The Many Faces of LockSport

Presented at HOPE X (2014), July 18, 2014, 4 p.m. (120 minutes)

In the past decade, the hacker subculture of LockSport has seen a tremendous explosion. What was once the purview of dedicated specialists, far-flung hobbyists, and college students meeting in secret is now featured prominently at technical conferences, family-oriented science fairs, and even TV shows. The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers now has nearly 20 chapters across the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada. Sportsfreunden der Sperrtechnik is still going strong with hundreds of members. Locksport International has meetup groups in major cities. Regional groups like the Fraternal Order Of LockSport, the Longhorn Lockpicking Club, the FALE Association of Locksport Enthusiasts, and more conduct local meetings and engage in joint ventures with larger organizations. At the annual LockCon conference, sport pickers from over a dozen countries gather to learn from one another and compete head to head. Despite the shared interest and community between all LockSport groups, there is great variation between the cultures and values of these participants. This panel discussion will feature some of the key figures from various locksport organizations around the world and will hopefully highlight some of those differences and offer the audience a chance to ask questions about locks, LockSport, and competitive lock-opening.(A primer on basic lock-picking and lock-opening techniques will be offered very quickly at the start of the session if you've never learned these kinds of skills before!)


Presenters:

  • Ray
    Ray is a hacker and lockpicker from Germany. Besides having a master's degree in computer science and interests in Unix/Linux security, he's been collecting and picking all kinds of locks for over a decade and has given presentations in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States on related topics. You may have seen his previous talks about locks and handcuffs at past HOPEs. Ray is also a founding member of his local CCC organization and leads the Munich chapter of Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik (SSDeV), Germany's largest LockSport group.
  • Deviant Ollam
    Deviant Ollam is a member of the board of directors of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) in the United States. Growing up with James Bond films and the TV show I Spy, he was fascinated with lockpicking from a young age, but never really got deep into this topic until witnessing TOOOL members firsthand at HOPE. He now helps to run the Lockpick Village at many cons around the world, has published books, and has visited over 100 cities across 17 countries in his time teaching about lockpicking.
  • Jos Weyers
    Jos Weyers decided to do some training after ending second in the ongoing toool.nl competition four times in a row. Four hundred key blanks later, he slashed the then world record time of four minutes and 23 seconds to impression an Abus C83 (he did it in 87 seconds). He's the Dutch champion (two times in a row), and German Meister (that's champion in German, also twice), and current world record holder in this particular lock opening technique. Jos is the vice president of toool.nl. Most people know him as the Dutch kilt guy.
  • Babak Javadi
    Babak Javadi is a hardware hacker with a wayward spirit. His first foray into the world of physical security was in the third grade, where he received detention for describing to another student in words alone how to disassemble the doorknob on the classroom door. After years of immersion in electronics and computer hardware hacking, he found his passion in the puzzling and mysterious world of high security locks and safes. After serving as a driving force within the locksport community for almost a decade and helping found the U.S. division of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL), he has recently re-embraced the beauty of the baud and resumed hardware hacking with a vengeance.
  • JGor
    JGor has had a hand in running the Longhorn Lockpicking Club since its inception at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 2006. In addition to running the club, he organizes lockpick villages and events for various security conferences. By day he is a network security analyst for the university, where his physical hacking adventures have ranged from defeating locking manhole covers to cracking cryptographic RFID card-access systems.
  • Doug Farre
    Doug Farre is the president of Locksport International, a recreational organization focused on promoting and fostering the hands-on, interactive, and stimulating hobby of picking locks. Doug is interested in all types of security and has written, advocated, and spoken on the subject for years. Additionally, he has acted as a physical security consultant for numerous institutions. He currently lives in Boulder, Colorado and works as a web and mobile applications developer at Quick Left Inc.

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