This is a pretty good some up of the difference between things as they appear to be and things as they really are.

I have a security background and it's largely all theater. Locks are just to keep out people who believe in them. All those badge swipes and things are about tracking access, not securing things. Matter of fact, most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety.

Learn to hack, learn to quadcopter.

Learn to hack
And let's be honest here, even Fort Knox is only ever as secure as the people who operate it.
Generally speaking, an operation is only as secure as the people who function within it and these people tend to be the most vulnerable points in a chain of security.
What I'm trying to say here is that you don't have to be a good hacker to be a good penetration tester and one of the most fruitful areas for "hacking" is always going to be social engineering.
- Calling people up and just asking for their passwords is a time honored tradition.
- I always wanted to try being a pen tester because me and my friends used to like to sneak and I liked to schmooze. I would always be the one to distract the cashier or whoever.
A little while ago our company wanted to get rid off local administrator rights, but as developers we kind of need those (like installing the software we develope and other unimportant things), so they installed some crappy software that wraps the user access control and I guess gives them more control over what can be run
It breaks every couple of weeks, but luckily you can use that same software to disable and bypass it by running the control panel as admin
- Every windows PC that has a USB port can be hacked into locally. Boot into windows install USB, open elevated command prompt, change the ease of access button's target location to be an admin command prompt instead of the ease of access settings, reboot, click the ease of access button, change the admin password in the admin command prompt, enter the password and you're in.
Also, lockpicking is pretty easy, and a lockpicking kit is really cheap
- Yeah, most commercial non-deadbolt locks are really fucking cheap. A lockpick gun will get you in most doors relatively quick. Most security, keypad, and fire boxes are all using one of a handful of keys. Same with the old crown vic police cars, actually. Also, golf carts.
Matter of fact, most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety.
Does this mean that passing a strong-ish magnet over them would typically make them open?
- Fail open means that fire code requires an unobstructed path of egress; You can't be locked in a building in an emergency. So mag locks are powered all the time in order to maintain the lock and then you remove power to open the door. This way if power goes out the door opens. In most major Corporate buildings, if you go into the fire panel room, you will find a relay that can simply be pulled out and will remove power to every maglock in the area. Or you can pull the fire alarm, cut the power, etc. Most big buildings also have a little lockbox aka a knoxbox outside their front door with a set of keys inside and some have a switch inside to kill the locks as well. They do have tamper switches though.
  I can't remember using a magnet to neutralize a maglock, but I wanted to.😅 It would have to be a big one and honestly it would be easier to just slap something with a bit of thickness on the maglock when the door is open to prevent it from getting a solid "seal'. It'll give the appearance of being locked, but a good yank will let the door open right up. Often you can also just slide a piece of paper on a coat hanger between double doors or under a door to trip the PIR (passive infrared) sensor used to auto-open for people exiting. It shouldn't work, but those PIR are cheap as hell and often very oversensitive.
Everything always fails at "guy who doesn't get paid enough to give a shit"
- Who watches the watchmen themselves?
most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety
I used to work in a room at a place that violated this regulation. It was a laboratory, too. Those probably catch fire more often than office cubicles.
- Lol yeah, that probably deserves a call to OSHA. Or in some libertarian place where that's not the fire code.

Lol everyone here getting it while everyone on Reddit was like "Oh you cut a hole in the wall you're not so smart I could cut a hole in the wall, too!"

Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.
I'm not sure if there's a name for this particular phenomenon but I like to think of it in terms of naive responses to contemporary art or, in short, Contemporary Art Syndrome; when people encounter contemporary art they tend to have the reaction "But I could have made that!" and the obvious response to this is "Yeah, but did you?"
(Putting aside the fact that there's actually [apparently] a high degree of technical skill required for, say, a Barnett Newman painting for argument's sake.)
- Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.
  Sites on the net claim the physicist Ernest Rutherford said the following but Wikiquote says it's unsourced.
  All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
- Along those same lines, I'm always bothered when in movies, there's a seemingly unstoppable evil that the people can't kill, then a little girl spills some water on one of the beasts, and it works. Word spreads and there's a montage of people in the US, France, India, China etc spilling water on the creatures and winning. Like, motherfucker they are organic beings! There are hundreds of ways to kill them!
  Also, the "we tried something once, and did a bad job at it, so we won't try it again" movie trope.
- The phrases I'd associate it with are obvious in retrospect or hindsight being 20/20.
eh, picking a lock is still better because it doesn't wake people up, and allows you to get away without the crime being noticed for a while
I agree that ramming a door down is stupid when you can just break through a window

Reminds me of this:

Hello, Lockpicking Lawyer here, in this episode I will be making my wife very angry...
fucking hell, it's real :stalin-stressed:
ancient plankton hundreds of millions of years ago died on the sea floor, got stuck between some rocks, turned into oil, and were pumped out of the earth and refined into plastic, just so they could be turned into that shitty "euphori-lock" that can be gotten around by simply flipping the container and cutting a circle in the bottom and going to town with a spoon.

"do you feel in charge?"
"I've paid you a small fortune."
"and this gives you... power over me?"
If their security details and handlers collectively decided that the ruling class no longer had power and that their money was meaningless
Which is why they're paid well enough to very much not think money is meaningless.

I'm reminded of the walmart storefronts that look like brick or stone but are really just veneers over extremely regular-ass walls

Lol imagine reading any of this living in a real country that doesn't allow new construction to be made out of wet toilet paper, termite shit and the bounced alimony checks made out to strippers under a fake name.

You use 'drywall knife'

'Concrete blocks and rebar with injectable insulation' is confused

Try again?

honey, wet toilet paper isn't the same as cardboard with powdered chalk glued to it
the latter is way more expensive
- Okay now breathe the gypsum fibers directly into your alveolar lining, great. Nah you don't need a mask to install this, what kind of
He recognized the contradictions in the system. That’s how it be.
- Sam Elliott voice: we used to make things in this country. Time was, a wall, was allowed to be a wall. If Kyle lost his CoD: MW II match, or mom forgot to get more Monster Energy, guess what? Broken hand, wall's fine.
- And behind the plaster? Wooden slats.
- Yeah plaster is a whole different kind of creature from drywall. I fucking hate plaster.
yeah this would only work on the flimsiest of walls

is the drywall knife?

reminds me of that time that al qaeda operatives were using gmail Drafts to pass messages back and forth (all using the same login) and because they never SENT an email, they never set off any keyword-detector alarms.

Practicing decontextualization like this is great practice for inventing new praxis. A lot of folks learn the patterns and skills of organizing. Don't get me wrong, they're great. But it's great to be willing to do something a bit different when opportunity knocks.

We have to be able to adapt to a changing world. Marshall McLuhan saw our current problem over 50 years ago. Although his takeaway was more on the techno utopia side of things. He didn't account for people using global communication for propaganda, which is weird because he lived through enough war and technology leaps, he should have realized that killing people is the father of invention.
- I thought porn was the father of invention

Locks are just there to dissuade opportunistic thieves. If you're determined enough all it takes to get into a place is a sturdy crowbar and some elbow grease.

Which is one reason I don't lock my car. I also don't keep anything of value in it. I'd rather come out to a ransacked car than a broken window.
- Tbf there are people who just go around checking for unlocked doors. Maybe it depends on the neighborhood which is more of an issue.
- My older car had a broken lock so it would open if you tried the handle, but the car alarm would still go off. I thought it was a huge upgrade.
- I did this for a while but stopped after watching someone drive off with my car lol.
Yeah, this is why I've never bothered buying an expensive bike lock, any lock at all will have the vast majority of potential bike thieves just move on.
- flashback to that time some guy used a boltcutter on my lock and took my shitty $120 bike like 2 hours into my workshift
  motherfucker must've been waiting for an excuse to bust it out lmao

gonna take a drywall saw to a congressional baseball game

also good general advice for pre-apocalyptic scavenging.

or that you dadskf;'akse'wfaegqrwt;'lj'a

This is true! You can make tiny pizzas by putting sauce or olive oil and cheese on saltine crackers, but... Where will we find lederhosen in our size, Frank?

