This topic came up again recently. Where does the word “Peterman”, to mean a safe blower-up-er, come from? It would be down to a scholar to do some digging and find the actual answer. Or I could just look on Google and find out… The 2 competing theories: Personally I’ve always thought of Saltpetre …
A question that I’m sure not many people consider is “Do I actually need an alarm?” The answer, similarly unconsidered, is probably not. But that is with caveats. As a professional, I’ve broken into hundreds of houses a year for the best part of a decade. So, you’d think I’d be partly deaf from the …
Doing the rounds again this week is the old news that the accelerometers in various devices, notably the iPhone, can be used to spy on a users input. In 2009 they were claiming 80% accuracy on iPhone 4.(1) Tiny variations in the movement of the phone can be decoded to tell almost exactly where people …
Stumbled across this earlier. I have a lot of dealings with the edges of criminality. I replace locks when keys are stolen, under a court warrant I break into places that may or may not have an owner, I see the results of burglary and repair them to a higher standard, and I open houses …
With the Queen’s Speech mere hours away, here is some very vaguely related news. Incorrigible rogues can sleep safely at night (or whenever) – it is no longer a criminal offence to be one in England and Wales. 308 other offences were also removed from the books. (Or perhaps haven’t been yet because it happens …
A new initiative to boost confidence in the UK police has been launched. Islington, Lewisham and Havering in London are having specifically targeted ultra-local posters at bus stops and other “street level” locations on roads and other locations that are deemed to have a crime or anti-social behaviour problem. http://content.met.police.uk/Campaign/localpolicing R2D2 on steroids? Or a …
Yes, it’s a crime-and-lock related news round-up! Read More »
Yes, these days you would think that the internet is no longer the “Wild Frontier” that it once was. The Silk Road is shut down, the Feds are taking over Bitcoin regulation, and the police and tax officials regularly monitor sites like eBay to catch those peddling stolen goods or making huge undeclared incomes. Yet …
I ran across some interesting info this evening about the results of statistical analysis on numerical passwords (Personal Identification Numbers, AKA PIN numbers, or, more correctly, just PINs) by Nick Berry, who now works as Facebook’s Data Scientist. The article is well worth a read. http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html is a direct link. Or, if you prefer, he’s …
(I wrote this in 2007 and found it saved as a draft today. Not much has changed since this was written. The only thing that has gone up is the hold times… Enjoy.) Me, I’m not biased. You come across as stoned, fine, come across as mad, fine. But this guy, he was special. Like …
From the old days: 5 doors, one mad bloke; A day in the life of a Warrant Locksmith Read More »
Happy “National Home Security Month”. Or something. Yale have kept it rather quiet – I didn’t see anything at the Master Locksmiths Association show – but as the nights draw in again, it’s a wise idea to consider your home and business security. Criminals have far more time to work when it is cold and …