Imagine you're a thief or penetration tester who wants to break into a modern badge-protected space. You've printed out a fake badge from one of the many excited new hires who posted a color photograph of theirs on the Internet, but of course the badge doesn't actually scan by a badge reader. Imagine that guards have been posted next to the badge readers to make sure everybody actually scans their badge.
Enter the beeping badge. Just as another employee begins to open the door ahead of you, you press yours against the badge reader (or any other surface, but the guard doesn't know that), and -- with a small delay for simulated round-trip processing against a database -- a small piezo-electric speaker in the badge beeps happily, courtesy of the same space-age technology available in recordable greeting card form. The guard sees and hears that you "scanned" your "badge", and more likely than not holds the door for you. "Good morning, M'am." -- "Good morning -- oh, I didn't get your name--" "Bryan" -- "Is that with an I or a Y?" You note down the datum for next time one of your co-workers needs to try and impersonate a guard, and are on your merry way.-- jutta, Dec 18 2018 Badger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BadgerThese are the Dachs you're looking for ... [8th of 7, Dec 18 2018] //Imagine you're a thief or penetration tester // I have _always_ wanted to be a penetration tester.
One point: you will probably want a tuneable sound effect, to ensure that yours doesn't sound like a boop against all the other beeps.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 18 2018 Now if only it was a highly trained badger and not just an inanimate badge. I think bringing a live badger to work as a type of security pass would deter all but the most desperate of intruders, and nothing puts them off anyway.-- xenzag, Dec 18 2018 <Obi-Wan Kenobi>
<Jedi hand gesture/>
"You don't need to see his mustelid ..."
</Obi-Wan Kenobi>-- 8th of 7, Dec 18 2018 multipass-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 19 2018 This reminds me that years ago I did successfully make a working, fake access card for my university hall of residence, out of an old bank card, tinfoil and tape. Completely pointless, as I already had a legitimate access card, but fun anyway.-- hippo, Dec 19 2018 Burgling your own property can actually be highly instructive and useful.
It can also be employed to cause great confusion and hilarity.-- 8th of 7, Dec 19 2018 .....especially if followed by arson to destroy the evidence.-- xenzag, Dec 19 2018 Yes, that's the best part ...-- 8th of 7, Dec 19 2018 Great idea.... break into your own home, then burn yourself out.-- xenzag, Dec 19 2018 Convincing evidence of the break-in is vitally important; otherwise insurance companies can be horribly suspicious and distrustful.-- 8th of 7, Dec 19 2018 When I first moved to London, I met someone who told me he never paid for bus journeys. He had a fake Oyster card and when boarding a bus, he would simply say "beep!" as he swiped the card and then found a seat. He was very confident in his vocal reproduction of the beep.
It must have been painfully obvious what he was doing. If it worked, I can only imagine that the bus driver was taking pity on him.-- mitxela, Dec 19 2018 Perhaps he was faking the fakeness of it - using a real card and paying the charges, and speaking the word "beep" to drown out the sound of the card-reader reading his card?-- pocmloc, Dec 19 2018 // It must have been painfully obvious what he was doing. //
Not necessarily; you have clearly overestimated the abilities of the front line staff that TfL recruit by a measureable margin (we suspect four to five orders of magnitude).
Years ago, when it was LT, a chimpanzee escaped from a Chimp's Tea Party at London Zoo and somehow made his way into the Managing Director's office. However, being a chimp, all he could do was bang his hands on the furniture, make loud hooting noises (he coudn't manage coherent speech), drink tea, and pick fleas off the other board members. The zoo's search for their errant wildlife was unsuccessful, no-one at LT noticed, and the chimp retired after more than two decades of distinguished service with a knighthood, a fat pension, and a bunch of sinecure company directorships. Of course it's all been downhill since then, because they went back to recruiting internally. Long serving staff still refer to the era when the operation was run by an incoherent escaped chimp as "The good old days".
When Ken Livingstone was ensconsed in County Hall, he actually hired the chimp as a consultant for a few weeks, but soon let him go because of his air of "overbearing intellectual superiority".-- 8th of 7, Dec 19 2018 Parrots can learn to mimic many frequently-heard domestic sounds; microwave ovens, smoke alarms, telephones.
It's possible - but unlikely - that a TfL driver might notice a passenger swiping a live parrot against the card reader.
A dead parrot, however ...-- 8th of 7, Dec 19 2018 random, halfbakery