Baffling barcode-on-steroids stickers plaster the Earth QR codes are everywhere. They have completely overrun Japan and are becoming well-established in the rest of the world as well. There are plenty of convenient uses for this technology, as well as several less carefully considered uses. QR codes were created in 1994 by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave. There was a need for a …
Is some w*nker ad agency has started sticking little boxes next to the billboard at bus stops containing a QR Code, NFC tags and a ring of flashing blue LED's.
Catch them out the corner of your eye when driving and you think the plod have you in their sights. How on earth were they allowed to be deployed?
Has nothing to do with honesty.
Why *panic*? That just MAKES people suspicious. If your immediate reaction to blue lights is to think the police are behind you - okay. If this then provokes panic in you, maybe you shouldn't be a naughty boy, or maybe you should learn not to look like a drugs mule shuffling through customs holding their stomach.
There is a certain in-built human response to authority to jolt slightly in the "Who? Me?" way, and a tendency in the guilty and inexperienced to give themselves away by such over-sensitivity of the reaction (sweating, nervousness, shuffling, etc.). Don't trust the incredibly calm, either. It's a sign of professionalism and them being accustomed to a police presence.
If you panic at the sight of blue-lights, if I were a policeman, I'd probably pull you over, just to see. Most people just look, indicate, make way (usually in 1-2 foot "edge-forwards" if in traffic).
It took a cop over a mile to pull me over the other day. He looked at my car at a roundabout, followed me, then blue-lighted when we were both in the middle lane (so I waited until it was safe and pulled into the left-lane), where he then followed me and blue-lighted again (at which point I realised he wanted *me*, not to get past), and then again at a suitable layby where I pulled in. If I'd been "oh, crap" and just pulled in, I'd have been suspicious of me too. I'd seen him at the roundabout, of course, but he was just a car. I was just driving as I normally would. I pulled over to make way for him like I normally would. I wasn't running down the street thinking "Oh, blue lights, he's after me", or making my driving reflect that.
But he'd already picked me out for pulling because he'd seen my lovely un-matching two-tone bumper and bonnet on a clapped-out Mondeo. I think he thought it would be an easy pull. I had the MOT certificate on the seat next to me from the previous day. He got out, I waited in the car (because I don't know why he's pulled me or if he is worried I'll jump out into the traffic), he came to the window, he looked at the MOT, we exchanged pleasantries about me not having the compulsory gaffer-tape-on-the-bumper to warn him of a Mondeo driver, he went on his way and barely looked at the car itself. He told *me* that I'd seen him at the roundabout, because I didn't know it was the same cop car. I think the slightest jerk of the car (or jerk in the car) when the blues and twos come on would have made him take a much closer look at things.
Whether you trust the police or not, whether you've done wrong or not, unusual reactions to their presence makes them doubly suspicious instantly. "What speed were you doing?" - the correct answer is "X mph" or "I don't know, officer". Not "Why should I tell you?" or "WE DID NOTHING WRONG!".
Blue lights should NOT make you jump or change driving patterns - whether you're doing something wrong or not.
I didn't say I panicked. It was certainly an unnecessary and potential distraction as I worked out what it was.
Given that they are on bus shelters mostly with lay-byes in them it's a reasonable assumption that a plod may be in the vicinity and either want you or want you out the way.
A light is which is totally unnecessary to sell a product ffs.
Sod the bankers - the first people hung in my own private utopian dictatorship will be the ad execs. (hello Eric Schmidt)
Oh and Mondeo drivers.
Jokingly ...
Obligatory 'Minority Report' quote: "Everybody runs, Fletch."
Obligatory 'Troops' quote: "They wouldn't be supects if they weren't guilty!"
Seriously ...
As police continue to act high-handedly, the number of law-abiding citizens whom have unpleasant contacts with the police rises, and hence the number of law-abiding citizens with a police *panic* reaction rises.
Interesting story about the mondeo. I wonder though, being as the police already knew you had an M.o.t before they interrupted your day, what was their real reason for pulling you over? I doubt that you know as they wouldn't have told you. Sounds like a fishing expedition to me.
Hope you weren't late for anything as a result.
Not so much panic as caution.
I slow down on the motorway when I see flashing lights up ahead. This is not 'Rubber necking'. It's just so I lower the risk of mowing down an emergency worker as I pass. If I see a flashing light in the mirror I get prepared to pull over to let an emergency vehicle pass. Anyway, if a police car is coming up fast behind you there is a chance that an idiot in a stolen car is coming up a bit sooner.
