 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, at the Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover various commission activities and anything that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have topics presented by guest speakers and NLC staff, which is what we have today. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time Live. And we do a mixture of anything, presentations, interviews, web tours, mini trainings, whatever. And they are all recorded, so if you do not make it to one of our live sessions, you can watch any of the recordings that we have now. Almost two years worth. We started this in January 2009. Yes. And also, thank you very much everyone who showed up today, the day before Thanksgiving. Sort of live for our session. That's great. We're here. So we're glad that you're here with us. Yes. Today we have Michael Sowers, our technology innovation librarian. My mind blanked at the Library Commission. Who does a monthly tech talk with us for this? And this is his monthly one for November. And I'll just let you take it away. Take it away? Okay. I can leave the room? No. No, no. I have no idea what you're talking about. Okay, great. Thank you, Krista. I think we're in rare form today. This could be interesting. As Krista said, I'm Michael Sowers, technology innovation librarian here at the Commission. And I do these once a month, usually on the last Wednesday of the month. Although we can move it around if necessary due to other issues. And typically I have somebody, kind of a guest speaker, interviewee for the session. And this month I don't. Oh, no. Not due to lack of trying or finding anybody. But there have just been two kind of topics that I thought really I wanted our listeners and watchers to be aware of and to deal with. And I figured that would take the majority of the time to explain them well. So I'm going to basically focus on those two topics today. Kind of do the show myself. And the first one has to do with some news in the Wi-Fi security world that will affect if you are offering public access Wi-Fi to your patrons in your library. And the other one is QR codes, which some people may have seen my presentation at the NLA conference. But I'm noticing we have a lot of people not from Nebraska and some people may not have been there. And on my way home from a recent conference I saw something that said, I think I need to take this on and tell more people about it. That'll be kind of the second half. So with that, what I would like to do to start with is I have a couple little survey questions of our audience. And so the first question is, do you offer free public Wi-Fi in your library? And if you do, if you could use the check mark in GoToMeeting, we have the check mark, right? Or don't we? Did I screw this up? Okay, raise your hand in GoToMeeting if you are offering free public Wi-Fi to your patrons. That'll work, okay. This is called Michael didn't check the interface before he wrote the slide this morning. Okay, so pretty much everybody. Everybody, but us. No, there's another person. Oh, one other person who's not... Okay, so all but one. Okay, that's good. Okay, great. So my next question is, do you... So I'm going to clear everybody's hands here. Okay, let me put that down. Okay, so next question. Do you require a password to access your public Wi-Fi, your open Wi-Fi? So if the answer is yes to that question, please go ahead and raise your hands. Raise your hand again. Yeah, again, please. And I'm going to sort by raised hands here. And I'm seeing two. All right. Okay, so where am I going with this? Okay, a little bit off background, and I'm going to remember my... Okay, so we're going to stay here for a second. I've done a lot of work here in the state of Nebraska with getting Wi-Fi into public libraries for the public. In fact, a couple of years ago, after I moved to Nebraska, I've been here almost four years. I saw a sign in a Wendy's along I-80 that said free Wi-Fi available here. I've also seen a few years back in Salt Lake City. I saw a sign for free Wi-Fi while you wait at a muffler shop. And after seeing these signs, I thought about it and I said, okay, really, the public library needs to be offering public Wi-Fi. And so we got a grant together here in Nebraska, and we ended up with 43 additional libraries, got some laptops and some Wi-Fi equipment, and we opened it up. And we've got, from what I can tell, a pretty good penetration of public access Wi-Fi here in Nebraska at our public libraries. And one of the questions that always come up when a public library offers open Wi-Fi is, should I put a password on it? And up until two or so weeks ago, my answer was no, don't bother. And here's why. Basically, the idea behind securing your Wi-Fi. Now, if you're doing this at home, you want to do that. You put a password on it and that way only the people who have the password can get on the Wi-Fi. And so that way my neighbors can't be using my internet connection. This makes perfect sense. It will also protect you from people snooping on your connection, which is a very good idea, which we'll get back to in a moment. But in a public library situation, if you secure the Wi-Fi, then you have to give everybody the password. And the analogy, which still does hold to a certain extent, giving everybody the password of the Wi-Fi is like locking your house and then giving everybody a key. It's no longer really that secure if anybody can get in. So go ahead, leave the Wi-Fi unsecured and tell your patrons through some sort of policy or login screen that, by the way, you are using an open Wi-Fi connection. This is usually what you get also in a Starbucks or anywhere else. It's very common. And that people who really know what they're doing can snoop on what you're doing over a public Wi-Fi. So don't do your banking over