Just a short blogposting this time to get me starting blogging again :)
Last weekend had a great time near Prague at the Czech lockpick championships. The Czech are friendly, well organized and sure have a lot of very exotic locks.
Our German friends from SSDeV kept scores on their blog (in German).
Below a small video of one of the rounds in ‘freestyle’. Many electronic pickguns and very fast opening times.
There was a little confusion how to call the championships at LockCon. Should we call them US open or World Championships?
To keep a long story short: I won the first US impressioning championships. And it was a close call.
The close call was whether or not I would participate. I did not prepare and did not even bring gear (suitcases were full of heavy stuff anyway). It was my new friend Ben Sherman who persuaded me to participate and generously gave me his file. And Jord gave me his spare handle. What followed was me winning all three rounds. And in the third round I was nicely focused and the only finalist to open the six pin lock in 60 minutes. We are all happy the title goes back to the Netherlands.
Even though I won a number of international championships, I am not really much of a competitive player. For me it is more important to be able to open a wide variety of locks in a decent time. This is what I teach at Lock-Experts (PDF) and rely on as a locksmith at intact-noodopening.nl. But I can not deny it is a good feeling to win.
LockCon 2012 LockPick championships … of the world?
Torsten Quast won the lockpicking games, followed by Julian Hardt and Jord Knaap.
I ended sharing the fourth place with “handcuff Ray”. And that is a pity because after a long number of elimination rounds both Julian and I were the only ones who were not defeated. But then I got into a pool of three people and lost, followed by a battle to the finals with Ray. And we both did not open any of the US Corbin locks ending us both at the fourth place.
All fun aside, Torsten seemed to like the idea of being the ‘unofficial’ world champion lockpicking. The Toool board had long discussions on how to organize the first “official” world-championships of LockPicking and Impressioning in the future (in corporation with other sportgroups like SSDeV, Fools etc). The way we envision it is that every locksport and (possibly) locksmith community in the world should organize their own championships and the winners of each of these competitions will be sponsored to fly to LockCon for the first official world championships. But don’t hold your breath for it to happen soon.
What else happened at LockCon?
Besides the warning for tornado’s all went fine.
LockCon was held at the LSI facility. A great place with its own museum. Good for ours of looking at special locks. There were unique locks and keys all over the place.
We organized some workshops on interesting topics. At the tour trough the S&G factory we learned they had the ultimate safe to protect what is precious to you.
Lots of networking was done at the late night parties. People would show off their latest tool development, reverse engineer interesting hardware, make new friends and drink till all becomes blurry.
Just google for lockcon and find lots of interesting archives full of nice pictures.
Thanks everyone for making LockCon possible and hope to see you soon at a new event!
If heaven exists, LockCon is it for us mortal lockpickers. And in one month from now it will be held (July 17/18/19)!
LockCon 2012 in the US
After a number of very successful LockCon conferences organized in Europe, this time the circus will travel to the US.
It is never easy to find a good spot for this kind of event but this year we found the best possible location: the headquarters of LSI (Lockmasters Security Institute) in Nicholasville, Kentucky.
The LSI facility is just perfect for LockCon because of the many areas where the LSI instructors normally train their customers on how to open various kind of locks. These rooms will offer the right atmosphere for our hands-on sessions and championships. And of course there is the in-house Harry Miller lock-museum (that offers napkins so you do not drool over their rare locks)
One thing that I would like to point out is that we have the same agreement with LSI as with Peter Field. Both LSI and Mr. Field will not talk to us about how to open locks. LSI only lets us use the facility on certain hours of the day and Peter Field will only talk about locks in general (in a very nice and detailed way I might add). As he said before: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”.
The US Championships in lockpicking, Impressioning and combo-manipulation
Besides many presentations (by Peter Field and others) and hands on sessions (spectacular!) LockCon will also host the US championships of lockpicking, safe combination-lock manipulation and impressioning! There will be people coming from all over the place (to name a few: Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UK and of course the US) to see who will be the fastest lockpicker in the world. And there are very nice prices to win as our sponsors are known to be very generous. I am curious how people like Julian Hardt and Jos Weyers will do against the people in the US.
