What's a QR code? Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
So during a recent sporting event, the Superb Owl Sporting event,
there was an Advertisement which consisted of, as I understand it,
since I'm not a football watcher, consisted of nothing more than a bizarre
code that appeared on the screen for something like 20 or 30 seconds.
That code is referred to as a QR code.
Here's an example of one.
You can see it on the screen right now.
The idea here is that a QR code is really pretty cool.
It's really nothing more than some text
arranged or encoded in such a way to make it easy for a machine to read it.
For example, the QR code that you're looking at is Https://askleo.com.
If you scan it with a device capable
of scanning QR codes, which I'll talk about in a minute,
that'll get interpreted as that text, and you can then potentially click on it
or tap on it, or in some cases, it'll just go to that URL automatically.
But QR codes are for more than just URLs.
For example, here's a QR code.
It's a fairly big looking one that has
the entire Gettysburg Address encoded within it.
Obviously, you wouldn't know to look
at it, but if you have a QR code scanning application and you scan that QR code,
the result will in fact be President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
So how do you create a QR code?
Well, there are a number of QR code
generators on the web, but as it turns out, Microsoft Edge just added one.
Let me show you.
We'll fire up Edge here.
We're running under Windows Ten and we'll
click on the address bar here and you can see there's the address https://askleo.com.
As soon as I Scroll click out of it,
you'll see that there are now two additional icons here.
One of them is a "send this page."
I honestly don't know what it is.
I think it has to do with sending to nearby people.
It's this one.
You probably saw it flash up "Create a QR code for this page."
If I click on it, that's exactly what happens.
Edge has created a QR code specifically
for this URL that I'm currently looking at.
I can then download that as a. Png file.
I can take a screenshot of it.
I can do whatever the heck I want with it to save it for later use.
As you've seen,
I saved this QR code and put it in the article that accompanies this video.
Like I said, the other thing is that there are QR code generators out there.
I took the entire text of the Gettysburg Address.
I found it over on Wikipedia, and I pasted it into one of these QR code
generators to create that big, massive QR code.
So how do you use a QR code?
Well, here's a great example.
If you take a look at this, what we're looking at is an image of my phone.
It's actually a screenshot of my phone
looking at that QR code I showed you
to begin with, the QR code that says https://askleo.com. On a Pixel four
the built in camera understands QR codes,
and if you leave it pointed at the QR code long enough, It'll give you this little
pop up that says, yeah, here's the text I recognized.
In this case, since it knows it's a URL by virtue of the https.
It shows the Google Chrome icon instead
of showing that text and it shows the URL of where I would be taken.
I could tap on that and it would fire up the browser and take you to that page.
Depending on what it is that's encoded in your QR code that may be text that then
gets copied to a clipboard that you could do something with it,
maybe something else you can act on if your camera doesn't recognize QR codes.
Smartphones, both iPhone and Android, have lots of apps available that do.
Some of them will show you the URL you're
about to go to or the text that has been decoded.
Some will just act on it as soon as it's been decoded.
And that actually leads us to the very first problem with QR codes.
Besides being somewhat mysterious and perhaps difficult to understand,
you can't tell what a QR code is until you
scan it, and in some cases, scanning it will take immediate action.
You have no idea whether what you're about to do is safe or not.
That is really unfortunate.
I find QR codes fascinating.
I think they're really interesting and really, really powerful.
But there's this fundamental idea of trust.
Apparently millions of people scanned
the QR code that showed up during the football game.
Millions of people disregarded security.
They had no idea what was going to happen when they did so.
Granted, in this case, it took them to a safe place, but there's no guarantee.
And I've absolutely heard of people posting QR codes on public bulletin boards
and in random places to see if people would scan them.
People do and all of a sudden they've got malware on their phone or whatever.
So the bottom line here for QR codes is they can be really useful.
If you trust the source, hopefully you trust askleocom and you've
scanned it and you've seen it happen on your own smartphone.
But be skeptical.
Just like any URL you don't recognize, you don't know where it's going to take.
You make sure you trust the source before you actually use the QR code.
I hope that helps.
I hope that clarifies what QR codes are all about.
For updates, for related links, for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/143703.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.