Why don't you rent your electronic wireless doorlock, asks man selling doorlocks We should rent our Nest thermostats, Sonos speakers and August smartlocks, according to Jason Johnson, the CEO of internet-of-doorlocks upstart August. Speaking at the Collision conference in Las Vegas earlier today, Johnson bemoaned how difficult it was to get smart tech into the home and challenged the industry to come up …
" Will you come take it out of the door? Or will you try to lock me out of my own house?"
The answer is easy. Put yourself in the position of the "lock provider". It is expensive and difficult to physically take the lock out. It's a press of a button (assuming you don't automate that) to lock 'em out.
Sign up to any cloud data storage service and see how it works if you card payment gets skipped.
I'm not sure what this guy's smoking, but it must be powerful stuff.
Yeah, for *some* car owners. However, remote locking has been a near-standard feature on vehicles for over a decade, and so I stand by my statement that consumers are used to it, and appreciate its benefits.
A poor implementation doesn't discredit the concept, especially when there is a history of it being implemented successfully.
I have a remote lock on my car (unsurprisingly) - but the key also works.
The remote lock doesn't because the battery has run out of juice. I've not bothered to put a new one in because the key also works.
And here's the thing: It's not a major inconvenience to have to put the key in the lock to unlock it - because if I need to unlock it, I'm going to the car anyway. It's not as though I ever walk past my car and think "it'll be handy if I can unlock the car now, without going over to it."
WTF? What if I stop making payments on it? Will you come take it out of the door? Or will you try to lock me out of my own house?
Well, look at what automobile dealers are doing. They are installing remote GPS kill switches with 4G on new cars. If you miss payments, they disable your car.
there is also the possibility that if you don't pay and John Q Robber does, then somebody you don't want in your house will take it over and take what they want.
or Billy Joe Hackathon will hit the database and auction off whole cities of locks.
we have three effective technologies to secure our homes. (1) my own lock. (2) big-ass dog. (3) New Orleans Mastercards, with numbers like .38, .45, 9mm, etc.
A key is fine if you have a free hand. Place yourself in the position of someone with hands full of shopping and a small child in tow....
A lot of people are used to using remote locking systems in their cars. The peace of mind that would come from locking your house door and knowing that the gas hobs are off and the iron is off is not to underestimated.
The concept is sound. The devil, as always, is in the details of the implementation.
A key is fine if you have a free hand. Place yourself in the position of someone with hands full of shopping and a small child in tow....
Been doing that all my life. Never needed an electric remote door lock on the house. I don't need one on the car but it's standard equipment these days....
>The peace of mind that would come from locking your house door and knowing that the gas hobs are off and the iron is off is not to underestimated.
Overestimated? Making Christmas pudding... the hobs are on for hours with no ill effect and no-one keeping an eye on them. I've accidentally left soup cooking for a whole weekend. The pan had to be thrown out but there were no further ill-effects. In fact, I've never heard of an unattended hob ever causing any problems. Its usually the humans around who do dumb things. I've discovered my iron turns itself off/down after being left alone for some time.
The problem is that smart locks are worse than the manual variety. More expensive, more fragile in operation, less secure. At college we had swipe entry. Giving the swipe unit a hit on the side opened the doors without a card. Do we need to mention the latest DMCA issues? Does anyone think the IoT is a security dream? IT needs tending - no-one wants to read security advisories listings to see if their house is still reasonably secure. Look at the picture for the article - smartphone entry key? That would be the same smartphone running flappy-bird and a random "bejewelled" clone?
Smarthome aren't popular because they just make things worse. If that's your hobby and you want to devote time and money to it, then fine, but you can bet my wife is going to be seriously unimpressed if I pop down to the shops to get some ingredients for her, and the hobs with the rest of the meal cooking on them turn themselves off.
@Credas - quite: it's a solution to a problem that exists only in the minds of the marketeers... we have perfectly good, robust, understood, and well-tested solutions to such problems as:
- closing the curtains
- maintaining house temperature
- checking if the fridge has anything in it
- locking the door
- turning the lights on and off
and many other delightful non-problems. While I appreciate, and indeed applaud, the design and the technology that allows us to play games with coloured lights or remotely access the fridge interior, that's all they are: games.
"The problem they have is that they're trying to flog a solution to a problem that hardly anybody thinks they have. And an expensive solution, at that."