Want to join or compete?
There are still a few seat available although getting in may not be as easy as it sounds. We do have a rather strict policy of having to know you before letting you in. Having said that, we can always be persuaded if you have a kick-ass presentation to give on lock-related topics. Memebers of Aloa and/or Savta are also welcome to (try to) register.
You can always try to register or visit our CFP page and see how far you get.
Hope to see you all in one month from now in Kentucky!
The LockCon 2011 announcement It’s about time
The big question always is: how to pack a four of five day event in just one weekend? The answer lies in the (preliminary) LockCon 2011 schedule:
Friday, October 21 2011
Visitors are advised to arrive before 18:00 (if possible). Toool representatives will be present in the hostel from Thursday on, and be available all day to assist visitors and assign them rooms and explain the (simple) rules of the event.
18:00 – 19:00. Dinner will be served. We hope the kitchen stays open till 19:30/19:45 for latecomers.
Friday 20:30 – 21:30 “Masterkeys for a non-masterkeyed system” by Han Fey
Han Fey likes to investigate. On the second hand market he found locks from a facility with180 individual locks. These locks were not masterkeyed. Han did however discover a flaw in the system, allowing a relatively small set of try-out keys to open all the locks. In this presentation he goes into detail how he identified the flaw, narrowed down the keyspace and optimized his attack. Fascinating material.
Saturday, October 22 2011
08:00 – 09:00 Breakfast.
Saturday 09:00 – 14:00 “5 hours, 50 locks, 500 slides” By Peter Field
(Includes Lunch around 12:00)
As many LockCon attendees know, Peter Field has an extraordinary way of looking at locks. Like a pathologist, he cuts locks in many thin slices and captures the result with high quality photography. This unique methods of creating a cutaway view is world renowned. With it he has set a standard many people tried to copy but only very few can even get close.
We are proud and honored to have Peter over for yet another long presentation about the different elements in high security cylinder lock design. Combining his unique cut-away imagery with illustrations from old patents, he will explain how engineers classify the cylinder elements, modify them, develop new ones, and re-combine them all to invent new products for the constantly evolving security market. You will leave this presentation with an outline and a clear understanding of the design constraints and functions of most of the various elements you may find in any lock cylinder.
About Peter Field: he started locksmithing in 1960, and in 1978 was asked to join Medeco Security Locks, where he is now Director of Research. He has over 15 US Patents pertaining to high security locks, with several more patents pending. Being a employee of Medeco one thing is clear: Mr. Field will not discuss any opening techniques. As he told us in previous years: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”.
15:00 – 15:45 “State of the art locks in the Stasi era” by Oliver Diederichsen
Oliver Diederichsen managed to get his hands on some unique material: complete Stasi manuals of the department responsible for covert entry operations. Many of the techniques and tools can still be converted to work on modern locks. Oliver will highlight one part of the files that talks about the state of the art in locks around the late eighties, and how far the stasi got in bypassing them.
16:00 – 17:00 “Magnetic locks and how to defeat them” by Datagram
Datagram is a well known expert in the field of lock forensics, but also does lots of other interesting research. Magnetic locks are still considered amongst the most high-secure locks. And in some cases rightfully so. During his presentation Datagram will show what progress he made on bypassing some of these magnetic locks, and demonstrate his custom made opening and decoding tool.
17:15 – 18:00 “Impressioning Abloy Classic” by Jaakko Fagerlund
Jaakko Fagerlund is a big fan of Abloy locks and knows a lot about them. And of course he is interested how to tackle the system/ Together with Jord Knaap they improved on Barry Wels his ‘reduced contact area‘ impressioning technique for disc-locks. They found a way to get better marks and make the process more easy, and share their findings in this workshop.
18:00-19:00 dinner
20:00 – 23:00 Impressioning championships.
