Tacháaan!
Charlie StrossThis. Just, this.
Sally Strange@cstross oooh facepaint that right on my forehead please
rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually@rk See also comp.basilisk.faq: https://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
Mark T. Tomczak@cstross @rk Fun fact: a train of thought like this is what twigged me to your writing.
I was musing online years ago (and ignoring the whole House of M Marvel story arc, because I don't read comics closely enough) that Scarlet Witch's powers should generally be far more hideous than they are portrayed in the comics... A probability-bending power shouldn't make The Thing slip on a banana peel, it should be creating crime-scenes where the cops had to call in some lab-boys from Oscorp to help them understand how 95% of a man's carbon-14 could spontaneously, simultaneously decay into nitrogen-14.
... and a friend on Facebook asked if I'd read The Laundry Files...
Janeishly@cstross "What Happened at Cambridge IV" by David Langford is one of my favourite short stories ever (and I've got it in an anthology with Terry Pratchett's "ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’", which is another absolute belter).
Angle🖇@cstross Let's not give ICE ideas. :/
Woozle Hypertwin
Raymond
Alberto Cottica@cstross reminds me of your Basilisk CCTV system, Charlie.
Solarbird 
@cstross every cop and federal agent adopts it as part of their uniform in 0.02 seconds
shift/reset@cstross It's a great idea, but now I'm thinking of just having a rickroll tee
RonnieThat was where my mind went
Jenica Lake เหล็ถเลถ@RonniesaurusHex @shift_reset a rick roll qr that poisons ai please
Eric A. Meyer@cstross So a reverse Scorpion Stare, of a sort. I dig it.
Seiðr@cstross Yes, please.
~n
trainguyrom
AndiS 🌞🍷🇪🇺Not only US currency. It is an international standard!
Jernej Simončič �
Sabrina Web 
📎@cstross and please sign me up, I want one too
Jeffrey Schrab@cstross Every time I see something like this I think to myself, Monty Python‘s “The Killer Joke” seemed like such a silly idea at the time…
Rowan Tommins@cstross I can't think how to search for it now, but I remember reading a while back someone went to a convention wearing makeup designed to defeat autofocus algorithms, and watched people frowning as they tried to take photos of it.
trash panda qc
Chris Harris@cstross Shades of William Gibson's "Ugly t-shirt" from Zero History. Papers were written...
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=3099
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=3099
kauer@headfirstonly @cstross I get a bad certificate then page not found on that link... does it work for others?
@kauer It spawns a "Not secure" warning (the URL is http: not https:) but loads fine for me.
@headfirstonly thanks. I tried on a laptop instead of my phone and it loaded ok.
Brian Fenton@cstross Max Gladstone wrote something similar in Empress of Forever... QR code face paint to hack a security camera
Scurra@cstross I'm now wearing a badge on my coat that is a QR code which links to a page on my personal website that (currently) says "by photographing/filming me without permission, you agree to pay me an appearance fee of £100." It's obviously an empty threat, but hey, I felt like I needed to do something.
@midgephoto @cstross I'm in the UK; in central London mostly. And the page has been triggered a couple of times (not just by bots) which amused me.
I wonder if you might find it as effective to ask people not to disseminate or publish pictures in which you are identifiable?
Certainly the demand for a fee doesn't have a legal base.
I photograph races and so on, and there are occasional people who have good reason, court orders etc, to not have their image published, so their numbers are marked and if we catch them in an image we intercept it. More effort is applied due to the good reason and request.
@midgephoto @cstross
Yes, I realise that's the actual request I should be making. I just couldn't resist the slightly facetious one instead.
Yes, I realise that's the actual request I should be making. I just couldn't resist the slightly facetious one instead.
slowtiger
WereBooks 🎃@cstross It's ironic that an idea from an earlier, more innocent era has caught on now that no sane person would blindly go to an obscured URL.
Mad Argon 
@werebooks @cstross And current dominant business model in web is to successfully manipulate people to click things they normally wouldn't want to... I hate this cursed timeline so much...
Sander
Ann McNichol@cstross yeah but then the ICE Gestapo would start wearing them
MaineC@cstross not a QR code, but human readable. Not a malware, but legal language, so arguably worse than malware:
Refers to German privacy laws related to photographing people.
Voxel@cstross Didn't expect to see this again, could you provide the original source?
Hep Cat
RRB@cstross AI data centers are this at scale. Only, they are reducing the whole planet to a useless brick.
Helena B@cstross it should be called the Medusa virus.
Steve Hersey@cstross
Bonus points for bricking facial-recognition cameras.
Bonus points for bricking facial-recognition cameras.
Steven D. Brewer 🏳️⚧️@cstross just remember not to take any selfies, amirite?
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)@cstross I'll settle for one that triggers a reboot. 🙂
Irenes (many)@cstross oh, but this exists. someone on here did a small batch of sew-on patches a few years ago that were QR codes of the EICAR test file. we have a couple...
@cstross it isn't technically a virus, it's a file that virus scanners per their spec are supposed to treat as if it's a virus. so, for example, if a badly-written surveillance camera decodes the QR code and stores it in a way that a virus scanner can see (which is not what it should do, but...), then the virus scanner will quarantine the file which may break the camera
@cstross that said, to know whether it actually works and when would require a lot of testing, which to our knowledge nobody has done
Joe@ireneista @cstross I cross-stitched one last year:
https://functional.cafe/@hungryjoe/113663950530589251
https://functional.cafe/@hungryjoe/113663950530589251
Joe (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] Not exactly what you had in mind, but now I just need a jacket to sew this on
David J. Atkinson@cstross Brilliant
Jmvars@cstross my phone does not automatically scan QR codes, is this a feature on newer phones?