OUR KEY SERVICE WORKS EVERY TIME!!
Airbnb’s preferred smart lock vendor accidentally bricks 500 door-locks
One of the most important and valuable offerings by Air-Cape Cod is our Key Service – an inexpensive way to have a real person meet your guests, show them about and give them keys.
Our personal Key Service also lets you be sure people showing up at your AirBnB are who you think they are. Your guests also know you have a local, on the ground presence in case anything goes wrong OR they have mischief in mind.
Instead of a high-touch, personal approach hosts across the country are relying on internet enabled door locks – these let hosts create unique codes so each guest can unlock the doors at their AirBnB listing.
However, as in all areas of life and business, you can’t do everything online!!
Internet enabled door locks have two serious issues:
- Technology doesn’t always work, and,
- Looking someone in the eye is a powerful deterrent to mischief.
Consider this:
Botched firmware update bricks hundreds of smart door locks. Stop me if you’ve heard this before – “Lock manufacturer sends update over internet, devices no longer work.”
Now think about that lock in your front door – you’ve got guests arriving, you are two hundred miles away and the lock doesn’t work – ( from boingboing.com article by Cory Doctorow)
The $469 LockState RemoteLock 6i is a “smart lock” that is sold to Airbnb operators through a partnership with the company, allowing Airbnb hosts to generate and expire unique, per-tenant unlock codes.
On Aug 8, Lockstate pushed an over-the-air firmware update to its products in the field, and a defect in the update bricked at least 500 locks, causing them to lock down and stay locked.
According to a letter sent by Lockstate, there is no way to unbrick the locks now; they have to be returned and replaced.
The company is asking customers to send in their affected locks so engineers could update the device with the proper software. LockState estimates that the total time to fix and return the product will be around 5 to 7 days. Customers can also choose to have the product replaced altogether, but LockState says this will take between 14 to 18 days.
The botched firmware bricked the device’s smart code access mode. Physical keys continued to work. The botched firmware was a nuisance for private home owners, but it was a disaster for Airbnb hosts, who had to scramble to get customers physical keys so they could enter their rents.
Wow. Sound familiar? Have you ever noticed that when Windows or Android are updated, things don’t work right anymore? “This app is broken. My wifi keeps disconnecting. Something changed in my email. I used to be able to …”
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