Impressioning is the fine art of opening a lock by filing a key from a blank. It is an ancient technique that still works on an amazing number of (high security) locks. The championships speak for themselves: who will be the fastest filing a working key to a lock his year? The impressioning championships will be played by the new rules. Meaning 45 people start with impressioning the same lock, and the first six people to open the lock will move on to the finals. Abus reserved some old stock just for these games and donated the C83 cylinders and blanks again this year. Thank you Abus!
Sunday October 23
08:00 – 09:30 Breakfast.
10:00 – 11:00 “Fichet F3D lock analysis” by Michael Huebler
The Fichet F3D lock is one of the most intriguing locks that came out in a long time. Not easy to get, quite expensive and contains many, many parts. The innner working of the lock also is quite interesting and unique. Michael will take you trough the lock step by step, and there will be an interesting discussion on how this lock maybe could be bypassed.
11:30 – 15:30 Dutch Open lockpick championships.
We are not going to play the one-on-one, and ‘winner takes all” that we did last year. It will be fair and balanced how we do it, and it will allow for many small picking contests against a direct opponent. In these games two people will be playing against each other, and the one with the most locks opened, or the fastest time if the same amount of locks are opened, will go trough to the next round. If the two contestants do not manage to open any of the locks they are both out of the game. In case we have an odd number of contestants, there will be three people competing against each other and the fastest two go trough. The last man standing wins!
There always is question about the selection of locks that will be used in the game. The brands will be kept secret, but we will try to arrange just two types of locks and make sure one of these locks is ‘relatively simple’ to open by an experienced picker. The locks used will be ‘standard’ five or six pin locks (so no dimple locks or special high security locks in the finals).
16:00 honoring the LockCon champs
17:00 Early dinner for those who need to travel
More information on how to register for LockCon2011 can be found here.
Expect this posting to change a little in the days to come.
Just a quick post before going to Hamburg for the German impressioning championships.
We have a date for LockCon! It is going to happen the weekend of October 22-23, and already some interesting speakers have promised to give a presentation! The location most likely is going to be the good old hostel in Sneek, but if other options (in the Netherlands) come up we might be persuaded.
Hope to see you all there!
It has been a while since I added a category to blackbag, but now there is a new one called “cut to pieces”, and it is greatly inspired by the work of Peter Field.
On the “cut to pieces” image I share with you today is the inner working of the Mottura C38 lock. It is nice lock, that contains many nice features. Today I cover the magnetic pin. The pins in one of the chambers are not spring loaded, and gravity pulls the plug pin below sheer line. If the magnet in the key is at the right position, and has the right polarity, the magnetic pin in the house is pulled towards the key, also lifting the housing pin.
I hope the image(s) speaks for itself. (click on the image for a bigger version)
I am currently making quite a nice collection of images of various locking systems for my presentations and workshops. I will try to share some of the work here to keep you posted on what I am doing …
Just a short post: Jos Weyers won the impression games … again. Life is good :) Time for yet another beer …
You know the drill: Barry is busy. Sad but true. Then again, don’t be sad as I would not want it any other way.
Just to give you an idea about my next few days: tonight there is a Toool gathering in Amsterdam, and it is going to be nice as a lot of our friends from abroad will be visiting it. Then tomorrow morning we will drive to Essen for the security show, and on Friday we will all go to Sneek for LockCon. On Monday Han and I fly to Malaysia for Hack in the Box, and after that things will settle down a bit.
During the last weeks I have been quite active in lock research, to prepare my presentations for both LockCon and Hack in the Box. Han and I always try to focus on the locks they use in countries we visit, and in the case of Malaysia it is ‘disk style locks’. Han Fey being ‘Mr Abloy’ knows a lot about disk locks, although there is a small difference in quality from the kind of locks they use there. As far the organizers of Hack in the Box have told me, the ‘solex brand’ is the lock to beat. And when the lock sells for just a 10 or 15 dollar, there seems to be a lot of counterfeiting going on. It is hard to understand a $10 or $15 dollar lock is counterfeited, and it is even harder to understand they are using high security holographic seals to fight this.
