One of the current plot elements in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary is that nefarious individuals have managed to disable a security camera system by showing it a particular pattern. In a strip from a few days ago, we get a good look at it.
As I understand, many smartphones use code-patterns like that: You can point your phone camera at it, and it’ll automatically take you to a webpage, or something of the sort. Does this one do anything, and if so, what?
That’s an awesome code alright. Even my browser puked looking at it!
Oops, looks like I had an unpaired quote mark in my link. This should work
Looks like it supposed to be a 2D barcode. Something like this:
Oops, looks like I misunderstood. You know that’s a barcode, and are wondering if it encodes any real data or command?
That I don’t know. I’ve got a reader at the office, and I can try to see if it reads tomorrow. Although I’m not positive my reader has that symbology built in.
Yes, exactly.
Unfortunately, I wound up not going in to the office today, so I don’t have access to my scanner. It will be tomorrow at the earliest before I do.
Anybody else got a scanner and want to try and get a read from this?
UID=“ADMIN” PASS=“DEFAULT” CMD=“sleep, 600sec, noprompt, fnord”
Here I was hoping for something more Easter-eggy, like a link to a secret webpage. But it looks like he played it (mostly) straight (except for the fnord)-- That’s the sort of command that might plausibly actually disable the cameras (Legs was complaining a few strips ago about them leaving the credentials set to the default).
Thanks!
There was another one in the same story that had a similar code but slightly different.
We saw it about a month earlier, but it wasn’t as clear, and I’m not seeing any differences with the naked eye.
From here:
http://zoo.nightstar.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18551&sid=647910d2fc853d5dbe19d27e1cbb5187
First code: UID=ADMIN PASS=DEFAULT CMD=SLEEP [600sec noprompt fnord]
Second code: UID=“ADMIN” PASS=“DEFAULT” CMD=“sleep, 600sec, noprompt, fnord”
So can anyone decode this or not? I’m getting a little concerned here…
Today’s code:
fnord UID=***** PASS=******** CMD=“overwrite daylog, prev 28800 sec, sleep, 6000sec, noprompt” fnord
You know what’s really annoying? I just checked for this thread to see if anyone knew the new one, but didn’t see it on the first page, and in the time it took me to go to the second page of the forum, yastobaal went and bumped it back to the first.