Without a Traceroute

Today I felt healthy enough to where the prospect of eating food seemed appealing rather than off-putting for the first time in several days. Let’s hear it for antibiotics, easily humanity’s best totally accidental discovery since fire (I’m actually taking regular old penicillin).

I went grocery shopping and discovered that while you can get Campbell’s soup in Sweden, you can only get mushroom, tomato and asparagus; sadly, not chicken noodle. Also, the cans are weirdly small and metric. Every company in the world seems to round down to the nearest metric size.

I promise this story goes somewhere (not necessarily anywhere interesting).

What could this be?

I settled on buying a couple cans of Campbell’s soup, for reasons of homesickness, and also some Swedish(probably?)-brand chicken soup for reasons of actual sickness. The Campbell’s soup helpfully comes with a little pull-tab for removing the lid, but not so the Knorr-brand (Knorr may actually be the Swedish word for “soup” and not a brand name, it’s slightly ambiguous).

I spent a fair amount of time searching through the unfamiliar kitchen, which contains three (3!) garlic presses but zero obvious can openers. I finally settled on the oddly shaped flange of metal pictured above as the most promising can-opener-like object.

By wedging the side notch against the rim of the can and levering the “tooth” part against the top, it’s possible to produce a puncture. But then you’re sort of stuck. There’s no way (I could find) to maintain the pressure, and the edge isn’t sharp enough to allow you to cut your way around the can. I just repeated the puncturing procedure like 20 times until I’d gone most of the way around and could peel back the lid. It took me about 10 minutes, but the payoff was a tasty bowl of soup.

Example (Yes, yes, I know there’s a pull-tab!)

I’m still not really sure how to feel about this outcome (obviously, ‘less hungry’ was a first). Either I was marginally clever in improvising a decent way to open a can without a can opener, or I was incredibly stupid at figuring out how to use a piece of technology as simple as a can opener. Does anyone out there in the internet have any idea whether the metal thing is a can opener? If it’s not, what else is it? For the record, the Swedes who own the maybe-opener are uncertain themselves.

In any case, the whole subject of trying-to-open-things-with-other-things-that-weren’t-designed-for-opening-them is particularly relevant to me, since I’ve been trying to pick up lockpicking as a hobby.

Lockpicking is actually a fairly popular hobby among hackers. It appeals to many of the same sorts of impulses: analytic problem-solving, a desire to understand the inner workings of a system, curiosity about whether that system can be exploited. The canonical document on the subject is the MIT Lockpicking Guide (although MIT has been trying to disassociate itself). I read it a couple years ago, and again in the last few weeks. It’s an excellent introduction to the subject, and really drives home the point that lockpicking is at least at much a mental craft as a physical one.

In order to be able to open a lock, you really have to be able to reconstruct in your head what’s going on inside the lock. This is the aspect of lockpicking that’s kind of exciting to me, the idea of possessing some arcane knowledge that’s in and of itself powerful and slightly dangerous.

What’s going on in there?

At 25C3, there was an entire section of tables devoted to lockpicking. They had tools you could borrow and lots of different locks to experiment with. They also held several workshops to teach participants how to open different kinds of locks: padlocks, door locks, handcuffs, etc. I went to one of the workshops, but I’m still very much a novice. I think I understand the theoretical underpinnings, but there’s also a tactile knack that I have not come close to developing yet.

The Research Department hacklab here in Malmö has their own nice collection of locks. I borrowed a few and poking at them has been a good way to pass the time while I was sick. So far, all I can do is set one or two pins, not very close to opening any of the locks. I’m curious whether there will be some sort of “AHA!” moment where I get the feel for it, or if it’s one of those things where you just very gradually improve at it.

Locks, locks everywhere