Author: Bjørn Madsen

I was reading locksmith journals yesterday (as I imagine all reasonable people do) and noticed an interesting tidbit: the NFPA has decreed that all rooms housing electrical equipment greater than 300 Volts now require a panic bar. Panic bars are usually required in places with hazardous materials so people can get out really fast in…

There are many different kinds of deadbolts but for this discussion the distinction to be made is whether or not there is a thumbturn on the non-locking side of the door or not. This has ramifications for security as well as ease of egress in an emergency. There is also a cost difference. A single…

One thing that will never happen to people with traditional non-electronic locks is having all of the locks in your house stop working after clicking on a link in an email, and then receiving a ransom demand to have the locks start working again. This is exactly what happened to this man in Austria no…

Top-selling handgun safe can be remotely opened in seconds—no PIN needed Back when safes didn’t have wireless connectivity built into them it was impossible to open them remotely. Just saying.

There are a few typical failure points for Baldwin thumblatches. The first and most common in my experience is that the springlatch itself fails. This may be because weatherstripping was added after the lock was installed, making it harder to shut the door. There is then a lot of force against the door from the…

The Subaru Fobrob exploit has been publicized and sourcecode released. This guy made the materials for this with less than $100 worth of hardware. Some more links to information about bypassing car alarms using electronic methods: Wired article about $11 hardware to spoof remotes Smithsonian article about car theft