Whilst I think you are correct, I can't help but think about televisions and the importance of renting in their success. TVs were a solution to a problem hardly anyone thought they had. They were expensive and complex pieces of kit which, certainly at the beginning, were barely fit for purpose. That they are ubiquitous these days has a lot to do with rental companies that would let you have reasonably up-to-date tech for not a lot of money*. This meant there was a steady turnover of TV/DVRs which probably drove development, at least to some extent. There may well be something in the rental idea for new house tech, though I won't be adopting it for some time, if at all.
*If I remember correctly, my parents didn't own the TV in our/their house until well into the 1980s. Once every two or three years the old one would be taken away, and a new one installed. Our first two DVRs were certainly rented, and I think the only reason mum and dad went for purchase was because the rental company they used went out of business.
The problem is that smart locks are worse than the manual variety. More expensive, more fragile in operation, less secure. ... Does anyone think the IoT is a security dream? IT needs tending - no-one wants to read security advisories listings to see if their house is still reasonably secure. Look at the picture for the article - smartphone entry key? That would be the same smartphone running flappy-bird and a random "bejewelled" clone?
Smarthome aren't popular because they just make things worse.
This has been my argument against "smart" homes for the past 15 years. Inexplicably, suppliers think it's a matter of price and not security. I wonder what kind of insurance these electronic lock vendors provide - if any?
>using remote locking systems in their cars - How many of the newer ones are garbage security?
The newer ones attempt to do more, and are poorly implemented. However, the Rolling Codes remote locking system has been near-standard in cars for over a decade.
> Surely the smartlock would require access by nfc token/phone or by a command prompt from a phone - requiring a command to be input by the screen?... so hands free is still not an option.
An NFC tag doesn't require the user to insert it into a lock, just have it in proximity - this is demonstrably an easier action to perform. Think of users with arthritis, for example.
"Think of users with arthritis, for example."
This is becoming an issue for me, as rheumatoid arthritis is starting to make life tricky. However, as long as I can manage by making sure the doors fit properly and the locks operate smoothly (oh, and make sure I don't have Yale locks fitted), I'll be okay. I'll also look at the existing options before turning to dodgy electronic solutions.
OMG, how on Earth do we get from the car to the house if we are carrying a bag of groceries, a laptop bag/briefcase while having 1-2 kids in tow!!
All I can say is that my parents must have been human octopi or something, because I don't remember having to spend many nights huddled on the front doorstep because my folks could only deal with a bag of groceries in one hand and a housekey in the other.
(Or perhaps they did something remotely clever, like hand me the bag of groceries or briefcase, while they got the other bag and their housekey, all the while telling my little brother to "follow us" to the front door.)
A key is fine if you have a free hand. Place yourself in the position of someone with hands full of shopping and a small child in tow....
My God how have we all coped until now?!?
Seriously dude, come on. You're suggesting the smart lock would be entirely hands free? So it would have to be paired with a fob or your phone presumably. What kind of proximity are we talking about? Anything much above NFC range is inherently insecure. You could be around the corner from your house and the doors unlock, potentially letting anyone in.
Pairing to a fob or phone or whatever with sufficiently low proximity requirements to not invalidate your insurance, means you still need a free hand to wave your fob or phone or whatever near the lock.
And what if the battery in your paired thing goes flat? Locked out? Bypass code? Multiple singular access vectors reduce overall security.
No thanks mate. I'll live with the 3 seconds of inconvenience associated with a simple key.
My answers to your concerns would be:
- The door would only unlock when you're close or when you press a button on the door handle.
- You would carry a fob with a key in it as a back-up.
I suggest this based on my experience of having 2 cars with smart keys.
I also have a real lock with a real key which is now a bugger to get the key in properly, requiring a bunch of pushing and jiggling up and down.
You missed out - they know where you live because you had to give your real address before you could register the lock and have it work.
And all that information is sat in a database that, judging from past events, was built by someone for whom secuity is something someone else bolts on afterwards.
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Are these the same smartlocks the DMCA injunction relates to?
Security bods gagged using DMCA on eve of wireless key vuln reveal
I'm very much into home automation, but I won't touch any of the devices he mentions -- Nest, his door locks, etc. -- because I don't trust them. To get the benefits from them, they require connection to a cloud or server that I don't have control over. As long as they send any data about me or my usage of the devices to someone else, I won't be using them.
> they require connection to a cloud or server that I don't have control over. As long as they send any data about me or my usage of the devices to someone else, I won't be using them.
Tin foil hattery! If your home uses utilities such as water, gas and electricity then your provider already has data about you and your usage.
