I went to Canada and all I got was this lousy punch card

Canada blows my mind. My Canadian friends tried to explain their magical blinking protected left traffic lights, and I didn’t quite get it, but I remember thinking there was some logic behind it. Today, driving in Vancouver, I came across regular blinking green traffic lights. I asked my friend about it and after five minutes of explaining, all I got was to go forward on green, I think. Metric continues to blow my mind, even though I spent some of my formative years in Europe. Google Maps automatically switches to metric if your starting position is in Canada. Nifty. Overall, the most baffling thing I have experienced in Canada is the hotel room key. The hotel is nice, but it has a dated feel to it. At one time, you can imagine that it was all very hi- tech, but parts were just never upgraded. Surprisingly, one of these parts is the hotel room key. While most hotels have chosen to go with magnetic swipe cards, this nameless hotel has kept with punch cards. No kidding. Check it out: Yes, just by posting this image, the key could probably be copied. All I could find about this on the ‘Net comes from a 1989 Usenet posting:

There used to be only one kind of Ving card lock. Now there are two kinds, as I discovered to my horror a while back while at a convention. The first and possibly “classic” version is all-mechanical, while the second is optical with an electronic controller. I did a longish article on the mechanical one back when I got to take it apart, which I will send to anyone who asks, and since the time of that writing discovered a few more things about it. I believe this article was sent to this very list years ago…

I love stuff like this. These things were spoken about on a security list in ‘89 with horror and how they ran across them a while back and discussed them “years ago”. Not only do these things seem trivial to copy, but seeing the regular pattern in the holes seems to suggest you could easily reverse engineer the algorithm and make keys for every room in the hotel given the room number. I guess you don’t need high security in a country where people say they don’t even lock their front doors. Good times.