unsecured Wi-Fi, that sort of thing. Or make sure you're using a website that has its own security. And I'll give an example here. This is Dropbox, which is a service I use to share files online. And as you can see by the red arrow in the upper left there, I'm logging in with HTTPS. And I have that lock icon there. Now, depending on your browser, this may vary a little bit how it looks. But basically, I am now using a secure connection to Dropbox. This is the login screen. And then once I'm logged in, you'll notice that it is still listed as HTTPS. Sometimes that little lock thing is like in the lower right corner of the browser. Right, yeah. It depends on... You might have a look around to see where that little symbol is. Exactly. I think in IE, it might be in the bottom. And again, depending on your version of IE, Firefox, I think it's off to the right of the address bar. This is Chrome. You look for the lock, you look for HTTPS. And what's going on here is that Dropbox is using a secure connection during your whole interaction with the website the whole time. And this is good. I could now safely use this over an open Wi-Fi connection because it is secure. It's encrypting the transmission. And if somebody was to pull my signal out of the air, which you can do because this is just radio, they wouldn't be able to tell what I'm doing. Okay, that's a good thing. However, not all websites work that way. I'll show you another example. Here is Amazon. And Amazon, you'll notice I'm on the login screen for Amazon, and this is HTTPS. Nice and secure. That's good. Trouble is once I'm logged in and I start surfing around in Amazon, notice what has disappeared from this URL. There's no HTTPS there anymore. It's verified my identity securely, but I'm now surfing around this site unsecurely. And the question is, and I'm going to get technical here, folks. So if you've got questions, raise your hand. Yeah, it is tech talk, but I usually don't get this geeky about how things work behind the scenes. On a lot of websites, Amazon included, it will verify your identity securely so nobody can figure out what my password is because that was done securely. But then once I'm surfing around the website, what it's done is it has placed a cookie on my computer to say, you're now Michael. And we know that. And we know that, but it drops out of a secure connection. It's now back to an unsecure connection until you want to go like actually buy something. Now, this happens on other websites too, such as Facebook, such as Twitter in some cases. Now, this is starting to change literally as we talk because of what I'm getting to with all of this. So what is the logic of a website? Why? Why would they do that? Make it secure then not then again? Okay. It's kind of a historical issue. And we can get even more technical. But what historically these websites was that secure connections are more processor and bandwidth intensive. Now, that being said, Google Mail went all secure all the time about six months ago. And they've kind of proven that it's no longer processor intensive. They're still bandwidth issues, which I don't really want to get into. But there have been reasons to not be secure in the past to kind of make everything run a little smoother. Those reasons seem to have gone away with the advancement of technology. But you've got to do a lot of backend changes to turn everything secure again. So there's work involved. All right. In essence, this has generally kind of been the way things have worked. Then several weeks ago, a piece of software was released. And that piece of software is called Firesheep. And there's my sheep. I found that sheep. I noticed he's kind of looking at that Wi-Fi over there. Firesheep was released at a security conference by a security expert basically to prove a point. Now, what I've mentioned is that on unsecured Wi-Fi, everything's kind of in the clear. And you really had to have some know-how to figure out what people are doing over this open Wi-Fi. The software existed, and I've looked at this software. And I could go into a Starbucks and see everybody's traffic that's using the Starbucks Wi-Fi. But it's literally every piece of traffic, every single bit of garbage. It's this flood of data coming into my machine that I then have to figure out what to do with and possibly implement it. And if your password login was secured, I couldn't get your password. That sort of thing. So open Wi-Fi was the chances of somebody snooping on you were minimal. Possible but minimal. Here's what happens with Firesheep though. Firesheep is a free open source plugin for Firefox. Now, I want to stress here. This is not a problem with Firefox. This is a problem with Wi-Fi. It's a piece of software that works in Firefox. That somebody created to work with Firefox. So this is no reason to stop using Firefox. I want to make that perfectly clear here. Firesheep can be downloaded and installed. And actually, I've provided a link to it in the links. You can go to Google, type in Firesheep. You can go find it. It's not difficult. And what it will do, here's a screenshot of something I actually did. And I actually, I spied on myself. I was very hesitant to actually take this to, say, a Starbucks and start snooping on other people. There are legal and ethical issues here about using this software. Well, if you look at this, this is my copy of Firefox running Firesheep over here in the sidebar. And what I did was I logged into Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Google, Foursquare, Flickr, Yahoo, and Yelp. I logged into all of these websites. And what has happened over here in Firesheep is it knows that I have logged into those other websites. And not only does it know I've logged into those other websites, it's actually pulled my name or user name out of those websites. And it's