Barcode - Wikipedia
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I feel that barcodes (usually QR Codes) are underutilized; I forgot about them until I saw this post.

  • I think barcodes could potentially be used to quickly transmit preset information to war victims.

  • They could be used to transmit information on platforms that censor: Sharing Lemmy posts on Reddit (even though it’s currently redundant due to federation). (I just thought of this.)

  • Arthur Besse
    10•2 years ago

    I wouldn’t say it’s exactly creative, but a common useful application of qrcodes is for communicating wifi network names and passwords. If you use a GNU/Linux distro with NetworkManager, wifi-qr is a nice tool which can not only scan but also generate these phone-compatible wifi qrcodes for any saved wifi network your computer knows about. On debian-based distros, just apt install wifi-qr and run the wifi-qr command and you’ll get a qr code right there in your terminal which you can scan with a phone.

    edit: actually NetworkManager’s commandline tool generates the QR codes itself, so you only need wifi-qr if you want to scan them. Just run nmcli dev wifi show.

  • art
    7•2 years ago

    Always thought it would be rad to make a sheet of BitTorrent Magnet Links with the top 10 most popular movies.

    I’d call it The Pirate Paper. Not everyone has unlimited data or a good client on their phone.

  • kat
    5•2 years ago

    i unfortunately don’t have the link on hand, but i once saw this video of a pentesting team doing data exfiltration with qr codes. they converted the file to base64, split it into chunks that would be easy to scan on a phone, converted the base64 to a qr code, and took a video with their phone to reassemble later.

    • @electrodynamica
      2•2 years ago

      I once saw a demonstration when qr codes were new where they actually made video qr codes. It was like a modem but with video instead of audio. I don’t recall the bitrate but it was high enough to be useful.

      (It was used to demonstrate exfiltrating from an airgapped computer)

  • vxnxnt
    4•2 years ago

    The most creative use I’ve personally come up with, is to create a QR code for Croc codes when i want to transfer some files to my phone. I know that I could just use a USB cable, but I’m on Artix have procrastinated looking into how to do that.