Donald Eastlake: "I've never seen such a ridiculously overhyped teaser article about a very simple 150 year old weakness. ... If you have an individual key, key blanks, and access to a lock, you can cut trial keys. Assume 5 pins and 10 level. You take a blank and pick a pin. You cut the other 4 places the same as your working key and, for the pin you picked, try the 9 other levels. (This only takes one key blank as you can start with the highest cut and keep going down with your key cutting machine or a file.) If you find some other level of cut that opens the lock, you have found the master cut for that pin. Do this for each of the 5 pins and you now know all the master cuts having used up 5 blanks and making 45 trials. In fact, you can stop as soon as you find the master cut so on average, it would be 22.5 trials. ... This weakness has been well know for 150 years but, so what? If you are skilled enough and/or have the right equipment, its faster to pick the lock anyway."

Sometimes I get thinking about what would I do if suddenly there were no computers (think aliens EMPing the earth ;-) and I would have to get a manual job. Maybe I could become a locksmith ...

2:33:30 PM