yale Just Another Company Being Terrible (Yale)

JamesCube · August 17, 2022

I can not express how annoyed I am at Yale. The lock company makes a lock with Z-wave built in. I thought "Great, I finally found a lock I can easily put into my smart home network" but that is where my trouble started.

A little bit of background. Like Linus and like many of you, I use home assistant with an Aeotec z-wave 7 stick as my smart home hub. I have a few other sensors, some z-wave switches and what not. Every single one of them has firmware i can grab to update them just like with any other product.

I ended up buying two locks from Yale because it was the best way for my smart home. When I connected them to my z-wave stick, they said they were on firmware 1.04, I look up to see what the latest firmware version is and on yales website it says 4.64. However, it did not have any update links on that page. I think to myself, it must be here somewhere, There is no way this company would be pulling the thing as Jasco just tried to do.

I don't find the firmware anywhere in their page or anywhere at all for that fact. I contact their customer support by email and they respond back to my emails with almost the exact same thing Jasco told Linus. (Emails attached)

I asked them similar question and get the same response of "We just don't have the firmware" I asked them Who does. "Z-wave has it, not us." I think to myself, really, the z-wave alliance has it, ok. . .

I mentioned Jasco to the person I was speaking with just to bring an example of what COULD happen when company's act like this and the response I got was "Never heard of them".

Moral of the story, at the very least until this gets fixed, we have another scummy company to cross of the list of Z-wave products.

Does anyone else have any other recommendations for a Z-wave lock that I can actually update?

manikyath · August 17, 2022

lock companies are awful in general.

Lockpickinglawyer has a presentation somewhere on the way lock companies keep making the same brutal security mistakes, yet appear more focussed on stopping the knowledge from spreading to average joe, than they are on stopping skilled thieves from working around the locks in 10 seconds.

i'm very tech minded, but in my opinion a lock is either a mechanical object, or a magnetic strike plate (with plenty of steel around it to avoid magnet attacks) that is managed by a secure central system trough non-cloneable credentials.

lieder1987 · August 17, 2022

36 minutes ago, manikyath said:

lock companies are awful in general.

Lockpickinglawyer has a presentation somewhere on the way lock companies keep making the same brutal security mistakes, yet appear more focussed on stopping the knowledge from spreading to average joe, than they are on stopping skilled thieves from working around the locks in 10 seconds.

i'm very tech minded, but in my opinion a lock is either a mechanical object, or a magnetic strike plate (with plenty of steel around it to avoid magnet attacks) that is managed by a secure central system trough non-cloneable credentials.

You get a like for just mentioning Lockpickinglawyer.

JamesCube · August 17, 2022

46 minutes ago, manikyath said:

lock companies are awful in general.

Lockpickinglawyer has a presentation somewhere on the way lock companies keep making the same brutal security mistakes, yet appear more focussed on stopping the knowledge from spreading to average joe, than they are on stopping skilled thieves from working around the locks in 10 seconds.

i'm very tech minded, but in my opinion a lock is either a mechanical object, or a magnetic strike plate (with plenty of steel around it to avoid magnet attacks) that is managed by a secure central system trough non-cloneable credentials.

I've been following Lockpickinglawyer for a bit, unfortunately I got these before I followed him.