Suing a popular YouTuber who shimmed a $130 lock—what could possibly go wrong?
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I just can't imagine the sort of guy with some domestic violence priors and willingness to use 'liberal' as an insult would be other than even-tempered and intellectually honest. Crazy stuff.
At least the judge sounded downright professionally unimpressed, which is nice.
The whole thing is especially ridiculous in the context of the fact that modern battery tech makes the overwhelming majority of locks you'd ever actually want to carry roughly equals against the zero-skill "angle grinder and act like you are supposed to be doing that" technique.
Non-destructive and covert have their uses; but often just as a ruleset that preserves some difference between the skill floor and the skill ceiling.
At least the judge sounded downright professionally unimpressed, which is nice.
The whole thing is especially ridiculous in the context of the fact that modern battery tech makes the overwhelming majority of locks you'd ever actually want to carry roughly equals against the zero-skill "angle grinder and act like you are supposed to be doing that" technique.
Non-destructive and covert have their uses; but often just as a ruleset that preserves some difference between the skill floor and the skill ceiling.
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This man clearly continues to have much difficulty understanding & following the law...
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It's possible that the supply of nuisance-grade attorneys suddenly dries up when you announce your target in that case.
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Defense against lockpicks is like high grade encryption: useful in many respects but still vulnerable to the proverbial "$5 wrench" attack.
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as the name implies, he IS a lawyer. You do you, but it would be really really stupid.
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There's so much more here and anybody interested should probably check out one of the lawtuber videos on the subject
Runkle of the Baily has been the main one analyzing all this.
And even though the case is now dropped the pain hasn't ended for Proven, as it seems Lee may have perjured himself in one of the depositions he gave in the McNally suit.
View: https://youtu.be/qL_MeobAp5s?t=1487
Runkle of the Baily has been the main one analyzing all this.
And even though the case is now dropped the pain hasn't ended for Proven, as it seems Lee may have perjured himself in one of the depositions he gave in the McNally suit.
View: https://youtu.be/qL_MeobAp5s?t=1487
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One of the things that came out in court - and likely a big reason for Proven's attempt to get everything sealed - is that the owner had those three felony convictions. In addition to the one mentioned in the article, there was one that the judge was much more interested in: Witness Tampering.
Oops.
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As a casual and slightly accomplished Lpicker... I'm still laughing myself silly. Proven has been proven to be as unique as a sidewalk crack... just another a-hole who thinks "THEIR" businesses should be treated like fine art.
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Florida man strikes again....
I remember coming across the vid of McNally grabbing the lock from the Amazon locker and proceeding to pick it in seconds with his liquid death can. Hadn't even heard of him before that but I got a good laugh and then saw the comments describing the crazy shit that led up to that. If I recall he did that to a couple locks in that video. Should have been the end of the story right there but Florida man loves vindictive lawsuits it seems.
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Ironically the video in question is in fact showing that the $5 wrench attack was successfully defended against, but the $0.01 shim made of energy drink can, won the day.
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It’s easy to forget that those of us who have been exposed to the stories of LPL, Popehat, Prenda, and other fun things wrt the law neglect that there’s still millions of boneheaded people out there who carefully maintain a cultivated willful ignorance of how law works and, worse, there are thousands of attorneys willing to take their checks instead of telling potential clients what a damn stupid thing it is they want to do.
And no matter how many times the stupidity happens, there is an inexhaustible supply of fools out there.
And no matter how many times the stupidity happens, there is an inexhaustible supply of fools out there.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
When you did it yourself, did it occur to you for one moment that maybe the best thing to do, instead of file a lawsuit, was to fix [the lock]? This is a Judge I would side bar with.
One thing that irks me, while I am glad McNally showed the failure of the product, I'm one that was about to buy Proven's trailer hitch locks for leasing out my dump trailers. Not many secure ways about it except to build your own, and get a solar-charged cellular camera and airtags on the things.
One thing that irks me, while I am glad McNally showed the failure of the product, I'm one that was about to buy Proven's trailer hitch locks for leasing out my dump trailers. Not many secure ways about it except to build your own, and get a solar-charged cellular camera and airtags on the things.
