Gadget Guru’s magic box

The nice folks at Master Lock, aware of Guru’s fascination with poking slender tools into awkward holes and wiggling them around until something pops, sent your author a biometric outdoor padlock (the nattily-named 4901EURDLHCC, which sounds like someone attempting to write a product name but succumbing to food poisoning half way through). It’s reasonably heavy, with a 9mm boronhardened steel shackle secured with servo-actuated ball bearings to prevent shimming. On the front you get a fingerprint reader with a d-pad around it for backup access using a directional code; pull off the base of the rubberised housing surrounding the metal lock body and a pair of 9V battery terminals offers power backup.

On the packaging Master Lock gives this full marks on its own security rating system, though anyone can make up a rating system. Guru rates himself eleven biceps, for example. Let’s focus on the facts instead: it works fine. Programming fingerprints (up to ten of them) is easy enough. Setting your own directional-arrows cheat code is similarly straightforward, and there’s a secret (unique) backup master code in there that you can discover through Master Lock’s Vault app. As a convenient padlock for things you need readily secured and easily released, by all means this’ll work.

Here’s the but: this is a padlock. Not one that can be picked. Possibly not one quite as cool looking as his beloved, beautiful igloohome Smart Padlock ($219), even if its fingerprint reader is a superb feature. But a padlock nonetheless. The universal truth of padlocks is that brute force works: good bolt cutters will make mincemeat of any shackle, a few strong kabongs with a heavy hammer will destroy most lock bodies.