Hacker News Reader

Comment by baobun | Hacker News Reader

2 months notice is very short, especially considering some of these will have been deployed for a decade... A year or so would have been expected.

Some of these will have their owners on the other side of the world with no way to get back in time.

Keep this in mind next time you consider depending on Assa Abloy - bummer to see them lose their ways.

View on HN

If you don't have the physical key available to you outside your house, you failed to have a backup option for the inevitable failure of the electronics.

I definitely agree with the spirit of this, but I also know a lot of non technical people who aren't as paranoid about things like this as I am (we have a keypad lock, backup keys in mounted lockboxes along with a 9v battery to power the keypad if need be), and they just expect that paying for something fairly critical like a door lock means it will either work normally, or give an indication that stuff might go sideways soon ("low battery! Replace or be locked out", for example).

I suspect stories like "I left my house without my keys on the day they shut it down to go for a walk and couldn't get back into my home." Or "I somehow locked my keys in my car, including the backup house key. Luckily my backup car key is in the house." Only to realize the lock isn't working normally and there are 100 emails warning them about this in their "updates" tab.. buried under a mountain of spam.

There will definitely be people who wind up stuck with this, especially with such short notice, and it won't necessarily be because they didn't plan. Now I'm going to go double check my lockbox.

Meh, nothing a drill with a decent bit won't fix

Unless you keep your drill inside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com