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.)
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!
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)
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.