After doing a little study on some sample locks we got, we decided to do a hand-on class on picking these locks. People can register for the class, and pay a small fee to get a pick and disk lock and try to open it at our two hour course/class (and later at the lockpick village).
Got to continue working … time is running out!
This year’s LockCon theme is: the winner takes it all.
That is right, after experimenting with knock-out systems in the games last year at the HAR conference, we will now expand this and let the knock-out system play an important role in the competitions at LockCon. We are real curious to see how this will work out in the lockpick competition.
So what’s the exact schedule? Please keep in mind that LockCon is a very dynamic and last minute changes can always be made. And we kept Friday evening open for last minute presentations and/or time to socialize. This is the schedule we have in mind :
Friday, October 8 2010
People are requested to arrive between 11:30 and 12:30 at the hostel. Toool representatives will be present at the hostel from 11:00 AM on to greet the guests and assign them a room. It is important to be on time as the first presentations begins at 13:30!
Friday 13:30 -15:30 Lock forensics: the more advanced stuff. By datagram
Datagram is a well known expert in the field of forensic locksmithing. His site http://www.lockpickingforensics.com/ is a one of a kind source on this topic. And we are very honored to have Datagram open lockcon with his presentation on advanced forensic locksmithing.
At this two hour presentation, Datagram will quickly go from the basics in forensic locksmithing to the more advanced stuff. He will go into detail on what traces are left in high-security locks when opening attempts are made with special decoder and picktools. And on Sunday Datagram will talk about the vulnerability in a lock many people thought to be ‘pick proof’.
16:00 – 17:00 “Wanna bet”?!? (Wetten Dass … 1986!). By Han Fey
Han makes friends all over the globe, and one of these friends is Mr. Frank Peter Wiersma. Back in 1986, when there were only a handful of television stations, Mr. Wiersma became a small celebrity in the locksmith community. He appeared on the popular show ‘wanna bet ?!?’, and accepted the challenge to try and file a working key to a lock in under three minutes (without trying the key in the lock!). His only tools: some files, one blank key, and just the ‘code number’ of a randomly chosen lock. In this presentation Han will give answers to questions like: did Mr. Wiersma succeed? What was his plan of attack? And just in case Han does not have the answers to all the questions … Mr. Wiersma is a guest of honor at lockcon and will be present too.
17:15 – 18:00 Medeco advanced and ARX pins. by Barry Wels
Medeco lately introduced special pins in the commercial product line to make their locks more resistant against picking and decoding attacks. And rumor has there are even more advanced pins in locks that are used in locations ‘that really matter’. These later pins are supposedly called “ARX” (stands for: Attack Resistance Xtended). What do we know about them? Do we know what these pins look like? How many different types are there? And do they really offer extra resistance against sophisticated attacks? This presentation does not have all the answers, but hopefully will give you some new insights. And a note to the public: If you have any information on ARX pins (pinning kit, individual pins, images, suggestions) please mail arx@blackbag.nl.
18:00-19:00 dinner
19:00 and later: time to socialize, give a ‘last minute’ presentation or compete in the combination lock manipulation competition.
Saturday, October 9 2010
08:00 – 09:30 Breakfast.
Saturday 10:00 – 15:00 The return of the lock Pathologist. By Peter Field
(Lunch 12:00-13:00)
As many LockCon attendees know, Peter Field has an extraordinary way of looking at locks. Like a pathologist, he cuts locks in many thin slices and captures the result with high quality photography. This unique methods of creating a cutaway view is world renowned. His lectures have been attended by locksmiths, security personnel, lock company engineers and Patent Office Examiners from many countries. And this will be the third time Mr. Field will give a presentation at LockCon. Peter Field’s presentations on locks is one of these things in life one can never get enough of.
