I was in a British train station the other day and saw a poster containing 20 QR codes, one for each of a set a possible journeys from the station. Since I'm techy and had time to kill I scanned it, waiting to see the timetable information. Sadly the company who installed the posters was having some downtime, so it just errored. The annoying thing was that they were really just a URL shortening company, forwarding you on to the correct mobile friendly page of the trainline website. I really don't know why the trainline couldn't have just made some nice short, typing friendly short URLs of their own, and posted these on the poster. Or just posted the actual time tables like they used to. In the olden days.
Whilst scanning it and trying to figure out what was wrong, the station master approached me to see what I was doing - since the poster had been installed he'd yet to see anyone use it, and had been waiting to ask someone what on earth it was for.
Still - if there is someone out there that wanted to hack me, they just have to place a qr code in a place where I am likely to have nothing to do for a while... At least with this poster it was actually easy to scan the codes, unlike those on billboards or posted on the tube here in the UK.
My local bus company has failed to grasp QR codes in a mind-bogglingly thorough way.
Every stop has a poster with a QR code on it, advertising that you can now look up when the next bus will be here by scanning the QR code. The first thing you might notice is that the poster is actually a photo of a QR code on a poster, and is taken at an angle sufficient to render scanning the QR code impossible.
The second thing you might notice is that all the posters are identical - they are, in fact, an advert for the QR code you are meant to scan and not the QR code itself.
So where are these QR codes? Somewhere else on the bus stop? On the post for the sign? No. Reading the smaller print on the poster reveals all: You simply visit their website on your PC and go to a specific URL, which delivers you a page full of QR codes. You then scan the QR code corresponding to the bus stop whose schedule you wish to view.
Maybe they got the idea from Google Code, which helpfully shows me a QR code for the tarball I'm about to download, for all those times I'm using the browser on my desktop and the IDE on my phone.
uh what? So I download the file, hash it, then pipe that into some program that's going to show me another QR code? And then eyeball that for differences? Who does that? I already have programs to compare two text strings, easily, accurately, remotely. Comparing two pngs is way more work. I was just assuming the QR code was the URL, but hash QRs make even less sense than my IDE on the phone scenario.
Actually, looking at the URL of the QR code image itself, it is for the download URL.
Lothian Buses in Edinburgh has done the right thing: they've stuck QR codes to each of their information signs, which direct you to the correct page on their mobile site, and the official Android app is registered for the URLs too.
The only semi-useful QR code I've ever seen in real life was on one of those little reminder cards in a parking garage to help you locate which floor you parked on. I say semi-useful because the QR code took you to a webpage that told you the same exact information the card had on it, and none of my friends or I could get reception inside the garage, so we all had to wait until we were out of the garage before figuring out what was on them.
I can see the usefulness of QR codes, but I don't think I've ever seen one implemented in a non-trivial or non-gimmicky way. They're a solution to a problem no one outside of marketing had.
I once saw a QR code advertised in a Buenos Aries subway station that was just a QR code and nothing else. No graphics, logo, or ad copy around it. So having some time, I scanned it. It was just text, not a URL. (I don't remember what the text said. But it was basically just "buy slurm!"
Seemed pointless to me. This is how the public interacts with QR codes - they can't do anything that can't be done by pasting TEXT where the QR code would be.
This sort of thing is common from what I've seen. More traditional businesses (like phone companies) don't know how to "do a QR code" (as it were), so they pay a company to make them for them. Such companies are just selling a glorified URL shortener, but the other businesses don't know that.
Whilst scanning it and trying to figure out what was wrong, the station master approached me to see what I was doing - since the poster had been installed he'd yet to see anyone use it, and had been waiting to ask someone what on earth it was for.
Still - if there is someone out there that wanted to hack me, they just have to place a qr code in a place where I am likely to have nothing to do for a while... At least with this poster it was actually easy to scan the codes, unlike those on billboards or posted on the tube here in the UK.