Can confirm.
Got into a lock hacking interest as a kid. I’m ashamed to admit it, but one of my favorite things was to go to bike racks and steal the locks.
(So if you got your lock stolen in South Weber, Utah in about 1985, I’m sorry.)
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Sometimes the lock makes the thing interesting. I remember breaking into friends’ computers when they were making a show about securing them, while neglecting the unsecured or poorly secured ones. Make a show of saving the file in question only on the floppy? That’s like asking me to pull its content out of the swap file. (Nicely ask me to not look and I won’t. But this was an open provocation.) And so on…
The only cases I’ve heard of with valet parking and actual burglaries, as opposed to hypothetical ones, were ones where the valets checked the address on the registration in the glove box of any luxury cars they parked, phoned their partners, and the partners went and broke in the old-fashioned way, with brute force.
In other words, the valuable thing isn’t the key at all, but the knowledge that the people at a given address (1) are rich enough to own a luxury car, and (2) are out at a restaurant for the next couple of hours.
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Sure, that would be the case if you just gave them a spare key (or simply left your front door unlocked). But you have to give them access to your key, your address, and then they have to go to the effort of making a copy of your key. Somebody who’s going to make that level of effort would surely also have little compunction about kicking in a door (the cops informed us that it’s relatively easy here in my suburban neighbourhood, as doors rarely have reinforced frames… So even with a deadbolt it’s only a small amount of wood keeping your house safe).
[quote=“slybevel, post:41, topic:66238”] one of my favorite things was to go to bike racks and steal the locks.
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To be really evil you could have put them back on different bikes.
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Unfortunately, never thought of that. 
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Valet? lol.
You apparently missed the link I previously provided. Getting a copy of a key you have in your possession, is as simply as snapping a picture of it with the right app loaded to your smartphone.
And they hope the kids aren’t at home with a babysitter.
True, but it’s always been that easy. People were taking key impressions surreptitiously, by holding the impression wax in one palm, hundreds of years before smartphones existed. Making a key from an impression is easier than making one from a photo. And I have an old overhead projector, so I can also cut keys from photographs and webpages without a smartphone… the interesting thing about the smartphone app is that you can use money, instead of knowledge to accomplish the task. The “script kiddy” phenomena applied to the physical world.
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Interesting! What part of the country is this?
Ever since I stopped waiting tables, it seems I’m much more likely to have some sort of screwdriver on me than minted tender.
I was thinking exactly that.
Probably shouldn’t keep your ignition key on a ring with all your others in the first place. Especially if you have enough that it’s a “problem”.
I purchased this thing and subsequently discarded it a couple weeks later. The apparently unsolvable problem is keeping the screws at the right tightness. They naturally work themselves loose when the keys are moved back and forth during normal use. Not even Gorilla Glue would hold them tight. You need to keep a dime along with it for weekly tightening. Do not use your fingernail whcih will break, sooner AND later.
A request for guidance from the company went unanswered.
CXC
P.S. Another useful feature would be a bump of some kind on one end of one of the two panels, so you could correctly orient the whole by touch in the dark.
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Needs redesign of that part of the mechanism, then.
Dremel, and make a groove.
Grooves on the top edge of the key are good for figuring out by touch which key are you operating with, too. Use the small-diameter barrel-shaped mill to make a U-shaped groove in about 45-degree angle, so it won’t compromise much of the mechanical strength nor will tend to snag on clothes.
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While you’re dremelling, put your initials on that sucker.
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You do? I love it 
Didn’t miss it at all. You still have to submit it to a locksmith. And then go to the locksmith. And then scope out the house for a couple days to make sure that they know the patterns and know when nobody will be home for long enough to efficiently burgle the place. I mean, it’s a fun “OMG this is how you could be burgled in the modern age” story, but it pretty much falls into the same category as “Pedophiles could be watching your baby sleep on the video baby monitor!!!” shock stories in the news. Yes, theoretically this is indeed possible, but I can’t imagine any criminal actually bothering. It is a hell of a lot of work required, and on top of that when there is no signs of forced entry, the first thing that would come to mind is “Who has a key, or has had access to a key, any time lately? Oh yeah, the guys at the carwash had my keys.” Whereas a door kicked in could have been ANY random criminal.
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There are apps that handle routing the key codes to a locksmith, who will mail or deliver the key to you. A couple of Watchtower pamphlets in your hand, is all the cover you need to just go up and ring the bell. A clever criminal will steal things that won’t be immediately noticed, like select pieces of jewelry. People may not know they’ve been burgled until weeks or months later. Leave no prints,and there’s no case against you.
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