Mon Mar 14, 2016 5:02 pm by Kitteh_of_Dovrefjel
Act 1:
In high school I got to enjoy the tail end of BBSs and the earliest days of the web. One of the bits of digital detritus that drifted across my screen was...The Anarchist's Cookbook. I'll pause now for the chuckles, head shaking, eye rolling, and general amusement and scorn to subside. Anyhoo..... The section on sneakily gaining access to places one shouldn't properly be caught my attention and a bit of experimentation followed. The high point of this period was the day the librarian in charge of the computers forgot her keys at home and couldn't get into her desk. A few moments with a pair of paper clips and the old Hon was open. She immediately threw a fit about how I couldn't do that. So I locked her desk back up and wandered off to be a sullen and angst ridden teen somewhere with less screeching.... for all of ten minute until she came and found me and asked with surprising humility if I could open her desk back up. I walked away from the ordeal with one of the rarest of items in my school at the time. A laminated hall pass allowing me to basically wander as I saw fit. This led to a lucrative smuggling business for the rest of the semester. As it is wont to do time passed and interests shifted and my early fiddlings with paper clips and cheap, worn wafer locks were consigned to the dusty attics of memory.
Until......
Act 2:
Some twenty years and change have passed since I last used office supplies to open a desk. A friend calls and asks me if I'd be willing to help him out with the kids track he's overseeing as part of a one day cyber security conference at a local college. The plan is to teach kids a few basic hacker/maker skills while various speakers discuss social engineering and Russian worms. He's got rooms set up for cryptography, programming, soldering, and lock picking. All of the rooms are being run by competent folks who actually get paid to do this stuff on weekdays. But children being children he's assigning extra staff to the soldering area so that each pair of kids has a "responsible adult" making sure they don't brand satanic symbols into each others foreheads or write dirt limericks on the tables with the soldering pens. Apparently despite many years acquaintance my friend has decided I am a responsible adult and so I'm going to referee children with sizzling hot chunks of metal. Fun. Day of the event and as I'm dumping my bag in the soldering room and finding the fire extinguisher my friend asks if I know anything about picking locks. It seems his instructor for that room had bailed at the last minute. I spend the next hour watching the Youtube videos they had already found for the class and working feverishly with an Amazon special set of picks and a clear padlock. I might not have a clue but any adult that sounds like they know what they're talking about should be good enough for the day right? Right? Well, i managed to not make a complete hash of things. All the kids eventually managed to get an open on their lock, some of the parents did too. More than one parent asked if we really thought it was a good idea to teach kids how to "break into" locks. I got really good at explaining that it was a two pronged approach. We were teaching the kids that perception of security and reality were not always the same and in a world of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a million other impossible to monitor channels of communication understanding what security really means was a good thing right? And if kids learned that physical security wasn't really available for $8US at Walmart and it saved their new bike that was a good thing too. Apparently that line was good enough to get one of the paid scribblers for the local paper to wander into my room for a bit and the next day's edition had me quoted and described as a "security systems expert". Not bad for a line cook. One of the outcomes of my new title was rekindling my interest in locks. A week and a few days later a Sparrow's Tuxedo landed on my doorstep, Youtube got a lot of hits, and all the old padlocks I had lying around got piled on a desk and mercilessly raked open.
That was back in October.
Since then I've added a few picks, learned to SPP, entered a contest on Reddit, collected a few amusing locks, and found myself here.
In six months I've learned a lot. Mostly that I don't know a damned thing.
So....
Now to drop a siphon into the group's mind and drain all your smarts into my own head.