Most people rely on keys because you can’t use it or duplicate it if you don’t have it, but a team of computer scientists from UC San Diego have developed a sneaky software that will be able to break a key’s code using a photo. Each common key (not the modern key with asimetric sides) is basically a numeric code, represented by the height of the bumps. The software, actually called “Sneaky” does just that : finds the numeric code. Then a locksmith can build a copy of your key.

In one demonstration of this software photos from a cell phone were used and in another, a high resolution camera took pictures from a roof of a key 60 meters away. Both methods produced identical copies of the original keys.

Stefan Savage, the man that led the student-run project, is a computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. Their intentions were to make the genera public aware of this threat. There are many people who even post photos with some keys in the background online without knowing that that picture is a big threat to their security, and this is what this project is intended to do : prevent people from making this kind of mistakes in the future.

The software works by requesting 3 user-defined points in space as control points for the three dimensions. This is a technique broadly used in computer vision. Benjamin Laxton, the man who wrote the code (which was not released to the public) explains : “The program is simple. You only need to click a few control points in the image of the key and the ‘Sneakey’ program does the rest. It normalizes the key’s size and position so that each pixel then corresponds to a known distance. From this information, the height of each of the key cuts can easily be computed and likewise the bitting code can be extracted,”

Some might say that burglars are not scientists, but Laxton adds that a man with basic knowledge of Mathlab and computer vision techniques can build a similar system that can be used for copying your keys without knowing.

More and more companies produce keys with electromagnetic secrets as well as a physical code, but classical keys are still used in more than 95 percent of the locks, so you might consider keeping your keys out of sight in the future.

If we stick to this definition, we can say that military robots have been around ever since World War II and the Cold War trough the presence of the German Goliath Track Mine and the Soviet Teletank. But both these robots were simple and made little impact on the war.

It was not until a few years ago (starting with the Second Iraq War) that military robots really started to be important in a conflict, and with the technology developing rapidly since, it’s not a wonder that more and more defense contractors around the world are working hard at developing autonomous “robot soldiers”. It’s true that these robots look nothing like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie “Terminator”, but they seem to be very useful with their tank-like appearance.

“When the military says ‘robot’ they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots,” says Bill Smart, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the Washington University in St. Louis.

As appealing a robot that thinks for its own may be, the army intends to keep human involved. This both because there is no artificial intelligence system that can operate in an armed conflict and the fact that the army states it’s better to have a human being taking the decisions than a computer. That does not mean that having a human to operate the robot using a joystick and a computer screen is a set back. In fact, it’s great that even tough the robot is attacked, the army loses only the machine while the person controlling it is safe at the base.

“It’s a chain of command thing. You don’t want to give autonomy to a weapons delivery system. You want to have a human hit the button,” says Smart. “You don’t want the robot to make the wrong decision. You want to have a human to make all of the important decisions.”

The research team at Washington University in St. Louis intends to make a robot carry individual tasks without human control, just like a Sims character. You tell your Sim what to do, you don’t control him doing it. This is exactly what the research team is trying to do. While the robot is carrying out an order, the person controlling can carry out an order on another robot or do another task, making this both resource intelligent and time saving.

Even tough, the robots will not replace human soldiers, they will most likely be the firsts to do scouting operations or be the first row of the battle line. Today, the MQ-1 Predator is the best robot the world has to offer. The Mq-1 Predator aircraft systems is built for unmanned reconnaissance and can even fire two AGM-114 Hellfire Missiles.

It seems that humans will not be replaced by robots, but instead the robots will make the next conflicts safer for the armies that control this technology best.