I have a smart lock and tbh hate it. I’m not sure the security difference, but it’s more inconvenient than a key, takes longer, needs me to pull out my phone, open an app and then I can unlock my front door.
Unfortunately getting away from them in moderately upscale apartments is getting harder and harder.
I absolutely love my smart lock. It has auto-unlock when I arrive home after leaving the neighborhood, so I never have to use a key or a phone app. It also has a key pad, so if my phone is not on me or is dead or whatever I can still punch in a code. And I can both check the lock status AND door open status anywhere I am in the world if I have wifi or cell data. I can remotely unlock the door to let in my housekeeper if I am at the office without giving her a code. I can also lock it when she leaves.
That’s a much more fancy one than mine then. The only feature I have is remote unlocking. Nothing else you mentioned is a feature of mine, so that may make sense why I dislike them.
I’m not even able to lock my door remotely, let alone check status or if it’s open. The only way to lock the door is physically using the deadbolt from the inside, the app offers no way to do it.
Yeah, it’s not great. The door had a keyhole so when I signed the lease I was really expecting to be given a physical key to unlock the door, but they wouldn’t even give us those.
A fully featured lock might be worth it, but with the one I have now it’s not great.
If it’s internet connected it’s considered a smart lock imo. I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make.
Anything that requires the use of my phone for something that could be done just as well with a physical item is a bad product imo. I don’t read on my phone, I don’t ever want my phone to be my car key, I don’t like having smart devices in my home.
I have an august lock that has auto unlock but the Bluetooth radio is so weak it never unlocks. I usually use Siri on my watch to lock/unlock. Next place hopefully I can get one of those homekey tap to unlock ones.
I hope you didn’t pay much for your lock if you can’t even lock it with the app, that’s a huge deal breaker. I don’t remember the last time I used a key.
I live in an apartment building, so I had no choice in the lock, but also didn’t pay for it.
Never tried Siri for it, but I also have Siri disabled on my phone. The watch app is a PoS with this and doesn’t work unless you open the app on the phone too.
I’m sure there’s better options out there, and my sample does seem to be a pretty low quality one, but I just don’t really find a need for one. I’d much rather have a physical key tbh. I’ve almost been locked out because I don’t always take my phone when running the trash out and I’ve bumped the front of the lock with my back and it auto locks me out.
Based on the context, I think they would suggest going with the old school lock with a deadbolt. The more complex a device is, the more likely it is to have multiple vectors of attack.
Honestly, the lock is one of the last things to worry about. If you have an outward opening door get security pins for your hinges.
Check out one of m.youtube.com/ talk on door security and worry less about the lock and more about the door fixture. His hour long conference talks to through how a door is insecure how it can be exploited and what you can do to prevent it from happening.
Absolutely right! By far the majority of burglaries are with forced / destructive entry. Virtually all. That makes me think: if there is a “lockpicking lawyer” out there, what else lockpicking is there…?
Typically, external residential doors open inwards so that they can’t be blocked by someone on the outside. Of course this doesn’t apply if we’re talking about an internal or non-residential door.
It is region specific as in my place 2 out of 3 of my external doors open outwards. my place before that was about 50:50 for outwards or inwards opening doors.
I’m not sure. Honestly, it was mostly observation, and not straight fact. Perhaps it just more common on more recent construction. I don’t think I’ve ever been aware of an apartment or house door opening outward, except for screen doors on the outside of regular doors.
Trying to think through all doors of all places I have lived personally and I can not remember a single inward opening door in a house, cottage or apartment. I could very well be wrong but nothing comes to mind.
I have to disagree - this is more like the gate that blocks the sidewalk that you can get around by walking on the grass. The mechanical locks that these come with are significantly weaker, more common and better understood by thieves, that they wouldn’t bother even trying to figure out how to hack the smart lock.
That doesn’t invalidate their point. The electronic lock is just an additional potential point of failure with no added security. In addition to people who can pick or break the key lock, now there is an additional type of person who can break in: the kind that knows how to bypass electronic locks.
Same concept but why pick a lock when you can break a window or sliding glass door?
In other words… The attack surface is indeed larger for smart lock than dumb lock – more ways to attack – but in practice it matters little because existing home attack surface is easily breached.
PS the counter argument is smart locks come with added security controls: monitoring, logging, and the ability to auto lock in case someone forgets to lock it.
