Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I also think QR codes could eventually be used by "shock site" trolls as in the bad ol' days on Slashdot. It's perfect because there's no way to inspect the URL before visiting the website. I've scanned a few QR codes on street lamps (for music events, etc.) and this is always in the back of my head.

Here's a much more fun example of a QR code prank: http://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/302963_1... (totally SFW of course)

View on HN

I do agree that QR codes can be used for trolling, but there's absolutely no reason you can't inspect the URL before visiting a link from a QR code - all that's stored in the QR code, after all, is the URL!

The trivial technical solution is a QR code reader which tells you where you're going before it sends you there, which ZXing (the Barcode Reader for Android) and several iOS QR readers already do.

Short URLs (very common in the QR code space, for making a smaller code) quickly circumvent this solution. If I see "bit.ly/asdf", I'll assume they just shortened their URL.

And this is one of many reasons that URL shorteners must die. If it weren't for Twitter, people wouldn't be so used to blindly clicking through short URLs.

But anyhow, most URL shorteners offer an API to retrieve the long URL. You could implement that in your QR code scanner as well, for the most popular URL shorteners, to allow people to see where they will be redirected to.

Alternatively on Android, you can use FairyPreview to decode most minimized URLs for you before sending them to the browser.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...

And cell phones don't display long URLs, another phishing problem begging to be exploited

It's phishing. Sure, you're going to check the url. But most people won't. And simply being on the bank is going to be validation enough for most.

Here's the decode:

http://zxing.org/w/decode?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffbcdn-sphotos-a.aka...

No way to inspect the URL? What QR code reader do you use? I use Barcode Scanner, and when I scan a QR code, it always shows me the URL, and I have to click "Open browser" before it will actually browse to that URL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com