He will yet again give a four hour(!) presentation about many of the different elements of high security cylinder lock design. Combining his unique cut-away imagery with illustrations from old patents, he will explain how engineers classify the cylinder elements, modify them, develop new ones, and re-combine them all to invent new products for the constantly evolving security market. You will leave this presentation with an outline and a clear understanding of the design constraints and functions of most of the various elements you may find in any lock cylinder.
About Peter Field: he started locksmithing in 1960, and in 1978 was asked to join Medeco Security Locks, where he is now Director of Research. He has over 15 US Patents pertaining to high security locks, with several more patents pending. Being a employee of Medeco one thing is clear: Mr. Field will not discuss any opening techniques. As he told us in previous years: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”.
15:30 – 16:30 Just a handful of keys. By Julian Hardt
Julian Hardt found a vulnerability in a number of certified (and non-certified) safe locks. Due to this vulnerability, the amount of possible keys one normally should have to try (the so called ‘key space’) can be greatly reduced. In some cases the key-space goes down from 280.000 keys to a number small enough that it might be possible to just cut the few remaining keys (or build a set-up key) and open the safe with just a handful of keys. In our community it is common to report these kind of vulnerabilities to the manufacturer(s). And that is exactly what Julian did. Thing is: they just have not responded yet …. maybe this announcement helps.
16:30 – 17:30 The Cromer Novum alarm lock decoder. By Till
This year, Till will present an old but very nice opening-tool. It is a tool to open Cromer Novum alarmlocks. And even though these kind of locks are not very common anymore, it is definitely worth showing the tool. The nice thing about this tool is that it makes use of pin and cam technology to decode the lock. Once the levers in the lock are identified, a set up key can be build to actually open the lock. Old but fascinating technology to open what was once a high security lever lock (and probably still is high security if you do not have the proper tool to bypass it). If you ask nicely, Till might let you try the decoder yourself.
18:00-19:00 dinner
20:00 – 23:00 Impressioning championships.
Impressioning is the fine art of opening a lock by filing a key from a blank. It is an ancient technique that still works on an amazing number of (high security) locks. Besides an old-school locksmith skill it is a technique still in use today by intelligence agencies worldwide for their blackbag operational needs. The championships speak for themselves: who will be the fastest filing a working key to a lock his year? The impressioning championships will be played by new rules too (very close to German rules). More about that soon, but we can already say that only “standard Abus five pin locks” will be used.
Sunday October 10
08:00 – 09:30 Breakfast.
10:00 – 11:00 Beating the BiLock. By Datagram
In this presentation Datagram will tackle a lock many people in our community thought was ‘pick proof’. BiLock products are well known for their double sidebar locks and two rows of ‘hard to pick’ pins. In the industry they are considered one of the most high security locks. In this presentation you will hear all the details on how the lock works, how the attack was discovered, what tools were made and how the company responded when they were informed ‘there might be a small problem’.
11:15 – 12:00 Mult-Lock MT5+ layer attack. By Jord Knaap and/or Han Fey
The latest Mul-T-Lock product range is the MT5-line. The MT5 is a high security cylinder that makes use of two security layers: an interactive element (the so called Alpha spring) and pin-in-pin technology. The top of the line product currently is however the MT5+. At the “+” series, an extra layer is added to the lock: a clever mechanism that uses sliders and a sidebar. In this attack we will focus on this new slider mechanism. Jord Knaap found a gap that in some cases can be used to bypass the slider mechanism and did the right thing: he informed Mul-T-Lock about it. And now, after they have been given time to fix the problem, you will hear about it at LockCon.
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:30 – 15:30 Dutch Open lockpick championships.
We are going to play one-on-one, and ‘winner takes all’. In these games two people will be playing against each other, and the one with the most locks opened, or the fastest time if the same amount of locks are opened, will go trough to the next round. If the two contestants do not manage to open any of the locks they are both out of the game. In case we have an odd number of contestants, there will be three people competing against each other and the fastest two go trough. The last man standing wins!
