alt Hacker NewsLock-Picking Robot
Comments
I reread Neuromancer last month and there was a line about how the AI had to recruit a human for its plan b/c the final step had a mechanical lock that needed to be picked by feel. I’m glad to see this is a brute force approach and that us humans still have some use for a while more (not sure if my comment is /s or not).
I'm a strong supporter of the "I did it because I wanted to see if I could do it" ethos. So this isn't a criticism of the project itself, but I'm pretty sure a snap gun will beat this almost every time.
There is also a Safe Cracking Robot
[0] Blog about it: https://joeleb.com/safe-cracking-robot-defcon/
[1] Defcon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9vIcfLrmiA
What a fun project! The use of wires to get around the corner is such a clever idea, although I see that goes back to the 90s. I'm surprised the idea isn't older.
I wonder what makes it take a minimum of 0.7s per combo, it seems like it could be sped up substantially.
There is a link to AliExpress in the README that is broken. Another comment though suggests something like the "Sputnik Pickling Tool".
Maybe like this wild machine: https://youtu.be/CLcOZhq2GjQ?si=LJktKRzeHPRyXcXR&t=155
> brute force all possible combinations
Somewhat less impressive than I was expecting. The wire idea is neat though.
Cool idea but I'm not buying the justification. There are many cases where the correct response to "but law enforcement needs a way in" is "we have a system for that, it's called a warrant."
Further, while standing somewhere for five minutes may be obvious in some situations, there are many cases in which it wouldn't be obvious at all, or the response time would be great enough that this could still be quite useful to bad guys.
Finally, "security through counting on slow hardware" is probably even worse than security through obscurity.
The number of comments in here slandering the developer’s morality for picking locks is actually pretty surprising for a site literally called Hacker News. 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. It’s an odd double standard.