Stories 9-10

9. QR Code

Quick response code (known as QR code) is a kind of two-dimensional coding schemes. Similar to its ancestor bar code, it was designed for automotive industry mainly used to identify and track items. Like a lot of other technology innovations, although it was invented in 1994, it became popular all of a sudden due to the rise of mobile devices.

The major advantage of QR code is that it is optically machine-readable. Think about it, compared with inputting a long and error-prone sequence of characters with a big fat finger on a tiny keyboard, no one will reject the temptation of just taking a scan of a QR code picture to access the same information in virtually no time. And it looks cool.

QR code can be of various sizes. For example, a version 1 QR code is of size 21 x 21 which means it has 21 rows and each row has 21 symbols.A version 40 QR code is of size 177 x 177 (image below). Therefore, it can contain up to 1852characters, approximately twice as much as in this article.

If you are geeky enough, here is a new trick (copy right unreserved): 1) generate the QR code of the three magic words or whatever, 2)arrange your candles or flowers into a matrix accordingly to those dots and put them at the desired place. Mission accomplished.

10 QR code and Attagging

Because of the easy-to-use features, QR code is gospel for those marketing people who want to give customers quick and effortless access to the brands. What’s more, when you take a scan of a QR code, you are actually participating in an interaction with them. Marketer can secretly collect your device info, location info, and reveal your interests. With these information,they can increase the conversion rate and the campaign effectiveness.

So far it all sounds too perfect. Wait, what were we talk about two weeks back? Phishing. Instead of sending you an email which will be quickly recognised by a lot of intelligent spam filters, now phishers have a new tool that can easily bypass any such filter. Better, because any suspicious link won’t look suspicious any more after being encoded as a QR code, phishing can increase its conversion rate as well. Even better, QR code can be displayed on any legitimate media which will reduce user’s vigilance.

If the above aren’t scary enough, what about let us be aware that your mobile devices are more capable of leaking your personal information.A malicious QR code (so called “attagging”) can turn on your GPS, microphone,camera, or send email/SMS/IM without letting you notice. Next thing you know,you were paying $3.14 subscription fee to Mr. Stranger's account.