There always is question about the selection of locks that will be used in the game. The brands will be kept secret, but we will try to arrange just two types of locks and make sure one of these locks is ‘relatively simple’ to open by an experienced picker. The locks used will be ‘standard’ five or six pin locks (so no dimple locks or special high security locks in the finals).
16:00 honoring the LockCon champs
17:00 Early dinner for those who need to travel
More information on how to register for LockCon2010 can be found here.
It has been a little slow with my weblog. Maybe it’s because I now use twitter to burst short messages instead of blogging, but the silence here does not mean nothing is happening. On the contrary, a lot is happening….
First there was the safe opening weekend. I am sorry to be repetitive, but the weekend was a great success. Julian picked open four safes, amongst them yet another couple of real monsters , and lots and lots of other safes were opened in more destructive ways. I really was eager to try to open a safe by manipulating a combination lock, but failed as the only lock around was a four wheel lips lock. I am by now reasonably experienced in opening three wheel ‘group two’ locks, but this four wheel lips lock was just a little too much for me. We ended up drilling a hole in the safe and using a scope to read the combination.
I like a challenge and am using the vacation I am in now to study the four wheel lock(s). Jord Knaap was kind enough to let me use one of his cut-away demo locks for this research/test. The lock is neatly mounted on a stand, and as Jord had an eye for details, he even included the anti-drill ‘hard plate’ on the stand (it’s the yellow layer between the dial and the house of the lock). The interesting part is that these locks have false cuts in their wheels, and the position of the false cuts seems to be different on some wheels. Maybe there is a pattern, but it is too early to say … It’s just the first day of my holiday today ;)
Behind the scenes we are busy preparing lockcon (October 8-9-10). It’s gonna be good as more and more people from all over the globe are attracted to it, and the presentations will be high quality as always. And I will use this two week vacation to reply to some mails people have send me. I am running a little behind but will be back on track before the holiday is over …
Our German friends from SSDeV decided to change the rules of the impressioning games. Instead of the fastest time on one lock, now more locks need to be opened and the person opening the most locks in the least amount of time wins. In the comments of this Hackaday post Jos explains the exact rules:
“First round everybody gets a keyed alike lock (so same amount of work) this round takes an hour. The six fastest go to the finals: during six rounds (20 min. each) all the contenders open one lock, which then gets swapped. So all finalists open the same 6 locks. The used keys are put in closed boxes so there is no way you know the key is supposed to look like.”
And with opening times of less then a minute these games are more and more looking like formula 1 pit stops. And so people are trying to come up with ideas and tools to shave off a few seconds left or right. The expert on the field of impressioning is Oliver Diederichsen. It was his research and book that really got us all started at this. And he came up with a new tool. It is a modified euro-profile cylinder that contains five sharp solid pins that will scratch the blank at the position the pins will make contact with it. Once these marks are on the blank, it is just a matter of filing them down to code 1-1-1-1-1 and start impressioning.
As Oliver is one of the most fair people I know, he shared the design and allowed others to copy it for future games. So Jord Knaap made a nice handle that contains a half euro profile with the steel pins. And the euro-profile core in Jord’s tool is interchangeable. At the back of the tool there is a small hole that will allow you to push out the cylinder and change it for another brand.
To come back to the games: they were won by good old Atrhur Meister, followed by Oliver Diederichsen and Jos Weyers. Congratulations guys. Looking forward to the impressioning games at Lockcon in a couple of months …
As always we are organizing our yearly LockCon. On the Toool website you can always read the latest news about it (http://toool.nl/LockCon)
If you are interested in attending, or want to give a presentation or lecture please let us know. The call for papers is officially open until June 10 and we still have room for interesting talks. Before the end of June we will come out with the complete program.
Here is the first information about LockCon 2010 in FAQ style ….
Q: What is LockCon?
A: LockCon is an international conference about … locks. Although we are modest people (ahum), LockCon is hosting some pretty innovative and unique presentations. (And we would like to hear from you if you have an interesting lecture you want to give). Besides these high quality presentations, there will be championships in lockpicking, impressioning and possibly (if time allows) safe combo-lock manipulation. One important issue about LockCon is that it is a place where creative energy flows and you can make friends for life (and an occasional enemy). It is the place where top lockpickers meet one another, and contacts are made between lockpickers and the lock industry. In other words: it is a unique event. To give you an idea read here about previous events.