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It's been a while since I've read a good "thin-skinned business owner self-immolates on social media" story. This did not disappoint.
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Using a shim made out of an empty can is modern tech, as all LPL fans know a good lock needs a frozen carrot to open it!
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The "$5 wrench attack" it's not hitting the lock/locked object, but the person with the means to unlock it.
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Well I've never heard of Proven Locks (pretentious name BTW), but it's good to know that both their product and company are pure trash, and should be avoided at all costs.
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Because it means that defendants have to hire up and spend money. At the least they lose time and sleep. If they don’t live in a state with anti SLAPP laws, they lose time, sleep, and money.
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Well, he IS a lawyer, and that fact is sufficient to scare away many bloviating blowhards.
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However this guy behaved: He didn't deserve to be harassed all around the clock, his family shounldn't be part of this and to threaten his children is the worst.
The persons who did this should be found and persecuted. They are not even personally involved in this!
What is it with this society that behavior like this is not even discussed?
The persons who did this should be found and persecuted. They are not even personally involved in this!
What is it with this society that behavior like this is not even discussed?
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The slightly awkward bit, for locks, is that since their resistance to nondestructive attacks generally costs money (in the terms of more complex designs or tighter tolerances) there's often an implication (not necessarily as often an accurate one) that you should expect more from the more expensive ones; and also the more you are spending on physical durability or for at-least-partially-supervised environments the more weak nondestructive/covert resistance is a problem.
It's barely worth complaining that some $5 lock-shaped object from alizon is not pick-resistant because the amount of violence required to open it looks and sounds almost indistinguishable whether you are using the questionably-fitted key or a screwdriver and a sharp twist.
If you are spending $130 on something milled out of a chunk of stainless steel; you start to care more because there are now levels of supervised parking lots where an angle grinder is going to attract rentacops; but nobody will care if you just walk up and shim it with a key-like motion.
Encryption is sort of a weird mapping to physical locks just because of the economics of software. Overall security seems to be a lot more like locks(ie. not as well-linked to the price and vendor claims as it ought to be; almost always worse than it looks); but when good cryptographers are that combination of born and made that keeps them in rather short supply, and really good, careful, software engineers are not cheap or abundant; but copies of libraries are free it's actively easier to (possibly mis)use the work of people way, way, smarter than you are than it is to try to make your own mistakes; so people usually just do that; outside of really nasty power-limited embedded systems or ones where legacy compatibility is required.
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He made a series of videos, basically unpicking provens claims one by one. The one of the amazon locker was to prove he wasn't tampering with the locks ahead of time. he made another video where he had a whole pile of the locks and a whole pile of shims (all clearly cut with as much care and attention as required, ie none) and just opened one after another in seconds to prove that it wasn't just random chance or only a few carefully picked locks being vulnerable.
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Way back in 2007 I moved across the country for school/training/work. I lived in this apartment for three years. When I moved out, I turned in my keys at the office (on a Sunday) and then quickly realized that I had left something in the apartment. Imagine my surprise when I walked up with a Schlage bump key and popped the lock on my apartment on the first try.
Suffice to say that from then on whenever I got an apartment somewhere I would bring this up to the property management. One of the most popular solutions has been to replace the lock with a digital lock that is of some high mechanical quality, and then give the apartment administration a unique code to get in. The lock logs it and I get a notification on my cell phone which then allows me to switch over to internal security cameras to see what someone is doing.
Suffice to say that from then on whenever I got an apartment somewhere I would bring this up to the property management. One of the most popular solutions has been to replace the lock with a digital lock that is of some high mechanical quality, and then give the apartment administration a unique code to get in. The lock logs it and I get a notification on my cell phone which then allows me to switch over to internal security cameras to see what someone is doing.
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The company claimed to have this case locked up from the start, but it was picked apart embarrassingly quickly.
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They are going to sue Harbor Freight next. And Bruce Schnier for ever saying “security theater” out loud.
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How many AI slop conspiracy theories do we think the “Sucks to see how many people take everything they see online for face value,” guy has liked on facebook(possibly X, or linkedin, if he's a sophisticated business gentleman)?
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