I've never understood the hype about QR codes. They appeared one day, and then suddenly every advertiser made them a priority, plastering them all over everything in print. It has always seemed like undue obsession with something that, ultimately, is not that useful to very many people -- and that's assuming most people even know what they are. I was pleased to discover that I'm not the only one: the Guardian has set up a Tumblr called WTF QR CODES to catalog the many bizarre and inappropriate uses of the technology:

Most people look at a QR code and see "robot barf", but marketers seem to think they are a must-have technology for their advertising campaigns. In their minds, eager consumers wander around with their smartphones, scanning square codes wherever they appear. As a result, the codes appear just about everywhere, and often in some really absurd places.

The examples range from the fairly mundane (QR codes in the subway, where there is no data reception and where they are often located on the inaccessible side of the tracks) to the completely outlandish and even dangerous (huge QR codes towed behind airplanes, or printed on highway-side billboards).

There's one thing the article doesn't mention that I think is an important point: even if QR codes were popular, they would be a doomed transitional technology no matter how you slice it. Image recognition technology has been progressing rapidly and is already being used in products like Google Goggles, which means visual machine languages are going to be unnecessary. The tech isn't perfect yet, but it's already at the point that smartphones are capable of recognizing ads based on color, configuration and other indicators. As visual search becomes more common, consumers are going to get used to the idea that they can snap a photo of anything and find related information online—and the QR code will be officially obsolete (at least as a marketing tool).

Until then, I guess advertisers will keep slapping them on everything from bananas to condoms.

In a court ruling that came out a little while ago (just catching up now), Judge Richard Posner took the lead in an appeals court ruling that effectively reaffirmed the idea that police don't need a warrant to search mobile phones as they're arresting someone. Of course, this general concept is not new and I've discussed my concerns about police being able to search phones without a warrant in the past -- but this particular ruling does seem pretty limited. While Posner notes some of the bigger questions, he basically compares the phone to a diary, and focuses on the mere searching of basic data, like the address book, to suggest this particular search was limited, and doesn't raise any significant 4th amendment issue.

It’s not even clear that we need a rule of law specific to cell phones or other computers. If police are entitled to open a pocket diary to copy the owner’s address, they should be entitled to turn on a cell phone to learn its number. If allowed to leaf through a pocket address book, as they are, United States v. Rodriguez, 995 F.2d 776, 778 (7th Cir. 1993), they should be entitled to read the address book in a cell phone. If forbidden to peruse love letters recognized as such found wedged between the pages of the address book, they should be forbidden to read love letters in the files of a cell phone.

Effectively, the court more or less says that circumstances matter, and that in situations where there's a chance that data will get deleted or modified, it's perfectly reasonable to do a simple search of the mobile phone, but it could get thornier if it moves more in the direction of voyeurism, rather than as evidence for crimes. I'd certainly prefer much stronger privacy protections -- especially as a phone really is a window into much, much more than just a phone, but the ruling isn't much of a surprise and seems to align with other rulings on similar issues.