Acoustic barcodes deliver data with a fingernail and microphone

Either through QR codes, RFID, or near field communication, there seems to be some desire to share tiny pieces of data in a more physical and accessible form. [Chris Harrison], [Robert Xiao], and [Scott E. Hudson] of the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon have come up with a fairly interesting solution of making data more physical. They call it Acoustic Read the rest

Barcode tattoo has a lot of thought put into it

This bar code tattoo was sent into us by [Lifespan]. Before going under the needle, [Lifespan] didn’t care much for tattoos. After seeing this video he realized that a tattoo could have dynamic content through domain redirection.

[Lifespan] spent a lot of time going over the different styles of 2D bar codes. QR codes were deemed ugly because of the … Read the rest

Barcode challenge for radio operators

[Scott Harden] came across a few posts about QR code matrix barcodes coming through on the 40m baud radio band. A few operators had captured the signals and assembled them into the code block seen above but they weren’t able to get a clear enough shot for a smartphone to decode the image. [Scott] took on the challenge and decoded Read the rest

LEGO barcode scanner

Playing store just got really, really fun because you can now build your own LEGO barcode scanner. As you can see after the break, it works well and it’s fast like a real barcode scanner. Unfortunately it doesn’t scan real barcodes. Or at least not traditional ones. As we learned in the Barcode Challenge, standard barcodes are a … Read the rest

Barcode Infiltrator

Whenever someone manages to expose vulnerabilities in everyday devices, we love to root for them. [Adrian] over at Irongeek has been inspired to exploit barcodes as a means to attack a POS database. Based on an idea from a Pauldotcom episode, he set out to make a rapid attack device, using an LED to spoof the signals that would be … Read the rest

POV fan EEPROM hack

pov_fan_eeprom_hacking

Hacking with Gum got their hands on one of the persistence of vision display fans that Cenzic was giving away at Blackhat this year. It’s not the biggest fan-based POV display we’ve seen but it’s still a fun device to tinker with. They hacked into the EEPROM on the device in order to change the message the fan displayed.

This … Read the rest

Barcode challenge

barcode_challenge

This morning we logged into Google to find a Barcode instead of the normal logo (how strange that Google would change their graphic!). Apparently today is the anniversary of the Barcode. This method of easily labeling items for computer scanning is used for every type of commodity in our society. But do you know how to get the … Read the rest