One thing people aren’t considering is that if we assume that it’s relatively trivial to bypass either a classic lock or a smart lock, only one of the two is likely to give your phone a notification that it’s been opened in your absence.
Do they have a small battery? Because it is a common practice to cut down electricity when someone intends to break in your house, even with that backup source of power I guess the lack of electricity would mean no Internet anyway.
Mine runs on 4x AA batteries, which lasts a very long time. On the order of a year. Cutting electricity would indeed prevent the notification, but a dumb lock couldn’t send one even with all the power in the world.
Plus, in a shared apartment/condo building the power is much less likely to be cut and in a freestanding home one could theoretically put their network on a UPS so any notifications would still go out.
freestanding home one could theoretically put their network on a UPS so any notifications would still go out.
I have a UPS attached to my Synology NAS, and every time the unit is triggered it sends a notification (kinda, now that I think about it, how is it sent if no power electricity 🤔) so the NAS advises me that can’t ping to Synology after several minutes, is that what you mean?
I mean that if you have a cable modem and wireless router on a UPS, your internet should stay up unless the burglar also cuts the cable (much less likely).
Ahh yeah, that was me overthinking, pretty neat simple solution I have been wanting to do that since forever, hopefully a robber won’t be the cause of me finally doing it 😅
Haha yeah, the whole thing is a risk calculation that you can take all the way down the rabbit hole. But having network on UPS has other uses too, at least.
It’s more secure as in I can’t forget to not lock the door, since it auto-locks. Also I can’t lock myself out of the house if I leave my keys inside, which I have done in the past lol. As the other nerds in here have said, it probably won’t keep you any safer against people breaking in though, but I think of it in terms of convenience.
I pick locks as a hobby. Your door lock is almost never the point of attack. It’s way easier to break the door or windows. Only time picking would be useful is if you need to conceal that you’ve entered, which burglars don’t typically care about.
Fun fact, broken windows very rarely alert neighbors to a burglary. They’re not terrible at alerting the home owner, but unless a neighbor connects a second, overtly thievish sound to the crack of broken glass, they will usually go about their day. It’s not even the bystander effect, most people just don’t know what a burglary sounds like.
I put that 3M film on all my accessible windows and doors. It takes 3-4 hits with a sledge to get through. Thieves don't come prepaired for that and even if they are, the alarm would go off on the first hit. It's also a very loud noise and an extra minute of smashing on a populated downtown street. Well worth the extra cost.
How bad some of the “secure” backup locks are or the failsafe mechanics of those or even just the software of not even cheap products are most of the time real bad and just adds more fail points.
well, what do you do if it runs out of battery? electric locks really only make sense on gates and doors in apartment blocks, where it’s okay to have it just default to open in case of failure.
They have their conveniences but I want to get this lock. It’s design makes picking next to impossible. Lpl couldn’t even get it. youtu.be/qV8QKZNFxLw?si=1WCdQCktVfGhJtsm
I think that’s the only thing I dislike about rust. Not having to use * to dereference but later having to use is tad confusing. I know it’s still clever solution but in this case I prefer c++'s straightforward consistency.
C++ does have the problem that references are not objects, which introduces many subtle issues. For example, you cannot use a type like std::vector<int&>, so that templated code will often have to invoke std::remove_reference<T> and so on. Rust opts for a more consistent data model, but then introduces auto-deref (and the Deref trait) to get about the same usability C++ has with references and operator->. Note that C++ will implicitly chain operator-> calls until a plain pointer is reached, whereas Rust will stop dereferencing once a type with a matching method/field is found. Having deep knowledge of both languages, I’m not convinced that C++ features “straightforward consistency” here…
Because she is 9 and doesn’t know how to do much of anything with a computer. So to ensure she doesn’t break anything or end up where she shouldn’t… Windows vista
to ensure she doesn’t break anything or end up where she shouldn’t…
So she uses an operating system that’s near to 2 decades old OS with years of live without any security patches whatsoever? I would say that’s rather more dangerous for her, than using an up to date operating system.
Just install an up to date os of your choice (be it Linux (Mint) or Windows) and create her an account without admin privileges and some reliable antivirus (especially on windows). If you want to be really safe you can filter her network traffic. There are countless tools for this. One of the easier ones to use is NextDNS even though it’s possible there are even better solutions.
Relax, it’s not that different from a modern computer. She not going to have it for ever anyway. She doesn’t use it for school. She does use more modern computers all the time for various things. And yes there are plenty of apps that still work on vista.
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