> the number of comments

Two of them in total, if I counted right.

Picking locks is a tradition in hacking. So morality is already off the table. Except if this is to save a cat - the offical reason for lockpicking in the 90s.

Now, the robot is hardly something you put together between dessert and coffee. Someone building this must have a live for hardware and lockpicking is just a pretext.

And think about the cats!

You must be mistaken.

This site stopped being Startup News just like Facebook became the 'metaverse' overnight.

But that isn't what "Hacker" means. Take it from pg, who named the site, 15 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648199

> In the sense of the word that means people who write code, not people who break into things

I mean, you tend to see this everywhere.

Hopefully these people do realize that a lock is a promise saying "you belong to a society, be nice". They do very little beyond that, especially these days with small, powerful powertools.

>Every day there’s a story on the front page of some grey/white-hat showing off an exploit they found to infiltrate a site we all use.

This is not true.

The title of this website is literally in another sense than white/grey/black hacker.

Well no, as it doesn't rely on force feedback.

It could do the "what I have for you today ..."routine though!

I sell these over on covert instruments dot com

I hope version 2 will also do double-entendres on April 1st :)

It also has to have the Lock Picking Lawyer's voice.

Or McNallyOfficial's.

This is a class of device usually called an "auto dialer" and have been around for quite some time. This one appears to be fairly low-featured. Newer devices will automatically send a text when a safe has been opened and the better ones are programmed with knowledge of the internal plate schematics so they can shorten the brute force process.

I don't think this is a relevant comparison. Snap guns break pins, which isn't the case with this robot.

I would also kind of respect the project if it was a mechanization of McNally's "It can be opened with a Master Lock".

Nice one, I assume a lot of folks here maybe get the reference?

I think the biggest problem is that the amount of tension you need to apply to hold the binding pins can vary quite a bit, and it's hard to build a mechanical device that can feel with enough fidelity to figure it out.

I am pretty sure anyone building a lock picking robot is at least aware of some lock picking basics, and that's clearly not the point of a project like this. They could get a Lishi, a rake, a comb, almost anything, and we could also argue that this won't work with pin-in-pin dimple locks, tubular locks, and disc detainers, but again, obviously not the point.

Almost every digital lock I've seen (I own about 5) have a keyway hidden under a rubber tab or plastic tab. I haven't built an EMP device yet, but supposedly that works on a lot of them too.

It's not picking, it's brute forcing every combination. Lishi and other lockpicks require tension and feedback, often one pin at a time, which is the opposite of what this tool is doing.

I felt the opposite. Sometimes figuring out a clever way to make the “dumb” thing possible is very impressive.

Human lockpickers use feedback when picking. I'm wondering if a bot could do the same - e.g. measuring the travel distance to find a binding pin, or the resistance to moving the wire?

The next step is to train an ML model on all videos of the lockpicking lawyer and it'll get a click out of one, three is binding every time.

Houses have windows, and bricks are widely available, locks don't protect you, they exist as a social contract: "don't go in here," if people want to go in there, they will, but we have a mostly civil society (fair to argue against this), and locksmiths exist, so this is just a tool, and a fun project.

Locks are not security, in the sense that you're using. A sledgehammer goes right through 90% of them, or the hasps or latches secured by them. A competent lockpicking enthusiast will take two or three minutes to go through almost any of them. Someone motivated to get in with foreknowledge of the lock type can simply use a $200 camera and photograph your keyring from a couple blocks away, then 3d print all the keys on the ring and walk right in.

Law enforcement can use pick guns, which will open a large majority of door locks, if they don't want to just use a battering ram for some reason.

There are a ton of legitimate reasons to use lock picks, though - being able to use a pair of paperclips, or office supplies, can get you into network cabinets in a pinch, or if you lock your keys in your house or car and have a pick kit in your wallet. If a friend has an emergency and they know you can do it, it can save locksmith fees. Kids can lose keys in astonishing ways.

And the hobby is fun - it's manual dexterity, skill, obscure technical knowledge, and you gain an appreciation for all the lockpicking content out there, and get to see the brazen plot devices when movies portray lockpicking in ridiculous ways. There are engineering attempts at creating unpickable locks with some awesome youtube videos, with engineering geeks creating elaborate locks and shipping them to the lockpickinglawyer or other content creators.

It's also important from an educational standpoint. Knowing how secure you are is important, because assumptions can lead to tragic results. If you have a glass door, it doesn't matter if you've got a million dollar unpickable lock. If you know how trivial it is to open most padlocks, and what form factors of locks are most susceptible, you can make better decisions about securing storage units, trailers, outdoor gates, bikes, and so forth.

A device like this is a novelty, not a serious security threat, and I'd argue the threshold for building it exceeds the threshold for which there are a thousand other trivially accessible ways of bypassing a given lock. There are tools similar to this device in spirit, in which you set pins for a key type manually with the key inserted, and with a little practice, will get you through a door in under a minute.

Start here and enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ

I don't think even the non-3d printed commercial ones are for law enforcement purposes.

Besides being for fun, the main draw seems to be that it picks the lock _and_ gives you the bitting. So if you lose all your keys, your locksmith is now in and can easily remake keys without swapping out the lock core.

There may be cases were it's (much) cheaper to pay a locksmith to stand there for ten minutes and spend a few minutes at a key machine, rather than pick a lock in 30 seconds and spend 10 minutes installing a $100 high end lock cylinder.

Given that the locks are so pickable anyway (any causal perusal of YouTube will reveal as much) I think lock picking is something of a community service to let people know that locks are, and probably have always been, to keep honest people honest.

I can kinda buy the justification but I dont think the solution will get adoption. The TSA will cut the TSA-compliant locks if it will take the agent longer to find the key than it will to find the cutter. Or at least that's what the airline employee told me when I asked why my compliant lock had been removed. Law enforcement are not going to settle for a 5 minute skeleton key.

The creator doesn’t mention anything about helping law enforcement. They mention cheap off-the-shelf tools that could do a better and faster job than this robot. There are many reasons pick locks, including it being a hobby.

I don't see how this would bypass the need for a warrant. It'd allow for picking the lock rather than breaking it when you _do_ have a warrant (and whoever has the key isn't available or isn't cooperating).

> security through counting on slow hardware

Security through locks doesn't work in the first place. At least not locks that can be picked by this robot. Pick gun is a thing.