I really really hate QR codes.
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I really really hate QR codes. But a lot of people really like them. And they're useful during a talk for the people who really like them (I'm also including the text of the link, though, dammit!)
But... I have never done this before, and a lot of the "free QR code generators" look kind of scammy and I don't want to give people weird viruses or spam. So... fediverse, help!
EDIT TO ADD SOLUTION: within like 2 minutes https://zxing.appspot.com/generator
I love you, fediverse.
@sundogplanets
Framasoft has also a QR Code generator in their toolbox (among a lot of respectfull tools) :
https://omnitools.framatoolbox.org/image-generic/qr-code -
I really really hate QR codes. But a lot of people really like them. And they're useful during a talk for the people who really like them (I'm also including the text of the link, though, dammit!)
But... I have never done this before, and a lot of the "free QR code generators" look kind of scammy and I don't want to give people weird viruses or spam. So... fediverse, help!
EDIT TO ADD SOLUTION: within like 2 minutes https://zxing.appspot.com/generator
I love you, fediverse.
@sundogplanets
I like this one also : https://justaqrcode.com/
And to read them with a webcam on a desktop PC : https://scanapp.org/
(desktop PC because I can move my webcam a little bit around) -
A arbeitstitel@nrw.social shared this topic
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There are plenty of good QR code generators. I use
https://www.qr-code-generator.com/But you are right to be wary - especially when reading QR codes. Make sure that your QR code reader is one that lets you look at the URL first, not one that just loads up automatically. Then you can see that the website being loaded is the one that you are expecting. People have been known to paste fake QR codes over real ones in public places, for example.
@Anne_Delong @sundogplanets
"Make sure that your QR code reader is one that lets you look at the URL first, not one that just loads up automatically. Then you can see that the website being loaded is the one that you are expecting. People have been known to paste fake QR codes over real ones in public places"This can't be emphasised too much.
I disabled the included code reader on my Android phone.
Some 3rd party Android coder reader apps on Playstore have had spyware or malware. -
@sundogplanets a lot of them include a url shortener which makes for simpler QR codes that scan more easily... I always used bit.ly in the past, it was fine, and gave some useful stats. But it has been a long while and I got my own shortish domain so just started using local software instead. If you just want straight up QR code generation then QR Code Monkey works fine too IIRC.
@yvan @sundogplanets
URL shorteners are evil because they hide the destination. Such links are now forbidden on many forums. I think invented for Twitter when it was stupidly only SMS size messages.I always preview a QR code and never go to shortened links.
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@yvan @sundogplanets
URL shorteners are evil because they hide the destination. Such links are now forbidden on many forums. I think invented for Twitter when it was stupidly only SMS size messages.I always preview a QR code and never go to shortened links.
@raymaccarthy I think "evil" is a bit strong... they're effectively just a HTTP redirect. But I totally get the issues with the effective obfuscation of the target URL and am aware that has been used for nefarious purposes. There is no good reason to be using them on things like forums where there are no character limits - that's suspicious behavior! Blocking them on such sites makes sense.
Their origin is certainly in sending URLs in short text formats - be that early Twitter or SMS/text messages. Still useful for the latter.
For QR codes a shorter URL means a simpler QR code. A simpler QR code is both more robust and better to scan from distance (depending on print/display size of course, but especially for if they're going to be on slides at a talk.)
These days I'd expect most good QR apps should automatically preview the redirect target URL. On desktop I use
wget -Sto check the targets of any suspect short URLs. -
@raymaccarthy I think "evil" is a bit strong... they're effectively just a HTTP redirect. But I totally get the issues with the effective obfuscation of the target URL and am aware that has been used for nefarious purposes. There is no good reason to be using them on things like forums where there are no character limits - that's suspicious behavior! Blocking them on such sites makes sense.
Their origin is certainly in sending URLs in short text formats - be that early Twitter or SMS/text messages. Still useful for the latter.
For QR codes a shorter URL means a simpler QR code. A simpler QR code is both more robust and better to scan from distance (depending on print/display size of course, but especially for if they're going to be on slides at a talk.)
