🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <433@kaiser.UUCP>, tla@kaiser.UUCP (T Anderson) writes:
> The ones I have seen are, I believe, entirely mechanical.  That
> is why you see no wires.

There are at least 4 different types of card locks I've seen in
hotels.  The first (Sheraton Andover) has a rigid plastic card
that is inserted in a slot on the wall near the door.  The second
has a flimsy card, shiny on one side with small holes in it.  It
is inserted into a slot over the door knob that has two LED's on
it.  Note these locks are powered by batteries and the combinations
are stored in a ram as an aquaintence of mine at a convention took
one apart to see how it worked and removed the battery and caused
it to forget.  The way the combination is changed is that it has
a sequence of cards in its memory and the lock cycles through to
the next one when the it is inserted and locks out the old card.

The third (many Hiltons including the Vista international in NY)
has a card that is two pieces of cardboard folded over a sheet of
foil with holes punched in it.  This one failed on me once and the
manager came up with a cute little device that looked like a calculator
with a cord with a plastic version of the card on it that he inserted
into the lock to revitalize it.

All of the above are certain electrically activated.

The fourth type has a small plastic oval widget that you stick into
a slot in the knob itself (Baltimore Hilton).  I don't know about
this one, for all I know it could be magnetic like the cute little
magnetic mag-wheel locks I've seen.

The problem with most of these is they are only slightly easier to
deal with than keys.  The maids still have master keys and some of
my less reputable aquaintences managed to trace the maids card while
she wasn't looking and manufacture their own with an exacto knife.

Other silly hotel locks include a totally mechanical but changeable
lock that invoves a key with ten binary cuts.  (Sheraton Tara in
Framingham and the Washington Plaza among others).  Some hotels not
only never seem to change the keying (it is changed by inserting the
old key, a change key, and the new key in seconds), but didn't even
randomly assign the codes to begin with.  Noting that our adjoining
rooms and near identical bit patterns (they were consecutive binary
numbers), I counted the number of rooms per floor and noticed that
they had just started keying at code 101 for the first room on the
first floor and worked their way up the building.

-Ron