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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Are hotel room locks really that big a target? If you're in the room, set the deadbolt. When you leave, take your valuables.

The easiest way into a hotel room is social engineering via the housekeeping staff.

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The deadbolt doesn't do anything with this, for what it's worth. The deadbolt on Onity locks is software-controlled; that is, there's a privacy switch that's triggered when you throw the deadbolt, and it checks the value of that when you put in a card. If you use a card with the 'privacy override' flag, or you use the Portable Programmer (or my opening device), the lock opens regardless of whether or not you use the deadbolt, as it's disengaged by the lock mechanism when you turn the handle.

I think he is referring to a manually operated dead bolt or those latches at the top of the door. The locks that can only be set and unset from inside of the room.

Latches will work, but 99.9% of doors with Onity locks will only have the deadbolt inside the Onity lock, which is vulnerable to the problem I detailed above. Just something to keep in mind.

No no you're missing the point I think. Nearly every hotel room has a big old manual separate bolt set up higher and away from key based locking system. Slides open maybe 2 inches etc. Twice in my life the hotel person has given my room to someone else by mistake (I travel a lot for work). That is, I'll be in there, twice late at night, and someone else puts in a key and it works. After the first time I always set that manual bolt no matter what - just in case. Not that I think there's any real merit to the original point that kicked off this particular thread.

I think you're missing the point - Onity locks don't usually have this "big old manual separate bolt" as they're sold as "deadbolt inclusive".

It's pretty rare to not see them (can't remember when i haven't) due to the reason I list.

You mean like one of these, right? http://cache4.asset-cache.net/xc/87800053-deadbolt-lock-and-...

Does anyone actually assume hotels are secure (in a sense other than good faith) though? There are so many points for allocation errors on the cards themselves, dozens of "all-access" cards available to both internal and contracted staff, and different people in every room most nights (e.g. no neighbour familiarity about an issue).

Few people assume hotels are truly secure, but generally when something goes wrong, you have an accurate audit trail. That is, if someone breaks into room 413 using a legitimate card, I can go back and say "ok, Michael was the one who encoded this card for him, after the guest had already checked in". You can't do that with the opening device.

Most hotels have the a) long skinny security latches (i.e. http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=16874026) - those are specifically used so they can be opened by hotel staff using a special tool (http://www.nathosp.com/product/sl2/hotel_room_door_locks_and...) the deadbolt is typically controlled by the electronic lock and can be overridden.

> When you leave, take your valuables.

So I'm in a foreign land, and I should carry around all my worldly possessions with me?

How is that safer?

(Why can't the hotel provide a lock that works?)

Leave them in the hotel safe (many will give you one in your room) if you prefer. It just doesn't seem worth the hotel putting serious effort into the lock on the room door, because that's always going to be insecure, if only because the minimum-wage cleaning staff need access to all the rooms.

What's the point of mentioning minimum-wage here? Would your logic change if the staff weren't paid minimum wage? If you are staying at a hotel were the staff was paid above minimum wage, would you feel more secure?

The BLS says that the median wage for "Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners" is $9.32. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Obviously then, most are not paid minimum wage.

In any case, people also want a long-term job. An aspect of keycard entry is that you have a record of what people entered the room. If only one person entered when something was stolen, then that person is a definite suspect, and may be fired. But if it's possible to circumvent that security, then it's also possible to frame others.

>If you are staying at a hotel were the staff was paid above minimum wage, would you feel more secure?

Yes. Seriously, is that even a question? Wouldn't you?

Higher wages mean two things: the staff have more to lose by being fired, and by implication the hotel puts more effort into its staff. Which means they're probably recruiting more carefully and putting more effort into staff loyalty once they're there.

Then my point is that most hotel cleaning staff is paid more than minimum wage, so the scenario of the minimum wage staff is the uncommon scenario.

I don't think wages affect honesty to any great extent, no. I think bad working conditions affect honesty a lot more.

If you believe this to be true, do you ask the hotel how much they pay their cleaning staff, and choose the one with higher base pay? How much more are you willing to pay to be in a hotel which pays their employees a higher wage?

Higher wages mean other things than those two. It could mean that it's harder to get staff because there is better employment elsewhere, so there's less risk to being fired for suspicion of theft because it's not hard to find a new job. It could be because the union is strong and able to negotiate better than management, while management actively wants to break the union by treating their cleaning staff poorly in the hopes that the staff will steal, so management has reason to fire them and blame the union for protecting thieves.

(Yes, the latter sound much less likely than the former.)

>I don't think wages affect honesty to any great extent, no. I think bad working conditions affect honesty a lot more.

Sure, but the two are closely correlated.

>do you ask the hotel how much they pay their cleaning staff, and choose the one with higher base pay? How much more are you willing to pay to be in a hotel which pays their employees a higher wage?

I'd be surprised if they handed that information out, and it's not worth a great deal of research. But if I do happen to know then it changes how much I'm willing to pay for a given hotel, yes. I haven't calculated every facet of my internal hotel-pricing model (and it's almost certainly nonoptimal in some way - just not worth the effort to optimize), but I've certainly been known to pay more for a hotel I had a better impression of that, and on the (IIRC unique) occasion when I happened to know what the cleaners at one were paid I'm pretty sure that was one of the factors.

If people started asking, and making decisions based on that knowledge, then perhaps salaries and working conditions would improve for the cleaners. But you are right, people (including myself) use other proxies instead.

People have posted many videos/blog posts about how easy it is to open a hotel safe if the hotel fails to reset the factory code: http://www.dailydot.com/news/hotel-safe-security-flaw/

Since seeing this video last year, I have yet to find a hotel safe the I can open with all zeros. In the end, I figure that if someone really wants to steal my stuff, they'll eventually find a way.

I can't fit all of my valuables in a hotel safe.

If the hotel wants to fit a lock that doesn't prevent easy access to my room, and my stuff gets stolen, they can meet my lawyer.

I think you assume that the room safe is harder to break than the lock. Is this true?

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