11.27.12
The Purpose Driven Life
Some hackers, a special few — not all, are determined to push the outermost boundaries of innovation. So they busied themselves with the task of breaking into hotel rooms.
Now, at last, having definitively proven they can defeat the locks on posh hotel room doors, who knows what technological mileposts will be passed next? Whooosh! Feel the relentless wind of progress blowing dust and dog dirt in your face!
September brought a series of mysterious break-ins to the Hyatt House Galleria in Houston, Texas. In the latest, a 66-year-old woman’s laptop was stolen from her room, and the lock’s records showed that no key, be it the woman’s, the maid’s, or a duplicate, had been used.
Police told NBC News that they arrested Matthew Allen Cook on Oct. 31, after the stolen laptop showed up at a pawn shop …
The lock in question is from Onity, a major supplier of electronic and keycard locks for hotels like the Hyatt. Cody Brocious, a software engineer at Mozilla and hobbyist hacker, demonstrated a vulnerability in many of their locks in July, afterwards showing a refined technique onstage at the Black Hat hacker conference.
Brocious, news articles say, sold his digital hotel room door opening method to a locksmith training business for $20,000.
From the recent academic policy report, “US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds”, page 8:
Attention in the past decade has focused not on labor-saving innovation, but rather on a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things we could do before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages … These innovations were rapidly adopted, but they provided [only] new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours …
Sometimes not even that.