Those false gates...it's like having a prison with three false exits to try and trick escapees, but then it turns out they're actually real exits and you can walk right out.
One escape movie I saw many years ago, the prisoners greased themselves up; head to toe; and escaped through the wider bars. Only one severely fat prisoner still couldn’t get through.
@@BetaTestingUrGf I think the joke is lawyers bill clients more than they should. And since most lawyers bill hourly it'd be a simple multiplication of two numbers.
@@giorgitsiklauri840 The joke is that lawyers suck at simple mathematics. I've heard actual lawyers admit that this joke is firmly grounded in reality.
I am from Bulgaria and I am surprised the LockPicking community is interested in our locks. I personally found them very interesting when I came across some old ones in my grandparent's garage I guess I am not the only one. Btw I can help with Bulgarian translations if someone needs it.
Not only old ones, you have a pretty good factory called Mauer that makes some interesting and cheap locks among others. The most interesting one is Millenium Guard which is stupefyingly simple and very cheap, but I can't fathom that anyone would actually want to pick it. It's not impossible, just not worth it.
Thats true! Mauer was the company that bought the company named Dekaba, and after that this was called Mauer-Dekaba. Now only Mauer. I think this was the same company named Metal Varna during comunism.
It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. I don't speak Greek, but I know what symbols make which sounds, mostly, so I can at least puzzle out the sound of a word on a Greek menu. Cyrillic gets a bum rap in North America because Russia. but there are several languages that use Cyrillic script, including Ladino (a version of Hebrew spoken by Sephardic Jews) and Mongolian. Learning to sound out Cyrillic isn't a waste of time outside of North America, and more than learning to puzzle out the sound of Greek letters. If anything, Cyrillic is more useful than Greek, since there's more than just a single language using it. (Greek is starting to fail as a script, young people are transliterating Greek words into Latin script and the older folks by and large can't read it. This was the only thing the awesome tour guide we had for our day trip to Olympia said that was said even remotely sadly the whole day.)
@@tashkiira7838 I was mostly joking, he said it so casually i found it funny. I'm half finnish, so while I don't know russian, i have seen it written a lot and do actually know how to sound out the cyrillic alphabet. I don't think i've ever seen greek letters outside of a scientific point of view, but i do know the names of every letter. I'll check some words out and see if I can make anything out of it
So as a Bulgarian I've seen this in my grandfathers garage at the province, but never could open it cause he didn't know the combo ... Can't wait to go back there and test if I'll be able to open it .. For anyone wondering the writing says "Super Lock, padlock, coded and keyless". Also, just fyi, Супер is read in Bulgarian literally the same way you'd read it in English, cause it's а English stranger word used in Bulgarian and the "e" in Секрет is the same sound as in Elephant (couldn't think of a better example) .. Stil big props for pronouncing it that good, a lot of people can't do even that lol
I'm a simple bulgarian, I see "Bulgarian", I press like. Really cool lock. The right pronunciation of "супер" is like in english - super. I've never seen such lock in Bulgaria, so you should consider it as "boutique" item. This lock most probably is manufactured in the beginning of 90's, since before 1989, during "Communism", "firma Kvant" on the top right corner was just not possible. "Firma" is Bulgarian for "company", but we started to use this term in the beginning of 90's. As we call it - after the "Democracy" :)
@@lloydtshare Well since you have no common sense, I will translate for you what it says to common sense. Licenced does not mean produced. A product can be licenced in 70s and produced in 90s. It is a way for a manufacturer to indicate long-term commitment, experience, stability and tradition
@@lloydtshare Again, common sense is not so common these days. That lock may very well have been produced all those years, modified and constantly updated. Or they may have been producing different locks with a similar concept.
I'm constantly impressed by the high quality of your videos, from the the professional videography and lighting to the succinct presentation and interesting historical information. This is my favorite lock picking channel.
I never would have thought I'd find locks interesting before I started watching this channel. I have found just about anything can be made interesting with a good presenter, though. I wonder if LPL's presentation style translates to success in the legal world -- I would think being able to give clear explanations of tiny details would be helpful?
