I feel that barcodes (usually QR Codes) are underutilized; I forgot about them until I saw this post.
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I think barcodes could potentially be used to quickly transmit preset information to war victims.
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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.)
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 thewifi-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 runnmcli dev wifi show
.Awesome!
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.
That’s a good one!
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.
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.
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)