Engineers love to solve problems, particularly challenging ones, and Nathan Seidle, an engineer and founder of Sparkfun, loves to build robots. As a gift, his wife gave him an already locked safe (and no idea of the combination) knowing that he'd enjoy the challenge. As an engineer he did a little bit of research, some reverse engineering of the safe, and his knowledge of electronics and robotics to do the work for him. What could take a human years to try and figure out the combination, a few weeks of on and off work helped him create a machine that will try enough calculations that the safe will be open in minutes rather than years.
Is it legal? Is this ethical? In this case, Nate notes that he owns the safe and there's nothing illegal, its almost like you forgot your password for your own email account. He also points out that by informing the safe manufactures of the security flaws he and others could use, we can actually be helping out the design and development of better security systems. And safe cracking isn't much different from lock picking, which can actually be a competitive sport (as long as you aren't trying to break into some one else's property) Comments are closed.
|
Mr. WelkerTechnology Teacher at Southeast Raleigh High School. Archives
October 2019
Categories |