I'm actually impressed that the exploitable flaw is merely limiting the number of combinations. Usually when LPL finds a flaw, it's something that allows a lock to be opened in seconds or minutes. Attempting this many combinations will certainly take more time, making this lock way more secure than some of the electronic stuff...
And this is not counting that he already knew the internal parts, imagine if someone that doesn't know how many numbers or what kind of gate is in there was to pick this lock lol
I think the number's off and it's 64 possibilities if you can apply pressure to the shackle while spinning the last wheel or fluctuate pressure at least.
@@willjoyce5013 agreed - you can just turn the dial until it opens or doesn't, trying the whole range of the last's possibilities in one slide. You don't have to reset and try again. Similarly you should be able to adjust only the second last digit if you turn back the right amount (not far enough to move the other discs) making trying other second-last digits easier that a full reset also.
D Stanoev are you sure? I’m pretty sure I saw it down at my local Bulgarian convenience store, Locks, Stocks and Two Smoking Barrels! I was going to get it but I wanted to research it first, luckily the lockpicking lawyer had my back!
80 tries with 15 seconds a try (5:06 to 5:21) and then not messing up on one of the combinations to get it open will give you 1200s or 20 minutes to get the lock open without damaging it. So this locking mechanism is safer than every other lock i have seen on your channel. And even the thing that one needs to know how this lock works makes it safer. Best lock ever (?)
Richard Feynman used a similar technique to determine the combinations on filing cabinets while he worked at Los Alamos. Knowing there was a degree of ‘slop’ around the gates, he was able to reduce the number of possible combinations from 999 to a more manageable number and open filing cabinets quickly. It was a game they played because of the serious nature of the work they were doing and they needed to let of steam pursuing ‘fun’ activities.
He also had a very good memory and got in the habit of looking at the dial on people's safes. People tend to not spin the dial when locking so he already had the third digit for most of the safes in the complex. In fact, it would usually only take him a minute or two to find the number. He never did this in front of people so then he would sit around for a few minutes to make it look harder than it really was.
I heard he used to bring in a big bag of tools and make noise just to mess with people. But really he had his feet up because he already opened the cabinets.
@@user-lv7ph7hs7l more concerning is the gap between different military needs. Like excluding unauthorised use, while preserving quick and reliable use, which has led to funny situations. One example adding a code protection to nuclear missiles and noting the code down on the checklist right beside the control terminal. In case the user could not remember in which order to but the eight zeros in.
This guy just explained in less than 2 minutes what has taken me many years to try and figure out, *with* other people's help. Thank you, so much, for explaining the nonsense that is combination locks.
ok fuck off with these stupid jokes, bulgaria wasn't even a part of the soviet union it was just a part of the countries that the ussr had influence over (a.k.a. eastern bloc)
@@bradmichalson1900 no. I do not see how people think nazi Germany jokes are tasteless, when they keep making ussr jokes, which may i remind you is responsible for way more deaths.
Have you heard of "security through obscurity?" I think this odd ball lock would totally fall into that category. You started the video looking at the internals, but what if, as knowledgeable as you already are, you came across this oddball - cold turkey. What kind of time or attack might you use then?
Yup, a typical person wouldn't even know you have to rotate clockwise and anticlockwise, and absolutely not know about even numbers on last digit etc. Even a master lockpicker that knows the lock would have to make ~80 attempts to open it, a random person has no chance. For practical use, this is a good lock.
@@leegould5306 Or a few seconds with a battery-powered angle grinder and a steel-cutting disc. Of course, I'm pretty sure those didn't exist when this thing was made.
Since you don't have to dial in the entire combination to check the last digit, I'd say you're closer to only having 64 different combinations to check, with 32 on average. Just apply pressure to the shackle as you turn the dial half way. Great video as usual LPL!
You're wrong, but reality is actually a little better than you thought. You're wrong because 64+5 combos is only true if you can verify the first three numbers before trying the fourth. So you do actually have to try every number. However! You can try the 5 possible last digit positions for a given 3 digit attempt without resetting the lock. That means realistically speaking the total number of combinations is 384 / 5, or 61.8. So the real number of average attempts to open is about 31, slightly better than you thought.