Narf!

they lack the ability to articulate their lack of freedom and so on and so on

Then the wall's made of brick and you're shit out of luck. Or it's time to go in through the metaphorical ceiling and blow the roof off of the world and how it perceives itself.

"Baki, Son of Ogre" pivots around the fight at the end between Baki and his father (hence the title), whose name is Yujiro. There's a phrase that pops up towards the end that is said very mysteriously, that "the strong live in a different world than everyone else". What this means is very unclear until a moment near the end of the fight. Baki has Yujiro pinned with his left arm behind his back, face-down on asphalt. Normally, this is a situation where your options are very limited, since Yujiro's right arm should not be able to effectively reach Baki (who is basically sitting on his back). Yujiro, instead of trying to reach back to Baki on his right side, instead effectively performs an overextended hook punch through the asphalt to hit Baki on his left side while simultaneously rotating out of the arm pin.

It's absolutely moronic writing but nonetheless also very clever and it has stuck with me, and this reminded me of that. I suppose it's just lateral thinking, but there's always some interesting way to challenge your assumptions in different contexts.

If my description is unclear, it's chapter 280. And yes, I just like talking about dumb manga.

You may enjoy the UK show TaskMaster. They take a group of 5 comedians and give them weird tasks to competitively complete which they're judged upon later. It's quite funny and some of the stuff they come up with is pretty ingenious.
Also, I just watched that anime episode last month.
I'm reminded of a couple of stories where a character is pinned and unable to attack their opponent... unless they stab themselves, driving their sword through their own body to stab their opponent in turn.
That's a large part of the reason why berserkers are so terrrifying irl. There's no magical immunity to harm conferred by the berserk state. But if someone genuinely does not care if they die as long as they kill you it opens up many options that are difficult or impossible to defend against. Suicide bombers would be a more widely understood example; The hardest part of setting a bomb is often escaping. If you take that out of the equation it becomes much easier to blow things up.
related to the berserker thing, there's a concept in sword fighting sometimes referred to as 'newbie-fu', along with a lot of other names. Sometimes new fighters will do something so suicidaly stupid that experienced swordsmen have no defense against it. Not because there is no way to defend against it, but because whatever the newbie is doing is so dumb, and usually so suicidal, that no experienced fighter would ever try it. And because no one would try it, no one practices defenses and counters to it. Every so often a newbie will try something they saw in an anime and it'll work simply because no one ever bothered to craft a defense against such an outlandish attack.
A real world example i can think of is a series of French prison breakouts where the attackers evaluated all the defenses preventing them from getting in to the interior of the prison - Walls, fences, doors, cells, etc., and decided that the easiest way to breach all of them was to land a helicopter in the prison courtyard, get their guy on board, and fly away. None of the prison defenses mattered because the designers had simply not considered such a vector of attack.
I think some related TvTropes tropes would be things like "refuge in audacity". Or the idea that if you're wearing the right clothes and look confident you can go almost anywhere.

This is some Terence McKenna level thinking and I love it! I've taken enough psychedelics to know that the guard rails society have erected are flimsy and easily manipulated

GOOD POST

Interestingly I was having a conversation with myself about this. That ethics, law, and other normative systems are just sets of rules, just like how physical reality follows laws of nature.

The difference is that the "metric" of reality is existence itself — the measure is that something exists, or it doesn't: there isn't anything that violates the laws of nature that exists.

But in the human realm, there must be some metric ("good" vs "bad" ) that drives measures (ethical/legal/profitable/etc. vs not). But also there are indeterminates (neither moral nor immoral) or disputes, because there are many systems under existence (your moral vs my moral).