Q: When will LockCon be held this year?
A: The weekend of October 8-9-10. This will allow international visitors to also visit the famous Security show in Essen Germany October 5-8 and come to LockCon when the show in Essen is over.
Q: Where will LockCon be held?
A: The location for this event is the StayOkay youth hostel in Sneek (Friesland) in the Netherlands (youtube video). This has been the home for many years now for LockCon and is a perfect location for an event like this.
Q: Who will attend LockCon?
A: A lot of interesting people. There will be lockpickers, safe technicians, locksmiths, 24-hour opening services, lock manufacturers, lock tool manufacturers, hackers, members of the law enforcement community, spies and an occasional beautiful girl. And a pretty big number of them will be overseas visitors.
Q: How Much is the entrance fee for LockCon?
A: The ‘full event’ price is €125 for three days. This price includes three dinners, two breakfasts, two lunches and two overnights in the hostel. It also includes drinks, beer, wine etc and a basic supply of snacks. Visitors who only visit one day will pay €65.
Q: Wow, where do I sign in?
A: Not so fast. LockCon is an ‘invitation only’ party for the locksport community. It is open for members of Toool.NL, Toool.US and SSDeV, but we reserve the right to deny people even if they are member of these organisations. If you are a member of another well respected locksport organisation there is a good chance you are welcome as well. If you are non of the above, you will need to find someone to introduce you and hope there is place left. We have set the maximum number of attendees to one hundred. For this event we have reserved ten to fifteen seats for people we never met before. If you think you have something to contribute, or just are a very enthusiast lockpicker that does not have the right connections yet, please mail us anyway. We are open to interesting people and might be able to work something out. Just give it a try, you might get lucky :) Mail registration@lockcon.com to register or for more information.
Q: So what’s the exact schedule?
A:Please keep in mind that LockCon is a very dynamic event and not everybody has submitted their presentation(s) yet. What we know now is that Peter Field will give a presentation (most likely on Saturday) and there will be championships in Lockpicking, Impressioning and (if time permits) combination safe manipulation.
Below is roughly what we have in mind, but things can still change. It all depends on the number of presentations we get offered from the community.
Friday October 8
People are requested not to arrive before 13:00 and a toool.nl representative will be present at the hostel from 16:00 on to greet the guests and assign them a room. 19:00 Dinner will be served a little late because some of the attendees will be arriving from the security show in Essen. People arriving after 20:00 will not be served dinner! At 21:00 we will officially kick off with the first presentation(s).
Saturday October 9 2010
08:00-09:20 Breakfast 09:30-12:30 A presentation by Peter Field.
People who were fortunate enough to see Mr. Field’s presentation last years know his unique way of presenting things: he combines patent drawings with very detailed images. We are honored to have him as a speaker again, and are real curious what kind of exotic locking techniques he will display this time. Since Mr. Field is a member of the lock industry (Medeco), he will not discuss any opening techniques. As he told us previous years: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”. Lets see if he can break his previous record of a five hour presentation! 12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-15:00 Peter Field presentation part II, hopefully with some room for questions.
15:15-18:00 Impressioning championships. Most likely according to new rules. Impressioning is the fine art of opening a lock by filing a key from a blank. It is an ancient technique that still works on an amazing number of (high security) locks. Besides an old-school locksmith skill it is a technique still in use today by intelligence agencies worldwide for their blackbag operational needs. The championships speak for themselves: who will be the fastest filing a working key this year?