A bigger problem is drivers who *don't notice* flashing lights. Once on the motorway some guy was hogging the outside lane. I could have just gone round him but why should I? I had to flash my lights for almost a full minute before the driver in front noticed and got out my way. I was so annoyed I followed him flashing my lights for another 5 minutes. My finger ached after that but I think he got the message. I mean seriously some people don't have a clue on the road.
This other time coming home from work one evening I spotted a driver was using his mobile so I have him a long dose of full beam to dazzle some sense into him, but he didn't even notice. I just gave up on that one - I am not getting paid for it after-all, that's the polices job.
You drive a BMW or Audi, believe you own the road, and think you are a better driver than everone else on the road. AICMFP.
Driving behind someone flashing your lights 'to make a point' is only likely to distract the other driver from what is in front of them. Deliberately dazzling other drivers with your full beams is just plain dangerous. You probably won't realise you're the one in the wrong even after you've killed your first biker.
This post has been deleted by its author
I'm sure I read, oooo about 10 years ago, about a bright idea to store data on a4 sheets of paper using a colour printer. The capacity was pretty impressive (for 10 years ago). Certainly several orders of magnitude higher than a QR code.
And by the magic of Google: http://www.vestaldesign.com/blog/2007/01/rainbow-format-missing-the-point
So hardly original. But then, few things ever are...
I spent years looking into "homebrew" backup solutions back in the days of dodgy CD-R's and floppies. I even had a Video Backer that I took to pieces to find out how it worked. And I looked into paperising data too, as a sort of side-hobby while doing my Coding Theory courses at uni.
Turns out, anything with high enough a data density to be useful, the format was unreliable and weakened far too easily over time, and more and more unreadable. And anything with lower data density to be able to effectively store it - you might as well just print it out as English text / Hex codes. There's a tiny sweet spot but it's really been sucked into the real of 8Gb Flash drives nowadays, so it's not worth the effort.
So the world revolves again, keeping its data safe by just constantly moving it onto multiple copies of newer and newer media and expanding the data size by parity, checksum, etc. to check that its (probabilistically) okay. Not much of our data will survive to become archaeology, but that's pretty true of anyone that's ever lived anyway. Why should our data be more useful to future investigators than the Roman coins?
The HCCB failed not because of its color nature. It was intended for use in ads and other materials ALREADY in color, so the print costs are incidental. Also, the four-color version was designed to use the CMYK colors normally used in offset printing, so the colors were easy to produce and thus easy to read. Anyway, a B&W version exists, too. No, what did it in was Microsoft wanting to be the gatekeeper by turning it into the Tag format. If the HCCB decoded into straight URLs and other useful stuff, it probably would've had a better chance.
I've noticed them popping up in ads all over the place recently, but I've never seen anyone actually use one.
It also opens up the possibility of hard to detect advertising redirection or trolling. Overpaste the QR of your choice with a sticker containing either competitor information, or a link to a shock site... It's only a matter of time.
Make big ones for telephone poles, walls, etc advertising new clubs, over priced 'cool' exclusive restaurants, civil unrest meetings, underground Jedi movements - tap into the younger, tech-as-way-of-life-and-would-die-if-off-grid segment of the population to make it a trend, eventually gets to older generations. Be a moneymaker if the marketing is worked out properly.
Big thoughts for a Saturday morning. Cheers!
They seem like the sort of thing that augmented reality would be handy for. A QR placed somewhere on a static poster could then trigger a 3D advert when viewed through an AR app. The video would replace the poster.
It would also make a "They Live" augmented application possible, just need to replace the faces of random people with alien faces :)
I saw someone scannig once. I asked them how they would know that the link was not to some kiddie porn site.
The person looked at me blankly, as if I was from another planet. They had not even contemplated that someone might even remotely possibly display a bad QR code.
That said it all.
QR Codes are a disaster waiting to happen (IMHO)
It's another form of communication. You just need a prompt of some sort. Or only use reliable sources. How easy is it for someone to replace phone numbers on billboards? Easy to get everyone to call your premium rate line that way. Yet I've not heard of it happening. So the risk to QR codes is probably just as low.
A phone number is usually quite large, and not in a consistent format or size. A QR code is a funny looking square of black on white. Much easier to over-stick than unknown shape, unknown colour, unknown background phone numbers.
