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posted by mrpg on Thursday May 09 2019, @02:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-battery dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Tenants at a property in New York City just struck a deal in what is both a wildly reasonable ask but also a crucial precedent at a time of increasing surveillance—their landlord has to give them physical keys to their building.

Five tenants in Hell’s Kitchen sued their landlord in March after the owners installed a Latch smart lock on the building last year. It is unlocked with a smartphone, and reportedly granted tenants access to the lobby, elevator, and mail room. But the group that sued their landlords saw this keyless entry as harassment, an invasion of privacy, and simply inconvenient.

“We are relieved that something as simple as entering our home is not controlled by an internet surveillance system and that because we will now have a mechanical key they will not be tracking our friends and our family,” 67-year-old tenant Charlotte Pfahl, who has lived in the building for 45 years, told the New York Post.

Source: After Smart Lock Allegedly Traps Senior in Apartment, Tenants Sue for Physical Keys and Win


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @03:22PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 09 2019, @03:22PM (#841363) Journal

    Nitpicking (no I didn't change topics)

    In the case I cited, you can (at considerable expense) have those locks retrofitted...

    Naaahhh, the approach is to just sell a higher security higher price model with pre-fitted non-ferrous components. Brass is good enough.

    Is the lock unpickable after the modification? No. That's fallacious logic.

    Strictly speaking, yes. Just because lock picking is a term that applies to key operated locks.
    E.g. opening the code lock of safe is usually named safe cracking [wikipedia.org]

    It's a physical lock, it has somewhere in it at least one tumbler, and if you can by any means move the tumbler(s) into place you have picked it.

    Wanna bet?

    Look, I'm gonna use a simple crossbar latch mechanism embedded into the door - you'll agree that a latch is a door lock. Except I'll add a minor modification: to latch is kept into locked position by a hydraulic piston that's inaccessible to the hardened side.
    If you wanna open from inside, you just rotate a ball valve which allows the hydraulic oil to flow into a small reservoir and you can open the latch by pulling the inside lever.

    On the outside/hardened side, you have the digital pad to enter your code - if accepted, a battery operated circuit opens the valve. If not, the valve remains closed and the force you need to apply against the hydraulic pressure is higher than the break point of the outside lever of the latch.

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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:02PM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:02PM (#841374) Journal
    "Naaahhh, the approach is to just sell a higher security higher price model with pre-fitted non-ferrous components. Brass is good enough."

    Both options are available, both are rare. Not only because of substantially increased cost of purchase, but also TCO. Because when you *need* the locksmith to gain access to it, his quickest and easiest way to access it is removed.

    But, that doesn't mean he won't be able to do the job. It will just take him a little longer. And if the locksmith can do it, then it's also possible for an adversary to do it.

    This is a fundamental paradox of security in all its forms. Anything perfectly secure would also be perfectly impossible to maintain. The first time there's a malfunction, forget it, you can't break in to fix it. Manufacturers aim to make money, and they balance the possibility of bad reviews and other fallout from less secure products against the increased support costs etc. that result when the idiot buyer inevitably locks himself out and demands they fix it. The latter turns out to be much more frequent and important than the former.

    "Strictly speaking, yes. Just because lock picking is a term that applies to key operated locks.
    E.g. opening the code lock of safe is usually named safe cracking [wikipedia.org]"

    I wasn't talking about safe cracking though, it's still quite possible it might be picked. Just because no one you or I are aware of at the moment doesn't mean no one has, and even in no one has, someone might later. It's the same situation as with the steel one, before the magnet trick got out and it was presumed unpickable. And yet it turns out to be one of the easiest locks ever made. Slap a $20 magnet on the side and what is effectively a single tumbler is picked in the blink of an eye. Extremely convenient for the locksmith, and for the idiot customer who's probably a lot more likely to lock himself out than to see an attempted burglary thwarted by the lock.

    Anyway, once you replace it with brass, the magnet doesn't work, but that doesn't mean it's unpickable. It just means we're waiting to see how it will be done.

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