18:00-19:00 Dinner 20:00 More presentations
Sunday October 10 2010
08:00-09:30 Breakfast 10:30-12:30 First round of Dutch Open lockpick championships 12:30-13:30 Lunch 13:30-15:00 Follow up Dutch Open lockpick championships and finals 15:15-16:00 Award ceremony The closing ceremony and distribution of the prices for the Dutch Open lockpick championships, the impressioning championships, the safe combination-lock manipulation contest and the Toool 2010 ongoing lock competition. More updates to this schedule and other information will follow soon. Please keep checking this space for further updates.
Q: I thought I heard LockCon will be held in Turkey this year?
A: That was the idea. We were invited by the president of the Turkish chapter of the ELF to organize our event in Turkey. They even promised us some sponsoring to get the locksport community to Turkey. Unfortunately the Turkish backed out of the deal after we fulfilled our obligations, blaming the crisis for not being able to organize the funds. We know from other sources this is not the full story and it just proves that the locksmith community is not ready for this … but all it will take is just a little more time. If there ever will be a next time we will make sure to ask a big downpayment :) Fortunately we have the word of one of the sponsors that he will personally take care of the promises/costs that were made.
We are highly motivated to make this the best LockCon everrrrrr ….
Times are pretty hectic so Charlotte and I decided to take off to one of Europe’s nicest cities for a relaxing weekend without the kids. When we entered our hotel room I was thrilled to see it had a chain on the inside … (see my previous post on hotel doors to read why). The chain is a weak link by itself as it was obvious if had been broken and repaired many times before. In my opinion it is not necessary to use force on the chain as it can be bypassed relatively simple.
I did improvise a little and shot a video on how to bypass the chain using nothing more then a rubber band for you. Unfortunately I did not have enough time to experiment on how to lock the chain when being on the outside as I promised Charlotte I would spend my time with her and not geek around too much. But I guess a rubber band and some dental floss could do the trick.
And for those of you who want to test their ‘keyway knowledge’: can you tell by these keyways (1 2 3 4 5 and 6) what country we visited? BTW, keyway six is a lock used by the local phone or power company. And I did notice the hotel door keyway was the same as the picture I took of the lock in a completely different country.
Next post (after my short “I am now on twitter” message) is about Lockcon. It will be held the weekend of October 8-9-10. This will allow international visitors to visit the famous large security fair in Essen.
Just returned from a week of Gitex in Dubai. Always interesting but also tiring and internet is not the same as we know it. And quite busy with a million different things … and not everything in my life is lockpick related you know …
This weekend lockpicking will play a role of importance again. If you can pick locks and want to earn the last available ‘free’ ticket to the 2010 European Lockpick Championships in Turkey … Cologne is the place to be this weekend. Our friends of the biggest and oldest locksport organisation “Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik – Deutschland e.V” organize their championships in the friendly environment of the NaturFreundehaus (youth hostel) in the ‘Kalk’ area of Cologne. Even if you don’t want to pick locks … just come and have a look. It is always a spectacular sight to see locks opened in seconds. During two days quite a lot of different games are played (as you can see on the schedule). The person winning the prestigious “Handöffnung” games (hand opening) will win a ticket to ELF/LockCon 2010!
Personally I put my money on this friendly gentleman ….
Looking forward to see you all in Cologne!
My poor macbook died. I keep backups, so no harm is done, but it sucks to have to work on an old company windows machine for now.
So my posting is going to be a simple one today, using some images I uploaded to blackbag before the crash. One of the things I wanted to share is a couple of pictures taken at HAR from the by now famous ‘transparten lock’. These one, two, three, four images give you a much better idea how nice this lock is than in my original posting. And many people took the opportunity to play with the lock at HAR. If you have large demo locks like this please let me know!
One other thing mentioning was the round the clock presentations at HAR by my good friend Till. He demonstrated a system to copy mechanical keys called ‘quick key’ (made and designed in Berlin). It uses some sort of two component kind of rubber to make a mould of a key. Till showed that with a little effort almost any mechanical key can be duplicated. He even managed to copy a high security popular French safe lock key.
And to keep in line with my dead macbook … at HAR I have seen the most bizarre picktool case EVER…..
Hope to be back on a Mac sunday for a new update on BlackBag ….
