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Comment by Sebguer | Hacker News Reader

Butterfly seems to be taking over everywhere. I recently moved to a new building, and they're using it, as well as every individual apartment having fob-based locks on a separate system, without any key backup. We had our first power outage a few weeks ago, and it meant I had no way of locking my door behind me. The person's described problem at least doesn't apply here, though, since the same fob works on the front door.

Additionally, the staircases were fobbed to get back in, which meant immediately after getting into the staircase, I had no way of getting back onto my floor. They pretty quickly propped all the doors open, at least, but still seems pretty awful from a trade-off perspective as a tenant. I'm sure it makes the management of keys in general a billion times easier for the building, though.

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I have a relative who works management at apartments.

The digital keys do save a huge amount of trivial resets and lock outs that are otherwise dealt with via manual labor.

Seems like it should be mandatory that the doors have either a physical backup (key) or several days of stored power.

This is really only relevant for buildings with 24/7 supers which are qualified electricians and trained in this particular product.

Very large apartment blocks.

I'd never choose to buy an apartment in one of these.

You don't buy apartments, you rent them.

speak for yourself

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/flats/london/ https://japanpropertycentral.com/real-estate-faq/apartment-b... https://tranio.com/usa/ca/apartments/

Okay, I listed examples in London, Japan and California that clearly indicate that apartments can be purchased.

This is a distinction I also grew up with, I think it's a regional thing.

Pretty sure it grew as something like, "apartment" != "apartment building", where the second is read as "(adjective) (noun)" instead of as a compound noun, and just describes the physical layout of the whole building, while just "apartment" is describing the individual units and has an implied rent-not-buy.

In my experience, it's a distinction made in suburbs, I suspect because of the influence of NIMBYs who are opposed to rental apartments existing or being built. They say it's because they're afraid it'll lower property values and attract the "wrong" kinds of people that they chose to live in suburbs to stay away from.

"Apartments" says urban sprawl, poor people and minorities, "condos" says the opposite. The first says "there goes the neighborhood" and the other implies luxury housing that raises property values.

In cities, "apartments" is generally used for rental and owned apartments.

It gets even weirder in some places. We owned a house in an HOA for awhile in Michigan that was technically a "site condominium". We owned the exclusive right to build an house on our lot and the house that the previous owners built but the HOA owned the common areas and if I recall correctly the mineral rights for our property.

Most of the US differentiates owned vs rented by using the terms condo or apartment, but the term apartment is used for both in at least Chicago and New York.

I have a condo in Chicago so there's more to it. And individually we live in "units".

Also Australia. Here I say I own my apartment. Here you can own or rent an apartment just like you can own or rent a house.

I didn't know what a "condo" was until recently. I've heard that word on american TV shows but I never knew what it meant.

Don't you say flat? And I think a condo is a flat with access to facilities?

condo is a flat that you own with common facilities.

Not sure why you are downvoted as that is the precise legal definition. In a condominium the building is community owned.

dunno, by the time i woke up i was back to neutral again...

literally from wikipedia:

> Unlike apartments which are leased by their tenants, condominium units are owned outright. Additionally, the owners of the individual units also collectively own the common areas of the property, such as corridors/hallways, walkways, laundry rooms, etc., as well as common utilities and amenities, such as the HVAC system, elevators, and so on.

you can rent a condo from the owner like any other house of course... maybe that's why i got some downvotes. but some owners renting out their condos doesn't turn it into an apartment building.

>owners renting out their condos doesn't turn it into an apartment building.

Apartment and condominium are not mutually exclusive. Condominium only refers to the way a building is owned, if most or all of the units in a condominium were rented out by their owners to 3rd parties you could reasonably call it a condominium apartment building.

We also say flat. We use "apartment" and "flat" interchangeably.

My apartment building has shared facilities, which are accessible to anyone who lives in the building, no matter if they own or rent their apartments.

If you want to see something truly scary, from the point of view of an ISP, the number of building management people installing access control system who want a static public IP for them and intend to plug them directly into the internet without any form of firewall or router in between. Same with camera systems! And keyfob systems! And "smart" management devices of all types. They have no clue whatsoever.

Modernity is making entertainment show hacker over watch tropes true. Hero approaches locked door - over comms, net runner : I’ve almost got it hacked - door pops open. It’s so amazing.

Literally this.

I've worked on some audits that included pretty featureful BMS, and no joke, some of those systems could have given real "mission impossible" capabilities to an intruder.

Disable alarms? Disable cameras? Unlock doors? All possible through a web control panel that looked like it belonged in the early 2000's with hard coded, undocumented accounts.

Hmm, but this has been the norm for customer IPv6 for years now, and the sky has not fallen yet somehow ?

Or is it not so much because IPv6 is inherently more secure, but rather because its support is still pretty bad outside of the main computers ?

Or because random house appliances are not a particularly interesting target ?

Well, I agree that NAT is not proper security, but at least it provided a second layer on top of the incompetence of your average IoT developer.

The so-called smart devices doesn't follow the standard security protocols anywhere close to computers and mobile devices.