Not really.
My home uses water, gas and electricity. I'd be quite impressed if, with the installed hardware they could even tell when I got home of an evening.
Old-fashioned spinning-disk electricity meter connected to a phase shared with every third house on my street. Gas on a mechanical tick-over meter, again shared with the street. Water on no meter whatsoever, again shared with the street.
I'm sure if they wanted to they could cut me off temporarily, slap some specific monitoring device further up the line, just to collect that data but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be worth the effort. That's why the electricity companies want to put a smart meter in your house but, pretty much, want someone else to pay for it.
Total usage, maybe, but for the last two years I've been the one sending the electricity/gas companies the numbers from my meter cupboard, and my water is metered based on house size from what I understand.
And even with a smart meter, the usage pattern of a standard daily peak in usage tells you pretty much nothing of what's actually happening in a home compared to - say - sniffing the packets of when you actually, physically unlock a door live via a cloud server.
Three totally different levels of information.
> Three totally different levels of information.
I quite agree there is a difference in the granularity of the information - but information is, nevertheless, gathered currently and my comment was made in response to OP's concern regarding the sharing of any information.
I got the numbers rong last time I tried. Wish me luck.
Pay up front: $830.
Pay monthly: the suppliers have their $850 after 17 months, and then you carry on paying them $50/month.
No wonder the suppliers like the concept.
Mind you, this is how Pipex kickstarted the UK mass market broadband scene almost a decade and a half ago. Hide the upfront installation costs in the monthly rental, and then carry on charging the same amount after the upfront costs are paid off. It worked back then.
Not convinced it would work today. See e.g. SIM only phone deals. People have wised up.
Yeh, this shit is jacked up, WAY UP. So on your 17th month, you can exchange the locks for new ones, but why? If the old ones are no longer secure, then clearly they either A. Should never of been made/sold. Or B. You're in the middle of a scam. In all honesty Rent-To-Own bullshit is a cheaper option, which makes this look laughable.
Also, I see no mention of what happens when the lock is hacked. Can I sue them for the breach, or are they just selling the illusion of security?
Even most British Standard, home-insurance-compatible physical locks can be defeated in a matter of seconds if you've any kind of practice at that (e.g. a bunch of old locks in your bit-box and a quick Google search).
Electronic locks are slightly better in some regards - if nothing else they often combine "lock" and "door open / tamper alarm" in the same product, and if they are all cloudy, they could actually tell you if someone had bypassed them, or even just fooled them into opening.
I don't use electronic door locks in my house, but in some workplaces etc. they are much more common than key-locks. I have one on my garden gate, but that only gets you into the side-alley. It's probably quicker to jump the gate than piss about with that lock, especially as it alarms.
But the main reason I wouldn't rent access control is exactly why the manufacturer's would want it - once I've "paid" for the hardware, they are just making pure profit from me for little to no service. Hell, maintenance contracts for access controls systems I manage in work are severely cut down every time we look at them as, unless something goes wrong or someone breaks in, we are just losing money on them. And when something does go wrong, the cost of it is the least of our worries at that point anyway, and doesn't come near the annual average cost of the maintenance.
Monthly payments - no. Do not want. I don't want to rent my life, thanks. That applies for everything from software-licences to houses.
"Is this lock at least as usable as a physical lock if the power (or data connection?) goes?"
As I undersatnd it, this lock replaces the inside lock knob. You still have a key hole available on the outside (for backup). On the inside, this lock can be actuated by physically turning the lock/unlock ring or remotely with a Bluetooth app. So it is exactly as secure or insecure as the pin and tumbler cylinder that you select for the outside.
Security is still a question seeing as how some automobile RFIF locks are somewhat less than secure.
Yep, the physical key can still be used as backup - just as with most cars.
Curious observation: US tech blogs often occasionally feature stories about high-end physical locks being defeated by Biro-lids or paper clips... or how the physical key can be recreated from a photograph of it.
No lock is perfect - I've seen combination locks on doors with what is widely knows as Shiny Button Syndrome, the buttons used to enter the code having become shiny through use. SBS makes it clear to an intruder that they only have to try 16 combinations instead of 1000 (given the code is four digits long)
SBS makes it clear to an intruder that they only have to try 16 combinations instead of 1000 (given the code is four digits long)
Assuming a 0-9 decimal keypad and a four digit combination that is 0000 to 9999 which to even my distracted brain is 10000 possible combinations.
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."
...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
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