| Date: | June 6, 2005 / year-entry #141 |
| Tags: | non-computer |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050606-37/?p=35423 |
| Comments: | 15 |
| Summary: | In a sidebar discussion on this week's episode of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, Adam Felber explains that "you can foil most motion detectors with a pair of insulated gloves, a piece of plywood, and a hat." [Windows Media] [RealPlayer] |
In a sidebar discussion on this week's episode of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, Adam Felber explains that "you can foil most motion detectors with a pair of insulated gloves, a piece of plywood, and a hat." [Windows Media] [RealPlayer] |
Comments (15)
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Full disclosure inevitably leads to trouble, and you are being irresponsible by promoting it as a methodology, given the stance of your company on this matter.
Aww man, I tell you, some people just take things too personally. Did you know you can break in to most houses just by putting upward pressure on the garage door? It kicks in the safety mechanism that prevents it from crushing things. And to top that off, most people don’t bother locking the door that connects to their garage, thinking, mistakenly, that the garage door acts as first line of defense.
Security often doesn’t make people as secure as they’d like to believe.
Sounds an awful lot like the scene from "Tremors 2" where they avoid the heat-sensing worm jobbies by carrying a door or something.
Full disclosure leads to trouble the way small earthquakes balance pressures, averting a larger catastrophe that would otherwise happen later on.
I had to do this kind of thing when a roommate activated the house alarm then left while I was asleep, and I woke up to the beep beep beeeeeep of it arming. I managed to sneak under the view of the detector and hang a small cardboard box on it. Worked like a charm.
I supervised the installation of the alarm system when our company movied into our new headquarters last year. We have two independent zones and about 20 individual sensors (door contacts, overheads, motion sensors, etc.).
You might be able to foil a motion detector this way IF YOU KNEW WHERE IT WAS IN ADVANCE. Most people breaking in have no idea where they are. And if a room has two sensors installed catty corner this won’t work.
Also, our main office area has a 360DEG sensor that is extremely sensitive to movement. When armed I can move about 1"/sec without it picking me up. Any faster than that and it goes off. It’s unlikely that the hat/gloves/board method would work in real life.
But feel free to try it at your local businessplace and report your findings.
Well it all depends on the sensitivity of the sensors. My first alarm system would go off in a balloon blew past it. The system in my newer house will actually adjust based on the average temperature of the room. So if you throw a party, and fill the room, the sensor becomes less sensative as the average room temperature goes up. (And this is actually in the manaual.) So given the low complexity of home systems, I could certainly see this working. Especially since home systems are switching to infrared motion detectors as they give less false alarms.
Yup, you sure can.
If it’s cold outside, and you have a long leather trenchcoat, holding it in front of you also works. I’ve done it many times at work. (no, I’m not telling you where I work. ;-))
It does help to know where the sensors are, but you could always just walk inside of a cardboard box if you don’t know. And companies do skimp on sensors, so often you can guess easily: at the ends of long corridors.
"you could always just walk inside of a cardboard box if you don’t know"
Metal Gear Solid styles!
sorry to go offtopic.
am I cut out to be a programmer if it took me 12 hrs to figure out I should use CMapStringToString instead of CMap <string string> ?
"Full disclosure inevitably leads to trouble, and you are being irresponsible by promoting it as a methodology, given the stance of your company on this matter."
Actually, Concerned, you have this almost completely reversed from the real world.
The most secure systems (both computer and physical) are generally those that take as open an approach as possible. Cf. the writings of Bruce Schneier, Whitfield Diffie, and others.
Many of Microsoft’s security weaknesses are believed to be the result of their counter-productive posture of restricting information (again, Schneier has written on this extensively). And, I hasten to add, Apple is probably even worse, mostly because the perception of threat (so far) is as low as it is, so many security processes are ignored.
Far from being irresponsible, postings such as Raymond’s will only make motion detectors more effective, by closing the now-exposed vulnerability.
Criticism is the only known antidote to error. Security is a process, not a product. Learn those two principles (by Brin and Schneier, respectively), and maybe you’ll get somewhere.
alex: worse, you’re qualified at being a maintenance programmer.
When I was a kid, I learned an even simpler method of foiling motion detectors – just walk really, really slowly.
At my university, we had a classroom where the lights were controlled by a motion detector. When a particularly dry computer science professor would drone on for too long without anyone moving, the lights would suddenly go out.
Oh no, Dungeon is a security risk.
Is Zork I a security risk? I forgot if that part of Dungeon made it into Zork I or not. Dungeon was the second famous adventure game, after Adventure was the first. When you get to the point of foiling the motion detectors, the game even starts to have a bit of respect for you.
Wasn’t there a famous court case in France where they decided full disclosure was illegal (in France)?