Archive for May, 2011

The robotic key duplicator

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Frank brought this nice little key-duplicating robot to my attention. The ‘minuteKey’ seems like a great idea! (check their site or see the FAQ for the limitations)

I am not sure how wise it is to have your home keys scanned and analyzed by a robot and then identify yourself to it by paying with a credit-card (no cash payment possible). On top of that it needs your e-mail address in order to mail you a receipt. The first thing that comes to mind is that all this data quickly turns into a pretty interesting database, especially if the minuteKey becomes popular and widespread.

Interesting times we live in …

What is up with Barry?

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

Toool meeting Amsterdam

As you can see on the image above I am doing fine. The image is a picture made by Dutch Panorama Magazine a couple of weeks ago at the Amsterdam Toool meeting. Panorama interviewed me and wrote a pretty nice article about me.

One of the topics covered in the article is the flood of professional lock-related work I do at the moment. It is one of the reasons blackbag has not been updated for some time. Just too busy traveling, preparing courses, trainings, paid R&D and even work in the field of lock-forensics. When I say forensics it is not always answering the question if a particular technique was used to open a specific lock, it can also be in a role of expert witness to explain (or show) a particular lock can be opened quickly in court. I hope to follow up on the specific incident mentioned in Panorama when the case is final.

Next week we will be at ‘Hack In The Box’ in Amsterdam (may 19 and 20). We will have the Amsterdam Toool meeting on Wednesday (May 18) in our traditional hangout (the Kamers cafe/restaurant), and might later in the evening move to the prestigious Krasnapolsky Hotel at Dam square in Amsterdam to set up the booth. Thursday and Friday we will be at the Hotel for sure. If you want to learn about IT security and hobby-lockpicking, “Hack in the Box” is the place to be. I can offer a special discount if you want to attend “Hack in the Box”, so mail me for details.

One of the other courses we are preparing is for the blackhat sessions at DefCon (July 30-31). A two day hands on impressioning and safe-combo-manipulation course. Gonna be quite nice.

Still have a lot of work to do before I can announce LockCon 2011 …