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Comment by pards | Hacker News Reader

Does encoding URLs in QR codes expose the scanners to quishing[0] attacks, such as bad actors sticking malicious QR codes over legit ones?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing#QR_code_phishing_(qui...

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Yes, but it's no different from the QR codes already present on many consumer products. In fact, it is easier to spot, as either a cashier (or someone at a self-checkout) is likely to notice that there's a sticker over the barcode and get suspicious that there's some kind of fraud going on.

The standard URL format can also be encoded into RFID tags.

This is likely where things will head as printing serialized products is slow, cumbersome and is fraught with issues due to smearing, resolution etc.. and the reason you mentioned.

People have been making the claim for at least 20 years, and it still hasn't materialized yet. The problem is that it is a nontrivial increase in manufacturing cost, and you only get a benefit out of it when every product in the store has adopted it. If you want per-product RFID tags, you first got to convince an entire industry to eat a significant cost increase for a few years.

Besides, it has gotten less attractive over time. With the rise of self-checkout stores no longer save on cashiers by switching to RFID. The kind of tag to support "scan an entire basket at once" isn't compatible with being scanned by a NFC-enabled smartphone, so you can't use them for extra recall information either.

Serialized printing is basically a solved problem by now. I have several dozen products using it in my kitchen pantry right now, and none of them suffer from smearing or have low resolutions - and I can guarantee you they were rapidly and automatically applied in mass produciton.

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