Lockpicking

Lock picking has been on my list of skills to learn for years, but I just discovered how easy it is to buy picks on the web. Check out this short video that I made about it.

Here are some links to the picks and locks in the video:

• Southord 22 piece lock pick set
• Transparent training padlock
• Re-pinnable cutaway 6-pin lock

It's really made me realise how poor padlocks are at security. The last lock in the video was used for several years to secure about £10,000 of film club equipment, but I can open it in under a minute without any fuss.

If you're interested in learning this I'll happily lend you my picks, but I'd be careful where you take them. Once forum post I read said that the police in the UK take a pretty dim view of people out on the street with a set of picks. You'd need a pretty good reason to have them, otherwise you're probably going to get arrested.

While learning to pick locks, I've seen a lot of information about locksport - competitive lock opening. There's a really big community in the UK, and their core message, which I've seen over and over is that you can only pick locks that you own, and never pick a lock that's in use. The second one is really important - a couple of times I've broken locks while picking them, and you wouldn't want to do that to your front door!

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