Funnily enough when he pronounced the name in English it sounded closer to the Bulgarian sounding. :D Awesome video! Feeling proud at how hard is to pick that
as a Bulgarian i can tell you that the word Bulgaria is spelled with an "u" and not an "o" , also it is a name , so just like Russia , it has to be spelled with a capital letter .......that has nothing to do with capitalism , also death to the bourgeoisie :)
randomusernumber1 You're wrong. Nations must be capitalized, but adjectives describing national ORIGIN do NOT have to be capitalized. In English it's Bulgarian(capitalized), in many other languages it's bulgarian(lowercase).
A friend at work bought a lunchbox with a combination lock to stop us nicking his lunch, I quickly established that under all 6 of the dials there is a pin hole, you have to move the pin holes so they are all pointing out at the furthest left position where they are still visible and then just turn them all three clicks round and it just falls open
I wouldn't wonder if they indeed used a cast coquille for a micrometer and just machined it out differently. Maybe they even used rejected parts which would've been scraped otherwise. Socialist economy of scarcity at it's best...
that is an amazing collection add on. Show very well how the need to secure your items has increased in newer time. Must have been nice to live in a time, where a lock not only meant stay out, but it was actually respected
It's called security theater and it's still heavily used. It's a trade-off between actually keeping people out for more money and only looking like it could keep people out for less money.
Don't fool yourself. Locks have been picked open and bypassed for as long as locks have existed. _Locks and Safes: The Construction of Locks._ by A. C. Hobbs was written in 1853, to give but one example.
A sentence that came to my head during this video was "If they ain't false, they just gates." And I encourage you to quote this out of context and in any and all life circumstances.
This video was fascinating, both from the nondestructive bypassing, but also an insight into manufacturing at the time. Please can you do more videos explaining dial combination locks
From package i can tell you its not from 1976 or even 1986(communist block country), there wouldnt be anything in english and it would be in a simple cardboard box without any fancy multicolor font on it or plastic cover that allowing you to see what you have inside.
Biały what makes you think so? I bought this lock in 1982 in Yougoslavia.The packaging is original and from that time period and btw we had many products which were written in english.
@@TheMystikal82 Yugoslavia was different than the more "Soviet-y" countries. But this could have been an export version made for selling to other countries. So maybe in Bulgaria it just came with the commie-packaging but for ones sold outside Bulgaria, they wanted the packaging to look a little bit less like govno, and you're both right?
@@TheMystikal82 it may have been exported somewhere that's why its in english. The main thing tho that makes me think this lock wasn't made in communism is because it says that it was made by a "firma kvani" or "company kvani". In communism it would have just said " manufactured in Bulgaria in xy factory", there were no real companies back then, everything was state-owned.
During the '90s friends of ours had a great door with a very expensive and secure system of locks. In the end the thieves used a sledgehammer to break the wall and still managed to rob the appartment:)
11:45 There's actually even better shortcut for the last digit: just try to pull the shacle open while turning the know counter-clockwise. The lock will open once you hit true or false gate. Also, I'd expect that you could feel the gates on the first disc so there's only 16 true codes to try out unless I'm mistaken. (Feel the first disk, try 4 successive numbers for disc 2 and 3 and pull the lock open while turning the last disk.)
Hi Mr. Lawyer. I have no idea of what you are doing but it looks like you are happy so I’m happy to see that you are happy and sharing your happiness with us!
Superb as always. I love watching a craftsman (especially you) as I have some expensive motorcycles, ply his ultra-specialist trade - but for this particular lock, since it has a cast body, I'd go for smashing it with a high kinetic energy impact inducer (big hammer 😊). Not quite so subtle - but probably quite effective.....
Actually in Bulgarian the words for 'super' and 'secret' are different. The english 'secret' in bulgarian means a 'lock device'. So the name of the product is actually translated to something like "Superb lock device".
@@barmaleyes That is simply not true. In Bulgarian, "секрет" would either mean secretion or the English meaning of secret. "Секрет" does not mean a lock device - that would be a "катинар" (katinar). "Супер секрет" sounds like flashy branding for blind buyers around '90 to boost sales.
