Safecracking for fun and possible profit

We were given a small rolling safe some years ago that I've tried several times (unsuccessfully) to crack.  The combination had been lost, and the owner had moved to Alaska leaving no forwarding address and dropped off the face of the planet.  The only condition was, "If you get it open and there's any personal-looking papers in there, please send them back to me.  Anything else in there is yours."

Wonder if I could rent one of these automated safecracking machines for an hour or so?

I suppose one of these days we'll have to call a locksmith and say, "Hi, open this for us, please."

From AusCERT via Bruce Schneier: Another reason not to use Symantec

...Or McAfee or Trend Micro, actually.  You see, AusCERT has discovered, and reported, that "Antivirus applications from Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro -- the three leading AV vendors in 2005 -- are far less likely to detect new viruses and Trojans than the least popular brands."

This, they go on to say, does not represent any issues of code quality or update times, but that "malware authors are specifically testing their Trojans and viruses to make sure they can bypass these applications before releasing them in the wild."

"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.

Ingram mentioned -- and recommended -- the Russian-made Kaspersky Labs antivirus, which achieved a 90% block rate in AusCERT's tests.  I find myself curious to know whether their test included AVG antivirus, which hails from Germany.  Unfortunately, the article doesn't include, or link to, the full study results.