On Thursday 02 October 2003 12:09, Ped wrote:
> The e-reader itself can't have too much DPI IMHO, it has to
> be cheap? Or not?

I was thinking more along the lines of cheap inkjets not
producing enough contrast at the edge of the dots. I actually
have no idea how 2-dimensional barcode scanners work (apart from
the kind that acquires the whole image at once and analyses it
in software, like that 2D-barcode-based "color fax" software
someone was selling about 6 or 7 years ago.)

It also struck me that perhaps no one was able to get the cards
to swipe because (a) the barcode is actually done in MICR
(magnetic ink like the numbers at the bottom of checks) or (b)
there's an embedded magstrip or RFID tag or something in the
card. Of course, either of those situations would be pretty
easy to discover if someone actually sacrificed an e-reader and
dissected it, but I haven't seen anything like that on the web
to date.

By the way, the creation of any program that encodes or decodes
the barcodes will probably need to be done outside the US, due
to the DMCA. The makers of that Cuecat barcode scanner claimed
that their nearly standard barcode encoding was an effective
access control mechanism, so Nintendo certainly could do so,
especially if the resulting data stream has encryption that
needs breaking.

Rob