Lock (security device)

A lock is a mechanical or electronic fastening device that is released by a physical object (such as a key, keycard, fingerprint, RFID card, security token etc.), by supplying secret information (such as a keycode or password), or by a combination thereof.

History

Antiquity

The earliest known lock and key device was discovered in the ruins of Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria. Locks such as this were later developed into the Egyptian wooden pin lock, which consisted of a bolt, door fixture, and key. When the key was inserted, pins within the fixture were lifted out of drilled holes within the bolt, allowing it to move. When the key was removed, the pins fell part-way into the bolt, preventing movement.

The warded lock was also present from antiquity and remains the most recognizable lock and key design in the Western world. The first all-metal locks appeared between the years 870 and 900, and are attributed to the English craftsmen. It is also said that the key was invented by Theodore of Samos in the 6th century BC.

Locksmith (comics)

The Locksmith is a fictional character in Marvel Comics.

Publication history

The Locksmith appeared in Spider-Woman #50 (June 1983), and was created by Ann Nocenti and Brian Postman.

Fictional character biography

The Locksmith was a lock designer and escape artist who believed that the feats of super-powered beings have overshadowed the achievements of ordinary humans. For this reason, he captured super-powered beings in San Francisco and imprisoned them within specially designed cells.

The mutant Tick-Tock assisted the Locksmith in capturing various super-heroes and villains and keeping them in the Locksmith's prisons. Among their captives was Tigra, Poltergeist, Angar the Screamer, Flying Tiger, Gypsy Moth, Killer Shrike, Needle, Tatterdemalion, the Werewolf, Daddy Longlegs, Nekra, The Enforcer, Hangman and Dansen Macabre.

Locksmith and Tick-Tock eventually captured Spider-Woman herself, imprisoning her with their other captives. Tick-Tock used his power to help prevent break-outs, anticipating the prisoners' attempts before they could happen. Spider-Woman had Tigra insult Poltergeist enough to start a fight, in which they shorted out their specially designed prisons. Spider-Woman then had Gypsy Moth use her powers to swap their costumes. Tick-Tock did not foresee this change. Once placed in Gypsy Moth’s specific prison, Spider-Woman broke free and released everyone else. After everyone was free, Locksmith collapsed upon having a nervous breakdown. Gypsy Moth restrained Locksmith and Tick-Tock long enough for the authorities to collect them.

CoreOS

CoreOS is an open-source lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for providing infrastructure to clustered deployments, while focusing on automation, ease of applications deployment, security, reliability and scalability. As an operating system, CoreOS provides only the minimal functionality required for deploying applications inside software containers, together with built-in mechanisms for service discovery and configuration sharing.

CoreOS shares the foundations with Chrome OS and Chromium OS, by the means of using their common software development kit (SDK) as a base while adding new functionality and customizing it to support hardware used in servers.As of January 2015, CoreOS is actively developed, primarily by Alex Polvi, Brandon Philips and Michael Marineau, with its major features available as a stable release.

Overview

CoreOS provides no package manager as a way for distributing payload applications, requiring instead all applications to run inside their containers. Serving as a single control host, a CoreOS instance uses the underlying operating-system-level virtualization features of the Linux kernel to create and configure multiple containers that perform as isolated Linux systems. That way, resource partitioning between containers is performed through multiple isolated userspace instances, instead of using a hypervisor and providing full-fledged virtual machines. This approach relies on the Linux kernel's cgroups functionality, which provides namespace isolation and abilities to limit, account and isolate resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.) for the collections of processes.