How often do people leave their keys out in the open like that? Mine are in my pocket until I am at the door (actually, most of my doors are RF or keypad, I use very few metal keys).
This is really nothing new thought if you have studied locks at all. All the common keylocks (eg: standard house locks, most vehicles, etc.) have a fixed/known set of tumblers, and a fixed/known set of pin codes. When I was more interested in physical lock mechanisms about 18 years ago I had the GM tumbler height elevations pretty well memorized, plus a good stock of blanks and templates. I could look at most GM keys, "read" the code (like 5,4,4,3,1) and then go off and make a key that would work 90% of the time. Same thing for Ford locks. It was fun to move a friends vehicle in the high school parking lot, but the novelty wore off quickly. This article seems to be the same thing, except rather than having to say something like "cool keychain, can I see it?", you have to take a high-res pic of their key from 300 feet.
Well, would you notice somebody sitting in a car 100ft away, taking a picture at the moment you put your key into the lock? A picture of a key on a table is useless anyway, since you (most likely) don't know what lock it fits with. With a van with a computer and a small key-making tool in the back, you can sit somewhere until the residents come home, take a picture and have the key made by the time the residents go out again and then you can enter without breaking anything.
Of course the camera can be hidden so that nobody would even see a guy in a van taking pictures, just a guy eating a sandwich who could push a button to take the picture unnoticed.
This is really nothing new thought if you have studied locks at all. All the common keylocks (eg: standard house locks, most vehicles, etc.) have a fixed/known set of tumblers, and a fixed/known set of pin codes. When I was more interested in physical lock mechanisms about 18 years ago I had the GM tumbler height elevations pretty well memorized, plus a good stock of blanks and templates. I could look at most GM keys, "read" the code (like 5,4,4,3,1) and then go off and make a key that would work 90% of the time. Same thing for Ford locks. It was fun to move a friends vehicle in the high school parking lot, but the novelty wore off quickly. This article seems to be the same thing, except rather than having to say something like "cool keychain, can I see it?", you have to take a high-res pic of their key from 300 feet.