Imagine a higher quality version of this lock: Lockpicker: "Can't get in" Other Lockpicker: "Fuck it, just scrape the numbers! They lose money either way"
@Wine, no, because that would imply some very complicated over the hand modifications to achieve the cover and inside locators. Maybe inspired, but certainly not re-used.
if a guy had one, it would be easy to open every one of these in town! easy to remember combination and the 'add 2' security. no pick help from the manufacture. BTW, thanks for keeping the older up loads on here! It really helps those of us that are late to the party.
I love how LPL assumes his mishmash of fans spanning from locksporters through smash-and-grab criminals through safe-crackers through doomsday preppers through obsessive paranoids through safety concerned citizens through ASMR fans, are all able to "sound out the Cyrillic alphabet". Of course, I am the one who can and doesn't fit in any of the other categories I mentioned.
Super interesting older lock, been subbed to you for years, some of these videos I have forgotten about and didn’t understand then,but watching your channel made me understand everything this time around!
Great video explaining how this combo lock works and how to reduce the number of attempts needed to open it, but it's even less secure than shown. All of the four last digit possibilities can be tried sequentially without reentering the first three digits so it's basically open in 64 tries max, and an average of 32 attempts.
People at youtube are really smart and do great things. Which is why it always baffles me why I end up in these automatic play loops. Just watched the video on TAG5, this one was next in line, TAG5 is now after this. Weird... By the way, great channel, great videos! I'm also a lawyer but the only thing I've ever managed to pick was the lock on our freezer (don't know why it had one) when I was a kid, I managed to lock it and we didn't have a key! Mom was not happy. Luckily my dad was a better lockpicker and somehow managed to get it open.
LPL, I think you've made a mistake in calculating the number of tries required. The 'last digit must be within a half turn of second-last' trick is incompatible with the 'using false gates as true' trick; for each second-last digit you try, you don't know whether the real second-last digit is that, or that plus a third of a turn, or that plus two-thirds or a turn, which means the final digit could actually be anywhere on the dial. On the other hand, with combination locks like this, the last digit is largely irrelevant; you can test multiple values very quickly by just moving the dial a step at a time without needing to reenter the previous values, which is what takes most of the time. Thus the 'last digit must be within a half turn of second-last' thing actually makes this lock slower to brute force, since you can't test all the possible values for the final digit in one go. Thus, effectively, I'd say this lock requires 4^3 * 2 = 128 different setups, with each setup requiring 2 or 3 quick tests of the final digit.
Cool. 4 people could use the lock, and each time they were done with it they set it to their combination. The next fellow would then know the last person who had used the lock.
This must be one of the best locks around as the LockPickingLawyer still needs 80 combination tries to open it! Other locks are defeated in 10 seconds! Am I missing something?
Awww... what a cute little anvil. And the method of changing the combination...just repositioning the knob relative to everything else! That's some high-level rocket science going on right there!
Hi, I cannot find where to send a question to the lawyer. So here it is, did you ever come across a magnetic padlock? I have a cheep one that has a key that is a rectangle about the size of a normal key. It looks like it might have four magnets in it. Probably set in different polarities. I think this is a pretty good idea, one that might clutter up your lock picking set! Mark
The first locks I picked were the ones you could get for like a dollar for luggage for the airport or whatever, but the next time I started playing with locks was in middle school. During break, I would sneak in and play with other people's locks on their lockers, and pop them open, first starting with my friends, then anyone who I felt like, when I got better. Everyone tended to have those master locks with the dial on the front, and I quickly learned that if you pulled down on the lock and turn the dial, you could feel it get looser with every number you got right. I aggravated so many of the other kids in school, and I got suspended a couple times from it, but it was fun to me.
Can you use tension on the locking bar to feel the gates? Should work at least for the last one because it should just pop open when you dial over the right number.
Yes it works! When I was a kid (I'm Bulgarian) my father bought such a lock and I figured out that you can open it by applying tension on the bar. The low tolerances of the false gates definitely helped too. :)
![[478] Vintage "Super Secret" Bulgarian Combination Lock](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