> but this has been the norm for customer IPv6 for years now

Is it? Don't most consumer routers come with a firewall configured to block incoming IPv6 connections?

Maybe brand new ones do (?), but the ones I've used in the past few years don't seem to (they have no way to configure it).

This is in the context that those ISPs are boasting 90%+ IPv6 coverage, which makes up for tens of millions of residential customers !

Are you sure? Because these boxes typically don't provide any (good) tools for configuring their IPv4 NATs/firewalls, why would you expect them to provide tools for managing the newfangled IPv6? IPv6 support in a lot of routers is pretty lacklustre, but I've never seen one so incompetent that it doesn't at least block inbound traffic by default.

Because the ISPs at the same time do provide tools to configure them for IPv4, and they're the ones boasting about connecting « everyone » to IPv6..?

Otherwise, this is more hearsay from discussions about this on technical ISP forums, I wanted to look more into this, but I'm waiting until my ISP gives me more than a single /64, and with proper router support (so I can easily do things like host my server separate from my home network).

> Because the ISPs at the same time do provide tools to configure them for IPv4, and they're the ones boasting about connecting « everyone » to IPv6..?

My point was more "The tools they provide for IPv4 are crap, so wouldn't you expect the tools for IPv6 to be crap too?" with a side helping of "Just because they don't show you any (good) UI doesn't mean it doesn't exist". I agree that ISP-provided routers suck for both IPv4 and IPv6 configurability, maybe a bit worse for IPv6, but in my experience I've never seen one that both enables IPv6 by default and allows inbound traffic.

The consumer routers I have experience with still apply a stateful firewall to IPv6 traffic.

Host discovery in IPv6 is a harder problem due to the huge address space, whereas with IPv4 I can sweep the entire v4 address space in maybe 30-60 minutes for a port of interest.

Scanning the whole address range is difficult but due to the methods used to generate and acquire ipv6 addresses, there are methods to find assets.

https://github.com/lavalamp-/ipv666

My building has fob-based locks that are battery powered and work when the power is out, which I know because they recently replaced the batteries. Just another anecdote I wanted to contribute.

I was honestly expecting mine to be like that, and was pretty annoyed when it was just outright dead.

This doesn’t make sense… how are they running power to the door lock? I would have guessed that these devices always run on battery don’t they?

If it’s a commercial building it’s easy enough to run power through a special hinge.

For buildings with 'heavy duty' entry systems, power to a powered lock can be hooked up through a 'door loop' [1] on the secure side of the door.

Or you can put the electronic lock in the frame of the door, as an electromagnet or an electronic strike [2].

The door to a residence, personal office or hotel room might only need to open 10x per day and so can be battery powered - but the main entrance to an office building might open 1000x per day, so wired power is the right choice there.

[1] https://doorentrydirect.com/srs-460mm-door-loop-with-cable-p... [2] https://doorentrydirect.com/alpro-al151-inwardly-opening-ele...

A guy I made a website for a looong time ago sold systems like that. The system he sold had some really neat tricks to avoid needing to be connected to a network and the like.

The main entrance had the only networked badge system. What it'd do is when you entered the building it'd write an update list to your fob. When you then open any of the non-networked locks they'd grab the update list from your fob. This way things like revoking access to fobs or adding new fobs to the system would get to all the doors pretty quickly without them needing to be connected to wifi or whatnot.

Of course this also makes it feasible for the locks to run on batteries for a long time. The next trick the locks did was when you unlock a non-networked door it'd write its battery state to your fob. When next operating a networked lock it'd pass the battery state along to the main database. Hey presto you're getting low battery alerts, and there's still no always-on network slurping battery life.

In case of a power outage the reception people could let people in the main door, and all the other locks in the building would keep working as they always have.

Can’t lock your door when the power is cut? Sounds great for a rapist/robber/murderer. That is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Sorry, to be clear, it can be locked from the inside. The internal lock continues to function just fine. You just can't lock (or unlock) it from the outside.

That's equally bad. Someone can enter and hide inside your unit while you are away.

If power goes out when away the door stayed locked. Only if one has to leave their apartment when power is out does the door not lock. Same problem happens when coming home and the power is out, door wont open. Likewise not having access to phone leaves you out of your home.

This will most likely be sorted out for this use case but Im generally concerned with this rushed innovation, there’s no fallback to a basic method.

Door locks for all unit doors (places people live) are all battery based with a fail over of being locked but only to the outside. If you're inside they all open like normal doors. It's extremely obvious months a head of time when the battery is dying and nearly all systems will report this to whatever the unlock system is.The exact system determines if you're simply turning a door handle or switching a dead bolt to leave. There's no possibility of someone sneaking in or you being locked in.

Common doors, like to a lobby or a gym can possibly fail to let you inside if there is a power failure but you will never be trapped inside. Those systems are almost always paired with a FOB so you aren't locked out and often times there's a guarantee of a property manager that is on call for emergencies.

The records of when people use their keys will surely get stolen and/or sold.

If they propped all the fire-doors open, the first thing I would have done is called the fire department to report a dangerous situation.

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