[1092] LockPickingLawyer
└ posted on Monday, 24 June 2019, by Novil
LockPickingLawyer at YouTube.
So, what do you think the next story arc is about regarding that it caused such a reaction in Woo?
- LockPickingLawyer: This is the lockpicking lawyer, and what I have for you today is the S&G electronic lock model 2750C.
- LockPickingLawyer: It’s the lock used for the plutonium vault of the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Facility… and it has a fatal design flaw!
- LockPickingLawyer: With a simple tool like– Oh, the doorbell is ringing. Please excuse me for a moment.
- Sandra: Some people just don’t know when to stop.
- Woo: Dear Seeoahtlahmakaskay, have you read the script for the next story arc?!
![[1092] LockPickingLawyer](/comics/2019-06-24-1092-lockpickinglawyer.png "[1092] LockPickingLawyer")
Either bad things are going to happen to the kits or smooching, lots of intense smooching. More likely something similar to the former.
You’re obviously parodying a TV show — but I’m unfamiliar with it. American or German?
Those S&Gs are too easy. They should use a Bowley Padlock, Model 543.
I have it on very good authority those are proof against burglars, terrorists, hackers, and smart little sisters.
@ Edda:
The show in question is on YouTube, and is linked in the description below the comic. LockPickingLawyer’s channel consists of a lawyer showing how to pick various locks. He’s done various supposedly pick-proof and burglar-resistant locks and opened them fairly easily, which makes some people concerned that his YouTube channel makes the world less secure, by teaching people how to break into just about anywhere.
My guess is that the next arc is about the locks a racoon can open with his sensitive paws. We have seen some examples about it already in S&W. 🙂
oledakaajel wrote:
Well, I’m guess it’s D…
Eliyahu wrote:
Reminding us the world is a horrible place with no redeeming aspects:-).
Aaaannnnd… That is why you don’t Livestream sensitive information, always record then upload
Of course the smart thing for the government agents at the front door to do would to either pay him to fix the design flaw or at least shut up about it
Oliver and Pow are polite about knowing more then the rest of us. We all have the threat of some people who’d inform us of lockpicking advancements with a note saying “ha ha get —‘d”.
Sandra is such an only child that she watches such videos out of intellectual curiosity! 🙂
Next story arc- hmm, we’ve had some good Larissa. Perhaps she’ll die early. Or Ye Thusa will get arrested. Or another raccoon kit, or Cloud’s sister will be injured. But that’s all the easy guesses…
Titan wrote:
I have a scifi book written during WWII. Best part is the intro. Author was a electronics/radio engineer. FBI showed up at his door because his made-up science was too close to what was current, wartime research at that time. 🙂
I know someone now who’s son got a visit from the FBI in the last couple of years because he was doing nuclear experiments in his dorm room. LOL
Hah, when Larissa mentioned the lock in a prior video, I figured you might watch LockPickingLawyer on Youtube. I started watching it a few months ago and it’s fascinating to see the different things that people miss when building locks and try to figure out which ones are the most effective and difficult to open. I liked his guide on cheaply modifying a lock to make it evident that someone tried to pick it open.
@ Titan:
Didn’t consider this, true.
Was just going to say Sandra needs to learn autism spectrum disorder is. “When to stop” is not in their concept of curiosity.
@ Vicious Sand:
Raccoon family goes on a heist?
Honestly, I saw the words “Lockpicking lawyer”, and I got nervous…
I had a feeling the next arc would involve Woo’s previous owner coming back for him, claiming that Woo was still his property because the lock on his cage was picked, and therefore “stolen”.
Make me wonder who’s at the door.
Having been a fan of the Lockpicking Lawyer (and BosnianBill, etc) for a while now, I’m definitely looking forward to where you’re going with this one
Wait, not a Bowley 543?
Iron Ed wrote:
I see that, and raise you Tom Clancy getting a visit from the US Navy because they thought he somehow managed to get his hands on classified info pertaining to submarine warfare and technology, only to discover that he simply extrapolated from publicly available material from a normal library.
