The invention of the 1D barcodes revolutionized supermarkets and general market management. But shortly after their introduction, their disadvantages were clear. There was an instant demand to be able to encode (编码) more than 20 alphanumeric characters (字符) that the traditional barcodes could hold.

Denso Wave, a Japanese company, at the time, was in the business of manufacturing 1D barcode scanners. Listening to feedback from users of the 1D barcode scanners they were selling, they put together a development team to come up with a solution.

One of the key targets was to ensure that no matter what barcode they designed, it can be scanned very fast. It took the team nearly 18 months, and eventually they came up with a barcode that could hold up to 7,000 alphanumerical characters and could be scanned up to 10 times faster than any other code at the time. In 1994, the QR Code was born.

The QR Code quickly spread outside of Japan and were approved for many standards globally. But that wasn’t the end of the development of the QR Code. After all, nothing is perfect at its beginning and people soon began to present more requirements to Denso Wave. The variations (变体) of the QR Code were soon developed.

One of the biggest reasons why the QR Code has been able to be used widely is that Denso Wave made the decision to make the QR Code publicly available. This means anyone can use it without paying any fees. Denso Wave do hold a patent for the QR Code, but have declared that they have no intention to exercise it.

It wasn’t until 2002 that the first smartphones came to market with the QR Code scanner, and this really accelerated the technology. Once widespread on phones, almost anyone can read these codes and doesn’t require expensive hardware to do so. It is believed that Nokia is the first to bring this technology to a mobile device.

An IT company from Finland has developed a new font(字体)which uses machine learning to rewrite bad language into kinder words.

More than a third of bullying(欺凌) takes place online, and the numbers are on the rise, according to a report by the United Nations’ educational organization UNESCO. TietoEVRY developed the Polite Type font as a new tool to deal with online bullying among kids, pointing out harmful language and causing users to pick kinder words.

As users try to write hurtful English words, the font will automatically replaca them.

Writing “I hate you” would, for example, result in the milder “I disagree with you” when Polite Type is used on the computer. Sentences such as “you are ugly” is replaced with “you are not traditionally beautiful” while rude words are blurred(使模糊)completely. The company says it is the first example where a blur has been used as a symbol in a font package. Racial slurs(种族歧视语)are replaced with the racial group the slur is related to, rather than blurring the word entirely.

The vocabulary of the font was co-created with teenagers from Finland. The font’s library of words was chosen to include language from different origins, religions, and world views, and will make adjustments as more people and businesses use it. In the future, TietoEVRY suggests that machine learning could be used to teach the font to understand how language is used. Polite Type can be now downloaded and used for free.

“We want bullies to rethink the words they use and the actual meaning behind them,” said Kia Haring, global head of communication and sustainability at TietoEVRY. “I hope that our cause acts as a wake-up call for all audiences to consider how bullying could be handled.”

Improve Cloud Security

Sensitive customer data has constantly been found exposed on cloud servers without password protection. To ease the problem, database software makers have been trying to make security easier for cloud database managers. At the Enigma Conference in San Francisco, Kenn White, a security manager at database software maker MongoDB, will describe a new technique, called field level encryption, to make data safer on the cloud.

Field level encryption works by scrambling data before it’s sent to a cloud database and rearranging it in order when the data is needed for use. The promise of the product is to protect the contents of a cloud database, even if bad guys access it.

MongoDB’s new feature comes as more and more companies move user data to cloud servers, rather than run their own costly data centers. It was predicted that cloud computing would be a $214 billion industry by the end of 2019. That would be up more than 17% from 2018, when it was $182 billion.

Companies have rushed to the cloud without understanding all of the possible security consequences. Many companies have left countless databases exposed, revealing personal data. A database containing details about who lives in 80 million US households was left unprotected in 2019, just like the data on Facebook users.

Database managers want to store their data in an unreadable form, but they also want to be able to find specific pieces of information in the database with a simple search term. For example, someone might want to look up health care patients by their Social Security numbers, even if those numbers are stored as random characters. To make this possible, field level encryption lets database managers encrypt a search term on their machine and send it to the database as a query. The database matches the encrypted version of the search term with the record it’s storing and then sends it back to you.

This approach only works with specific kinds of data. For example, field level encryption isn’t useful for long text entries, like notes in a patient’s medical chart, because you can’t search for individual words.

Still, for data like account numbers, passwords and government ID numbers, field level encryption protects data and maintains a usable database.

Most importantly, White said, it’s simple to set up. Database managers turn it on with a one-time configuration change when they set up the database. “That’s really powerful,” he said in an interview.