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johansch

Here's a week-old story from the national broadcaster ORF:

http://kaernten.orf.at/news/stories/2821290/

Regarding the "locked in" issue; this article doesn't say anything like that:

"Die Gäste kamen nicht mehr in die Hotelzimmer, neue Schlüssel konnten nicht mehr programmiert werden."

"The guests could no longer enter their hotel rooms, new keys could no longer be programmed."

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The German in the article is fairly ambiguous. Interestingly it could even be interpreted as simply that arriving hotel guests could not get into their rooms because new keys could not be programmed. In that case guest who already had keys would be fine. The bigger problem seems to have been that all their IT systems including reservations were down.

I don't think it's ambiguous. In any case, it cannot be read as "people are locked into their hotel rooms".

(Which doesn't work with any electronic hotel door lock I've seen so far anyway)

I was wondering about that. In the US a system that could prevent guests from leaving during a fire or medical emergency would never be allowed, and I can't imagine Germany is much different.

This is Austria, not Germany. Better don't confuse these two countries if you are in one of them. :-)

Though the laws are surely quite similar.

In general you'd also want the possibility of gaining entrance quickly, even if the latter might require use of a fire axe or something (typically emergency keys, though).

Both for evacuation in case of fire (a guest might be unconscious in a room) or in the case of a medical emergency (a guest might call down and complain about chest pain, and pass out before opening the door).

Piling on to the misreported news, are the door locks themselves actually network devices? I was under the impression that the door locks were static devices and the key cards were reprogrammed to say "let me into this room".

Can a malicious agent actually prevent previously working key cards from working (during the guest's stay - I know there is a time limit encoded on the key cards) or just prevent new cards from being programmed?

I don't think this can be the case - what if you lose a key card/have it taken from you: In order to deactivate it you'd need to somehow tell the lock that that card is not valid anymore.

I have had that happen to me, and at least in that instance nobody had to come and reprogram the lock.

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