pulled my avatar icon from each of those websites. So imagine what I could literally do is walk into Starbucks or Panera or the library with an unsecured Wi-Fi connection. And I could see everybody else in the building who has logged into those sites. And I can see their name and I can see their avatars. Not only can I see who's logged in, I could then click on one of those and immediately be logged into that service as them. There's the problem. There's the problem. So let's say Krista and I went to Starbucks. We both logged in on different computers. I could run Firesheep and see that Krista is logged into her Facebook account because what it's done is it finds that cookie that Facebook left on your computer because you're no longer secure. And it copies that cookie over to my computer and I can now impersonate you. And I can completely hijack Krista's Facebook account and change her password and do whatever I wanted with it because as far as Facebook is concerned, I am her. Post insulting messages about my mother. I could do whatever I wanted. Wow. Okay. This has always been kind of technically possible, but very difficult. You had to really be wanting to do it. Oh, I mean, yes. Be a full-on hacker guy. Yes, exactly. Way beyond my skill set. Okay. I might have been able to see she was on Facebook, but I couldn't necessarily get her password. And I would have really had to know what I was doing and know exactly what I was looking for to get your cookie and impersonate you and write some software to then take it over. This security expert literally wrote the software, so it is now point and click. You install it, you go into the library, you go into the Starbucks, you get online, and you can take over somebody's session on a certain number of sites. And I see we have a question that has come in. Yes. Someone wants to know, does the unsuspecting Facebook user need to be on Firefox as well? No. No. No, that's a very good question. Other user can be on any browser whatsoever as long as they are connected to the Wi-Fi. Okay. So just being a Firefox user does not save you from this. Using another browser does not save you from this. Okay. So this is scary stuff. Yes. Okay. This is very scary stuff. All right. So excuse me. The question becomes, how can a user protect themselves from this and or what can the library do or whoever's offering the open Wi-Fi can do to prevent this from working? Protect their customers, users. Okay. So the first thing I'm going to do is I am going to focus on what can the library do. Okay. Okay. And it's actually very simple. Turn on what's called WPA security. It's Wi-Fi protected access. WPA security on your Wi-Fi hotspots. Okay. And give it a password. Now, I want to point out there's another form of security called WEP or WEP. Completely useless and was broken years ago and can be gotten around in about 60 seconds flat without trying very hard. Okay. So you need to turn on WPA. Okay. And before I get to how to do that and in a little more detail, I forgot I added this slide this morning. I did a little survey on my website over the last couple of days and I asked people in library land, what have you done because of this problem? Okay. The big giant purple area, which is more than 50%, was basically what's fire sheep and or WPA? Okay. Not a lot of people in the library won't seem to know this. Now, it was a small sample. Fire sheep and fire sheep is very new. Fire sheep is less than a month. Yeah. Okay. But two to three weeks now. Okay. The green area was no, we're not going to turn on WPA. So these are libraries who have actually decided we're not going to do anything about this, which kind of scares me. We have two categories of WPA was already on before this happened. Okay. And one other small sliver there. This is yes as soon as I heard about it. And nobody responded not yet, but we're working on it. Okay. So this is why I'm doing this session. Okay. So what's going on here? Now, you're going to need to do this on your Wi-Fi router. And it will be, the instructions will be slightly different based on which brand of router you have. Okay. I know a lot of libraries in Nebraska have links as routers. They're the ones we gave out through the grant. And there are others. Okay. So I'm just using this one as an example. Okay. You should be able to read your manual or online help for your router as to where to do this. Okay. Well, what I've done here on my links is, I'm going to wireless and the wireless security. I've turned on WPA. And then there's different algorithms involved. And usually the strongest one is called TKIPAES. I'm not going to get into explaining it. Version of encryption that's being used. Okay. And then I gave it a password. And notice what I've said here under the balloon for number five. Okay. Feel free to pick an easy password for public access. Okay. I see we have some maybe other questions. Let me kind of finish this thought. For example, if you're the library, you can make the password library. Okay. In other words, and in fact what some people have done is you get to name your Wi-Fi signal like in Starbucks. It might be called Starbucks in the library. It might be called the library. Some people even suggested name your Wi-Fi signal. Library Wi-Fi password is library. Okay. Like give them the password in the name of the signal because what's going to happen is the moment you put a password on your signal, fire sheep dies. Okay. It can't get around a password that is on the free Wi-Fi. Now, the people who still really know what they're doing and have the technical know-how and really want to break through this might still be able to get around it because you're back to the giving everybody the key makes it unsecure at a certain level. But having a key or a password on your Wi-Fi signal at all under WPA breaks fire sheep. Fire