It isn't. Lost my laptop about 2 months ago and got really pissed. Screwed up my Apache config on my current computer and went into my cloud backup to find my old httpd.conf. Found old laptop was still backing up, story unravels from there.

How did you access your laptop (ssh, vnc...) ?

His files were being backed up to Blackblaze, so he just accessed his backup files. I'm guessing the Photo Booth video was also backed up, and he just downloaded it from Backblaze.

Thanks, it wasn't clear in the article as they said Bao discovered he could access some features of the machine

Erm, what? He lost his laptop two months ago, and got it back in the last few days. It says as much in the news article.