Key-cutting machine borked sideways after visit from the BSOD fairy locks things down A return to the hue of blue today, with a cautionary tale of keeping your keys safe and sound when Windows is around. This latest example of Microsoft's finest being poorly in the wild was spotted by Register reader Adam Isherwood during that most British of undertakings – a weekend trip to his local purveyor of DIY products …
Poor choice of words but presumably inside this kiosk is a CNC that grasps a blank and then mills out the grooves. Even in cheapo CNCs from Aliexpress the motors can move each axis within 0.1mm precision so there is no reason to think this kiosk would be any worse, and would be well within the tolerances of typical locks.
e.g. A Yale style lock has 7 pins, each cut to 7 potential heights that vary by 0.025 inch / 0.635mm increments. The corresponding key has 7 grooves that when inserted allows the pins to align and allow the lock to be turned.
So 0.1mm would be nothing at all and well within the tolerances that a lock would cope with.
Well, yes, my point was largely about the vagueness of the language. As an aside, most of the pin-tumbler locks I see use 6 pins. The spare I got cut (by a human) for my front door actually only works if you jiggle it a bit... I think it's a combination of heavy wear on both the lock and key (it's a communal door for three separate dwellings), followed by inaccurate cutting. I maintain that, depending on the quality/age/wear of the lock, 0.25mm could be enough to at least make it need a jiggle...
The accuracy is a function of the machine capabilities and the wear on the cutting blade. The most common reason for low quality in cheap CNC'd parts is that the manufacturer will keep working with a worn cutting blade instead of replacing it more frequently. This saves money, but definitely affects precision.
"Even a ¼ of a millimetre out will quite easily stop a key from working."
The keyway can be even less, but if you look at the key types the machine supports, it appears the keyways are prefab.
Prefabs... scanner... I have to assume they're looking to create their own keycode software. What is kind of nice about this method is that if they can OCR the key blank and number, they could use the saved scans to help validate other commercial keycode software. That might sound needless, but there is quite a few confused entries when it comes to identifying the correct series when a keyway is shared ie. Y11 == IN8 == HK4. Worse, "HON", "MEDECO" and old "CHICAGO" are examples where that confusion can cut both ways.
Maybe there are magic fairies and a big mouse wheel inside the kiosk, and none of this technology stuff.....
When i see borked things like this in a public place, I always wonder why none of the many sales droids and other employees, or god forbid, the store manager hasn't tried switching it off and back on again. It's on a 3 pin plug for goodness sakes, and makes the whole store look so amateurish.
Maybe this is the result of switching off and on, in which case a nice bit of paper stuck to the front saying o-o-o would be better than just a borked machine.
That's the big problem with using Windows to run machines. It's not really practical to update any but the most expensive machines out in the field, so they'll tend to run with whatever was current at installation time.
Even if there's a maintenance contract, a new Windows version 10 years after installation is probably going to involve replacing the hardware./ You're not going to just install an update CD on something with machine control systems. So you essentially limit the machine's lifetime to the life of a Windows release.
Both good points, thank you. For key designs once a year, I could imagine annual visits with a USB drive (access locked, of course). I'd rather do that than deal with an always-on connection. But the need to connect to the outside world when a credit card is presented is more difficult to work around.
"When i see borked things like this in a public place, I always wonder why none of the many sales droids and other employees, or god forbid, the store manager hasn't tried switching it off and back on again."
It may not be owned by the shop it's located in. It's not unusual for vending machines to be operated by a franchise and they rent space or pay a proportion of profits/turnover for the right to locate it there.
Could be part of the 'not my job/above my paygrade' syndrome or possibly simply strict rules that the device can only be 'sorted' by the contracted techie.
I've had to sort out various equipment over time that was 'fixed' by the old turn 'er off and back on again but, depending on who and what determines the rules, some places come down hard on folks who do it if not 'qualified' (for various definitions of the word).
Strange world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There's one in my local supermarket and I've been pondering it.
I've two £1 keys to my flat door, but the door to the tenement costs £15 and you need permission to cut one (they are engraved 'Security Key'). I'd like to give it a go but I don't want locked out during lockdown.
Back when I worked for the local electric utility, we had a single key that fit literally hundreds of substation and right-of-way gate padlocks. All marked "Do Not Duplicate". These were so popular for hunters and off roaders who wanted to get through various gates that a few hardware stores were rumored to have a stack of pre-cut copies that they'd sell under the table.
"you need permission to cut one (they are engraved 'Security Key')."
So what? Take it to your local locksmith and tell 'em your Wife/daughter needs a copy. He'll be happy to cut you a key because it's YOUR security that's at issue, nobody else's. That's if he even bothers to comment on the label in the first place, which he probably won't.
I have eight keys that are similarly labeled. My Wife has a copy of all of them, the foreman has copies of half of them, and the field hands all have a copy of two of them.
This makes for a novel security compromise.
Make sure the key profiles are uploaded to the cloud (eg telemetry, hacking, whatever), and also some fairly workable ID for the customer (bank card, mobile #).
Should be able to work out their home address from the ID, and cut keys for it from the profile.
I wonder if some design genius placed the electronic guts directly under the cutting apparatus. That'll duff your hardware for you.
Back in the 70's a certain northern uni issued "do not duplicate" keys to all the residence hall rooms, but somebody forgot to make sure that Woolies didn't install a key cutting machine that just happened to be of the right type.
It's the same phenomenon that also sees, for example, ATMs and voting machines rolled out with Windows. I can see that a PC-architecture board might be a cost-effective way of putting brains in a device, but the choice of putting WIndows on it is disfunctional.
I can only assume that today's "software developers" have had a career, or perhaps a childhood, of tinkering and developing on Windows PCs, and know no other way. A couple of generations back to my time, and kids were writing software on platforms with minimal or no operating systems, and when they grew up they would have realised that for a kiosk application, you definitely do not want to put a general-purpose, desktop operating system on it.
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