I also don't know what I was trying to say tbh, someone started screaming on the bus at that point. I guess basically just that humans tend to silo their conceptions of things which don't match up with each other perfectly already, let alone realizing that the ultimate reality of things doesn't give a fuck about our conventions.

Building a perfect system or even a minimally common-to-all system seems like a fool's errand, like liberalism "we just need to declare human rights that no one can disagree with, and then no one will violate them" fucking Kant and Rawls

You have discovered ideology
You'd like reading Marx, if you haven't already
The difference is that the "metric" of reality is existence itself — the measure is that something exists, or it doesn't: there isn't anything that violates the laws of nature that exists.
What exists? Everything!

I wish I wasn't so sleepy and had something interesting to contribut to the discussion, but I really appreciate this post and everyone's conversation. I've been trying to change my habits of thinking recently (mostly by trying new things, such as drawing), as well as more occult stuff that I doubt Mr Hexbear would approve of. I fucking love that anecdote you posted, thank you!

Have you read the Dark Marxism blog that is all about the occult elements of capitalist ideology?
https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/
A bit of occult analysis with historical materialism is fine with many of us here.
- Occultism and esotericism can be very helpful for, idk, growing in thought, or becoming more aware of the world, or learning to see what really is. The tricky part is to remember that all the magic stuff is a trap for fools, and the real value is learning nasty little tricks like you don't have to walk on sidewalks and that the best way to lie is to tell the truth.
Occult shit is rad af
- I've been wondering if starting an occult comm is a good idea or not. I want to take esoteric ideas and just run with them in a space that isn't filled with reactionaries. But I think it'd be a fatal mismatch with the culture of the site as a whole; taking magic seriously doesn't tend to jive well with rigid material analysis

noclip irl with this 1 weird trick

Walls? Pah!

This shows the importance of praxis and how your org should incorporate people who come from different backgrounds. There's no way he would've figured that shit out while he was at the brainstorming and planning stage of the burglary. It's only when he was at the process of burglarizing and with multiple burglaries under his belt did he come to that conclusion. People coming from different backgrounds is also important since ideology doesn't affect everyone equally. Within a given context, one person might be completely blinded while another person might plainly see what's in front of them.

In my area there was a jewelry store next to a pet grooming store and they just broke into the pet grooming store and busted through the wall to get into the jewelry store. Never caught.

The Israeli Defense Force has used this in the past, including reading Deleuze's and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, as a theoretical reorganization of battle

In the interview, I asked Naveh: “Why Deleuze and Guattari?” He replied that: “Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained. It problematized our own paradigms. […] Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space […] [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus.’ […] In the IDF we now often use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ‘striated,’ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks and so on. […] We want to confront the ‘striated’ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice [the way most military units presently operate] with smoothness that allows for movement through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them.”

Naveh has recently completed the translation into Hebrew of some of the chapters in Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction. In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive and détournement. These ideas were conceived as part of a general approach meant to challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city. They aimed to break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function, to replace private space with a “borderless” public surface. Naveh made references to the work of Georges Bataille as well, who also spoke of a desire to attack architecture: his call to arms was meant to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape “the architectural straitjacket,” and to liberate repressed human desires.

https://transversal.at/transversal/0507/weizman/en

All time classic. Even greater than the CIA repping for Foucault over Marxism in France.
Who would have thought that reactionary mysticism based on elaborate (but only superficially Marxist) radical idealism, would not only never have provided successful means of concrete class struggle, but appealed above all to petit-boug intellectuals?

Respect for the "You have no power over me" approach to scheduling. "No no no, you see, I'm informing you as a courtesy. This is not a negotiation."

I think this would work better in a country where the houses are made of wood rather than stone

I suspect a lot of people have difficulty recognizing that what they believe about the world may not be representative of how the world actually behaves. I certainly do, frequently.

The entire field of modern economics. So much of modern economics is articulated by people who live in Plato's Cave. They will write these papers trying to explain how "innate market forces" work, when the reason they work the way they do is because the law designed them to work that way, and people with guns will come to arrest or kill you if you attempt to alter that.