It probably won't ever be a big thing (it takes effort) but it could be done pretty easily.
>How easy is it for someone to replace phone numbers on billboards?
Quite tricky. You need to get font, size, colour, any glow effects, drop shaddows etc. correct. Often the number will be overlaying another image or color so you have to get that right too.
As opposed to a QR code where you simply have to ensure the square is big enough to cover the original/.
Boy, you wouldn't think it here in Japan, where even the cheapest phones seem to handle v-40 QR codes without breaking a sweat -- even when (as is common) they're printed on glossy colour posters or transparent window decals. It's telling that iPhone users seem to have the most trouble -- you can spot them stopping, carefully framing, and retrying the QR codes instead of snapping them in passing like most folks with domestic phones. Methinks the US and Chinese phone manufacturers need to work on their image processing software, not on their CIS resolution!
Now imagine a little box containing some sort of server, perhaps part of a de-centralized social network. You plug it in, it'll boot, and display a QR-code on its display. This code contains the IP-address of the server as well as an authentication token. You photograph it with your mobile phone, set a bookmark in your browser and there you go. Alternatively you can press a button on the device to get the information in human readable form.
This would save a lot of data protection problems instantly.
"ultraviolet QR codes?"
That actually is a pretty neat idea. Use a UV LED to cause the pattern to fluoresce, and take the picture (without flash, of course). It would be a good way to de-uglify things, and would also make a dandy way to introduce a bit of obscurity to a link (e.g. stamp your property with the code - bad guy doesn't see it, gets busted, cops scan swag with UV light, scan code, call you.)
You could even do a real Indiana Jones moment: arrange some pattern of objects in the world that, when illuminated by the sun on a give day and time, forms the pattern. I'm surprised some artsy type hasn't done this.
First: Used properly, QR codes are great - they are everything that the Cue-Cat should have been, but wasn't.
BUT: I've seen some stupid companies use them. I got a post-card sized item of junk mail in my mailbox (US Postal Service: about all we do now is advertising), with NOTHING but:
The company's name.
A QR Code.
That's it. No info on what these jokers do, or why I should want to scan their code. If they think I'm going to just blindly follow a link like that - they've never seen a certain Christmas Islands domain, have they?
So, what did I do? Not scan their QR code, that's for damn sure. But being a curious monkey, I searched for the company name, found out what they did (avoiding their actual web site like the plague), and decided that yes, I really didn't give a frip, and fed their missive into the shredder.
Anybody who goes around scanning random QR codes stuck to random objects by random people should be forced to live in an Amish community as an Amish person - they clearly are not ready to live in this technological world.
Good point. I know of one application which uses them as links to inform emergency services of specific conditions in buildings. For example, when the firemen rock up to a high-rise, then can get up-to-date information on which residents need help evacuating (sounds a bit basic, but I live in a high-rise and it is a surprisingly common problem). You still need to keep a list of the people somewhere, but keeping it on-line makes updating it easier.
Personally, I think anyone with one in their email signature is a twat. But then again I think the same of anyone who spams me with more than a few lines of ASCII. I don't need to see your corporate logo, or logos for the myriad of products you claim to be an expert in. The more you put in your signature, the less I think you're actually any good at what you do.
Name. Phone number. Job title. That's all you need. I'll let you off with a small quirky quote, if you must. Anything else is twattage.
There. Said it.
Sure, so can a printed URL.
I would argue that QR codes are no more obscure than links in email and web pages, given that many common (albeit to be avoided) email clients and browsers fail to display the full URL of the link before the user clicks on it; whereas all QR code scanners I've used display the URL and accompanying text, requiring at least token approval from the user before opening the URL.
Yes, OS manufacturers and enterprise admins need to do more to lock down permissions to sandbox or block malicious code. (In Android's case, a *lot* more.) But displaying URLs and text blocks as easy-to-read QR codes does nothing to exacerbate this problem.
I think that was meant to be read with slightly different emphasis:
"A QR code can easily contain a link to a scam, or a blob of malicious binary information".
OK, any form of URL can link to malicious content, but I think the point is that the QR code itself has enough space in it to contain a useful buffer overflow targeted at the QR software itself.
Not many people would type in a printed URL like "http://www.theregister.co.uk\n\n000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000xdeadbeef", but a QR code neatly gives you the ability to blob that right up.
