lock-picking is that it doesn’t leave signs of a break-in.
Sorta. Lock picking will leave marks/wear that no key would. So I recommend everyone try to pick their own lock today to make it look like someone picked it for up-to-no-good reasons.
Do not pick any locks you intend to actually use or can't easily replace!
Sure, some locks won't care. But there are some that can permanently jam pins if you don't know what you are doing (and, in some cases, even if you do).
Yea at the end of the day it's all about what your threat model is. The strategies you use to defend against overt entry are not the same as the strategies you use to defend against covert entry (although there is overlap).
There was a while in the 90s/00s when code only required wood sheathing on the corners, and elsewhere you could have just insulating foam sheathing. So if you had vinyl siding, someone could pretty easily break into your house with just box cutters.
Since then I've thought of locks more like deterrent than bulletproof security.