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Comment by mkfort | Hacker News Reader

Taking a photo of your keychain is supposed to be kind of a bad idea since someone could easily cut a key from a decent quality photo. Of course I'm sure there are easier ways to break into your house but still.

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As someone who has tried cutting keys that way, its a little harder than it sounds. Doing it by hand, from a picture, is rather difficult (took around an hour to make an even close to working key), and while it should be possible to make an automatic cutting device fromt he picture, someone in the position to do that is probably very unlikely to break into your house (especially considering the effort to find out which key it is, then track you down and figure out which house is yours, then figure out when you won't be home).

As far as the site goes, the idea is interesting, but it seems rather bland to me. When I read it I thought it might be interesting to try, but by the time I got to the site I didn't want to do their missions any more.

Yeah, I'm not really the paranoid type, I just think it's funny how people will do stuff like that without a second thought. 95% of locks can probably be circumvented with a bump key.

It's pretty impressive/scary what can be achieved by application of machine vision (reconstructing shape, dimensions and correcting for angle etc.) to the problem:

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release....

Did you hear about Dutch insurance companies warning people not to post to Twitter and social networks that they are going on a vacation? Burglars are online too apparently... :-)

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