These days I'd expect most good QR apps should automatically preview the redirect target URL. On desktop I use
wget -Sto check the targets of any suspect short URLs.@raymaccarthy many of the redirect services also offer useful usage stats - I used to use bit.ly for this reason. To know which QR/urls were getting hits so we could work out which media/formats/locations were effective for QRs. (I used to be involved in organising things like CAMRA beer festivals, and similar sorts of events and we put QRs in advertisments, on beer mats, and on posters.)
But then there are possibly some privacy concerns - i.e. as a person/business I am sharing some level of metadata with bit.ly if I use their shortened URLs (as well as the URL they get things like client IPs and user agent strings for example.)
So I bought my own short domain so I could fully internalise that analysis and still have nice short URLs for marketing/advertising purposes.
In reality I expect most people who'd not hesitate to scan a QR probably don't care about any of these details. (Though I think greater public awareness of the risks would be a good thing.)
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@raymaccarthy many of the redirect services also offer useful usage stats - I used to use bit.ly for this reason. To know which QR/urls were getting hits so we could work out which media/formats/locations were effective for QRs. (I used to be involved in organising things like CAMRA beer festivals, and similar sorts of events and we put QRs in advertisments, on beer mats, and on posters.)
But then there are possibly some privacy concerns - i.e. as a person/business I am sharing some level of metadata with bit.ly if I use their shortened URLs (as well as the URL they get things like client IPs and user agent strings for example.)
So I bought my own short domain so I could fully internalise that analysis and still have nice short URLs for marketing/advertising purposes.
In reality I expect most people who'd not hesitate to scan a QR probably don't care about any of these details. (Though I think greater public awareness of the risks would be a good thing.)
@yvan @sundogplanets
"many of the redirect services also offer useful usage stats - I used to use bit.ly for this reason"Which is a malicious privacy violation if it's not your own site. Possibly even illegal in the EU.
If it is your own site then the data harvesting URL shorteners are not needed. A parameter on the URL works.Also the user has no idea where a URL shortener is taking them. There is no justification at all for these evil data harvesting services.
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I have a QR generator I wrote (using ZXing libraries). It is written in Java, & runs locally on your system. There are Debian packages, but also an installer for other systems (e.g., MacOS, Windows, etc.). You should install openjdk first. The Debian packages will configure the system to recognize icons, etc., but for other systems, I just provided the files as I had no way of testing that. It can also decode QR codes so you can see what a URL is.
@sundogplanets The QR generator I mentioned can encode binary files. The man page describes how to use this program to make a series of QR codes to store a user's GPG keys as a series of QR codes, each labeled with a file name. The images containing these codes can then be printed and stored in a safe place as a long-term backup in addition to a flash drive (which can fail).
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I really really hate QR codes. But a lot of people really like them. And they're useful during a talk for the people who really like them (I'm also including the text of the link, though, dammit!)
But... I have never done this before, and a lot of the "free QR code generators" look kind of scammy and I don't want to give people weird viruses or spam. So... fediverse, help!
EDIT TO ADD SOLUTION: within like 2 minutes https://zxing.appspot.com/generator
I love you, fediverse.
@sundogplanets I wish we had something less visual than QR codes, they can be hard to scan when totally blind.
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@sundogplanets I wish we had something less visual than QR codes, they can be hard to scan when totally blind.
@kevinrj Very good point!
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I really really hate QR codes. But a lot of people really like them. And they're useful during a talk for the people who really like them (I'm also including the text of the link, though, dammit!)
But... I have never done this before, and a lot of the "free QR code generators" look kind of scammy and I don't want to give people weird viruses or spam. So... fediverse, help!
EDIT TO ADD SOLUTION: within like 2 minutes https://zxing.appspot.com/generator
I love you, fediverse.
@sundogplanets Any time there's 100 scammy/spammy tools it's because the tech is 100% open source and the spammers know how to shout louder.
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@sundogplanets I wish we had something less visual than QR codes, they can be hard to scan when totally blind.
@Kevin R Jones The whole idea of QR codes doesn't make sense, when the actual site link they are pointing to isn't available as a text link below. Btw, that same problem exists for people with eyesight:; we can't see, where the QR code points to. Any human analysis about spam risk is impossible without mentioning the actual link in text. @Prof. Sam Lawler -
S svenja@mstdn.games shared this topic
