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Physical locks aren't very good. They keep the honest out, but any burglar worth his salt can pick the common door lock pretty quickly. It used to be that most people didn't know this. Sure, we all watched television criminals and private detectives pick locks with an ease only found on television and thought it realistic, but somehow we still held onto the belief that our own locks kept us safe from intruders. The Internet changed that. First was the MIT Guide to Lockpicking, written by the late Bob ("Ted the Tool") Baldwin. Then came Matt Blaze's 2003 paper on...

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) - Security specialists on Sunday showed that cracking top-rated locks said to secure the US Pentagon and Britain's royal family is child's play. Marc Tobias was in a sea of hackers practicing lock picking at a DefCon gathering in Las Vegas when he easily opened Medeco's flagship lock with a paper clip and a key cut from plastic sheets in a Shrinky Dinks toy. "We think this is a pretty serious threat, and the government guys here we've been talking to agree," Tobias told AFP.

NEWINGTON, Conn. -- On a recent evening in this quiet suburb, Matthew Fiddler hunched over a door lock, jiggling it with a pick and poking it with a wrench. In just a few moments, it popped open. Mr. Fiddler wasn't locked out and he isn't a thief. Instead, the 36-year-old father of four, clad in khakis and a blue button-down shirt, was seated around a table with a handful of people who pick locks for fun. The group, a chapter of Locksport International, gets together monthly to poke and prod everything from padlocks to dead-bolt cylinders. They swap tips, hold...