Eliyahu wrote:
He’s make the world MORE secure by showing the customers of those locks that they can’t rely on them and the companies making them what they do have to improve.
If he can find the flaws, other can to. “It’s not a flaw if nobody knows about it” is never a viable option.
The main point of a lock isn’t to be undefeatable, but to reduce optunistic break-ins. windows, especially ground floor windows defeats that point
I love LPL! Threw me for a loop seeing it here. The man is so good at picking locks, I’m sure he would be able to crack this one open inside of a minute. I think the longest I’ve ever seen him take on a single lock was four or five minutes.
Richard Feynman discovered, while working on the atomic bomb project, that the padlock that was used to protect the secret files was still set to the factory default.
Furthermore, he discovered that the file cabinet that the files were kept in was not secured to the floor and did not have an actual back, meaning that he (or anyone else), could easily tip it forward and take any files he wanted out without even bothering with the lock.
Awesome strip, thanks :). I really like LPL with his calm, soothing voice and no-drama style, as well as obviously his excellent lockpickign skills and insights into strengths and weaknesses of all kinds of locks. I must have watched like 50 of them over the last months. Made me get my son’s picks and practice locks and get much better at lockpicking than before…
Next strip is Larissa showing up at LPL’s door, so she can be taught how to open certain doors and then Larissa goes and tries to lockpick the Alamos Plutonium door and/or some other door that contains something super secret, super dangreus, something that is locked up for a reason, but that she needs for “science”..
clickbait wrote:
No lock is ever perfectly secure. The aim usually has to be „delay the attacker long enough for other security mechanisms to kick in“. But yes, if there is a vulnerability, it is better for it to be widely known than to be known only to those who are willing to put up major effort to find it. All the more, if single Youtuber can find it…
Also I nice analogy to cryptography and the whole „security by obscurity“ thing. The equivalent of lockpicking-as-a-hobby would be stuff like the SigFlag competitions 🙂
@ Mechwarrior:
you are slightly misremembering. At the start they had regular locks, and Feyman kept lock picking them to prove they weren’t safe. Then they switched to 3 digits locks, and he used the trick you described (tipping it). Then he discovered you could learn the last 2 digits of the code by playing with an already open lock, and he went to discover the codes of most locks in the facility. And then, near the end of the war, a technician told him what was the factory code and he discovered that it opened 1 in 3 locks in the facility.
MarqFJA87 wrote:
The same happened to Stanley Kubrick after Dr. Seltsam. The shown B52 instruments were a little to close to the real thing^^
@ Iron Ed:
When Alfred Hitchcock and Ben Hecht were writing “Notorious,” with the atomic bombs still being secret, they were looking for an example of some valuable material that would take up very little space. Hecht vaguely recalled hearing something about uranium, so they went to the California home of Robert Millikan, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist, and when he opened the door, Hecht asked, “Would a single wine bottle fit enough uranium to do…whatever uranium is supposed to do?” Millikan turned white and said, “Do you want us all to get arrested?” And Hitchcock and Hecht said, “OK, that’s all the answer we need.”
Anyway, the movie came out well after the bombs had been dropped, but it’s still a good story.
@ MarqFJA87:
Maybe that was the inspiration for a later Clancy plot point, where he has some Syrian terrorists learn how to make a nuclear bomb by…checking out some books from an Israeli public library.
Titan wrote:
The latter I would never – governments NEED to be always publicaly embarrased about their screw ups – any security flaw anywhere must be made public immediately.
as that is the one and only way which forces our IMMEDIATE corrective action. Keeping it secret maintains the risk of someone else finding the flaw.
Anything that leaks from government must be made public immediately to everyone.
It happens sometimes. Cody from codyslab got a visit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after his video about refining uranium. They looked around with geiger counters and confiscated a centrifuge that set them off.
@ Iron Ed:
Little confusion there. George O Smith was the electronics engineer, but the FBI never suspected him of anything.