The QR code standards are refreshingly uncomplicated; and even the highest density (v.40) code is limited to a modest 4296-byte payload. This means that the possible buffer overflow vulnerabilities are fairly limited, so it's reasonably easy to implement the QR reader software to avoid internal buffer overflows and then test for such vulnerabilities. I'd be more concerned about the QR reader passing along otherwise legitimate URLs that carry out things like format string attacks to downstream clients.
But I'll reassert my position that the most critical security focus needs to be on (a) educating users about the dangers of phishing and messed-up URLs, (b) giving them tools (like displaying the link URL) to help them avoid clicking on dangerous links, (c) fixing the OS so that it doesn't automatically execute downloaded code, and (d) sandboxing downloaded code so that it can't affect the rest of the system.
I think the reason for the lack of concern is the physical limitations of the barcode. Even at maximum size it can only hold so much information, which is explicitly stated. And the code standard is pretty robust and well-defined (as in just about every possible situation is defined). Which means it would be hard to buffer overflow if the barcode can only hold so much information. An 8K buffer will hold even the biggest all-numeric QR code.
This post has been deleted by its author
I've seen them around and never used them. Seen lots of people complain. But rather than accept it as a problem, I thought I'd look for a solution.
Did not find any. :(
So, what do people want from QR codes? I'll put the idea forward to BBC 3 and their "Be Your Own Boss" show. If someone makes a QR code everyone wants to use I'm sure they will be even more of a success!
http://wtfqrcodes.com/post/19736272462/oww-my-head-via-jakedevine
Has a screenshot from a mobile phone pointing to http://www.webdigi.co.uk [1].
"This page has to be ideally opened on your laptop or desktop browser.
"Once you open this link on your computer then you will have a QR code to the URL that needs to be opened on your device.
"OK"
[1]. to name and shame
Actually, most cameras can do this already.
Just remove the IR filter (requires edge of the seat microsurgery on camera lens) and then put a NIR LED from a camcorder etc in place of the existing white LED.
Not obvious its been done, but that 'phone is now far more useful.
Works great for low light, garden wildlife photography etc.
I tried this a while back, it works better on B/W cameras but colour ones also somewhat work.
Zapping the CCD with a focussed red DVD burner laser to blow out the green and blue filters would probably increase the sensitivity at the cost of ruining the camera for colour.
Nearly the perfect covert message system, as no-one else can see the message.
AC/DC
A good primer.
Denso is an independent Japanese car parts supplier, not a subsidiary of Toyota. http://www.globaldenso.com/en/investors/stock/index.html. Similar to Bosch in Germany.
Both at home and overseas, they have close ties to their Japanese customers - of which Toyota is the largest.
QR codes are less common in Japan than articles like this always suggest. At least for consumer applications.
I used a QR code for the first time yesterday. It was a link to an Android app I had found on my PC, and I did not want to type the URL on my phone. On-screen data transfer is another good application for this tech. It is quick and easy.
I am always curious about the threshold for the concept of "subsidiary," and how it may or may not differ per culture/regulatory regime.
Denso was spun off from Toyota in 1949. It is most certainly its own distinct legal entity, but Toyota still retains a ~24% stake in the company. What's more, Denso owns shares in a number of companies itself, many of which Toyota owns a significant chunk of. The two companies cooperate on nearly every level and are completely and inextricably linked together for all practical purposes.
I’m willing to accept that subsidiary might not be the exact correct term for use in this situation. “Partner” doesn’t cover it either. The closest anglicism I can come up with is “clan member.” Separate distinct entity, but unquestionable “part of the family.”
As to “use in day to day life,” well…that seems to depend on who you talk to. My Japanese friends claimt he things are embedded everywhere. From bus route info to advertising, passport baggage claims to all sorts of other things. Where we might use a regular 3of9 barcode or some form of reference number, QR codes seem to be used there.
Maybe that is different in different areas? (And why not? Different cities would certainly have different methods of representing transit info, etc?) But overall, it seems that QR codes are simply “a fact of life” in Japan whereas they are still largely a novelty everywhere else.
Interesting to hear a different take on the matter, though!
I'll buy that for a dollar, but am unsure how to use it. I had always heard the term applied to the parent company, as with chaebol or conglomerate. Without using the word subsidiary, how do you use kieretsu in a sentance to decribe child companies? "Denso is an independant mid-tier corporate node in the Toyota kieretsu?"
Barring XML, I don't know that axequate descriptors exist. :)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