John W Campbell was asked to cease publishing tales about atomic energy. He showed them that everything in that story was public knowledge and atomics were a staple of SF. Abruptly stopping would do nothing but arouse more suspicions.
I met George once and he had an even better personal anecdote. He worked on the proximity fuze — little gizmo with vacuum tubes which could survive being shot from an AA cannon. Very high priority. Then they were told their request for Cadmium was denied. Someone had an even higher priority. Huh? Cadmium didn’t have that many uses. So they checked the CRC handbook. “Look at all those stable isotopes. Someone is absorbing neutrons!!”
And, right there and then, the engineers KNEW!.
George used this an example of how it was impossible to truly conceal a major project regardless of the precautions you took.
Campbell also suspected. He had a map with pushpins marking the location of subscribers to his magazine, Astounding. Expected concentration around places like MIT. But why so many in middle-of-nowhere Tennessee? Place called “Oak Ridge”.
@ clickbait:
Please consider yourself upvoted. I was going to make a similar comment, buy you already laid it out pretty well.
So I had this dream a few minutes ago, where for a short time, Sandra and Woo was animated but not voice acted, so there were mobile speech bubbles and the sort. It explained how Larissa, Cloud, Sandra and someone named Echo had a secret club and the power to see through black, white, purple and yellow things. Then Larissa got trapped in a small cavity 3 meters below a road while Sandra and Cloud sat in sun chairs above, waiting for the next page to come out. The mouseover text on the final frame somehow had an image embedded in it and said something about an obscure character Novil planned at the beginning but hasn’t shown up since.
Also there was this part with a brain virus on a flying train but those wings were very obviously from Kerbal Space Program, sooooo… yeah.
@ Mechwarrior:
@ pyhnux:
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann” is an amazing book, and anyone here should definitely read it if you haven’t already.
That’s the kind of stuff that makes me laugh at conspiracy theories.
The security business is an entire industry dedicated to holding pee at the corner of the pool where it was released (paraphrasing John Oliver here, credit where it’s due).
Seriously, humans are where we are only because we´re very good at sharing and spreading information, not holding it in. People who think there’s order in this mess are really giving us too much credit.
If there is something to be known, it will be known eventually. Perhaps not at the best timing. But still.
Fex wrote:
The probability of any given conspiracy theory being true is directly proportional to the benefit of it being true, and inversely proportional to the number of people involved. And that latter not just because people can’t keep secrets, but because people make ripples in the world. To many people hiding their ripples is just as obvious as simply putting the information out there.
@ Eliyahu: Something also to keep in mind is that LPL is a pretty extraordinary at picking locks. He makes it look trivial sometimes, but, his skills are not something most thieves are going to have. Destructive entry is far easier and faster than trying to pick your way into most locks, unless you have a truly poor quality lock.
I know who knocks ISA Indigo-6A sent by Research 2.0 with a silenced pistol
And as always, have a nice day.
@ Khaisz:
You beat me to it. It’s obviously Larissa
What if there is no real plan for the next story arc, and we’re all giving Novil ideas?Okay, in all seriousness… I’m gonna guess someone – don’t know who, but someone – actually dies, or at least gets hurt badly, in the coming arc. I don’t think Woo would really be panicking otherwise.
Robert Heinlein got a visit from the FBI because of his story in [[Astounding]] that told about what was basically an atomic bomb. The Government was very upset with him because he was an engineer and former Naval officer.
Thumbs up for this one 🙂
@ bmuessig:
Not that I wouldn’t give thumbs up for the other ones too, but I find it quite hilarious that you have picked up the LPL from one of the previous comment sections.
Guys, check this out, I contacted the Lock Picking Lawyer about the comic. He was quite flattered.
@ Plinko20:
Shoot, the link did not show. Let me just put it in plain text.
https://twitter.com/Plinko20/status/1145406817725321218
Titan wrote:
The smart thing for the government agents to do is to bring him heap of locks used in OTHER countries, insist he does them first, tell them how then wait week before publishing.