sheep will not work anymore because it can't figure out the password to the Wi-Fi signal. So what I am telling everybody. Yes, go ahead. And what you're talking about that even by putting out your password what it is the people that really wanted to well now they have it and they could do stuff they could have done that anyways because they're the ones that know how to do this. Right. Yes. Yes. I think that you've suddenly given them an in that they couldn't have figured out in the before because they're the ones who are the experts that wanted to do this and be bad anyway. Right. Fire sheep irrelevant in their situation. Right. Yeah. No. Those folks are not using fire sheep. Right. They already have a way to do this and that's just something to deal with. Right. Fire sheep is mainly for the kind of lazy hacker. Yeah. What would be kind of called script kiddies. Yeah. The people who go, oh look there's a tool that will do this for me. I'm going to try it out. Mm-hmm. I mean. And look what kind of, to them, innocent damage I can do. Right. The same kids that think spray painting inside your car is he he fun. It's kind of an opportunistic use. Exactly. Exactly. So what you want to do is you want to remove that opportunity. Did we have an outstanding question? Yes. I just wanted to check. Dave maybe. He wants to ask you leave and log off and they log off. Do they still have the ability to access your accounts? Like is it left behind? You know that's a very good question. Quite possibly. It depends on whether the site deletes the gives you a different cookie each time or keeps the cookie. So I would, my answer to that is I'm not 100% sure but I believe it would be on a site by site basis. Because of what it actually is. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're on public live, I've gotten to the habit of last six months of logging out of everything and not having it remember me. And yes, I have to type in my password a lot more often. I don't even have websites remember passwords anymore. I kind of broke myself of that habit. But. I only do that at home because we have ours locked down. Yeah. Yeah. But even at work, I log out of things and you know, I'm starting to get that on my laptops. I log out of things. Because somebody steals my laptop. I don't want it to be still logged in. You know, it's kind of a thing like that. I would not leave anything. Right. While you're on someone else's computer. Most people that want an open Wi-Fi are going to be on their laptop. And you know, they have to remember. Yeah, exactly. So really, my recommendation here is every library offering public access Wi-Fi needs to, and I'm sorry to say it. I've been saying for years you don't have to do this. I've completely changed my mind because of this. You've got to turn on WPA security and you've got to put a password on it. Make it a stupid simple password. Make it library. Make it the number one. It doesn't matter for the point of view of Firesheet. That's really what it comes down to. I don't want to walk into your library and be able to do this to your patrons. I don't want other people to be able to do this to their patrons. I thought about testing this at a local public library and I didn't. I only used it on myself. Okay. But this stuff is so easy to use that you've got to work around it. Now, what about you as a user? Okay. There's not a lot of options. Okay. Option number one, don't use open unsecured Wi-Fi. Well, that's not what happened to you. I mean, you know, you're in an airport for three hours. You're probably using open unsecured Wi-Fi. I mean, you know, there you go. Two, if you really get into it, this is what I do. I leave my computer on at home all the time. I actually remotely connect to my computer at home and then do the surfing on my home computer. It's got a virtual private network. And that way, my connection to my home computer is secured over an unsecured Wi-Fi. Probably overkill for most people. There are some anti-fire sheep software plugins out there for Firefox. There are also some plugins out there that will alert you if anybody else is using fire sheep on the network. They're really stopgap. They're not really helping you, I don't think, in my opinion. The other one and the Electronic Frontier Foundation just updated this software. I've blogged about this before. I've talked about it in this show. If you are a Firefox user, there's a piece of software called HTTPS Everywhere. And when you turn this on in Firefox, if the website supports secure connections, even if it dumps you out of them, it will force you back into them. So that in between time, like in Amazon? Yeah. But it's not 100% and it doesn't work in every website. Okay? So... It's a little something. It's better than nothing. Exactly. Right now, your only really good thing is only use websites that secure everything and or only use Wi-Fi that's secured via WPA passwords. This software was released on purpose to make people secure their Wi-Fi and to make websites secure their transactions. And I've provided some links. We'll show you the links at the end to some podcasts from some security people that I listened to on a regular basis. And he was literally thrilled that this software got released because for years he's been saying people need to secure their Wi-Fi. And they're not. And they're not. Yeah, but that's what I thought was interesting about this when I read it up on it. And I did the crazy thing and I'm sure some librarians will cringe. I Googled it and I found the Wikipedia article about it. It was just a very basic overview of here's the students in the community. And I thought it was very interesting that this was not someone who, the person who created this software did not do it out of malicious reasons. They weren't trying to say, ooh, look what I can, this horrible thing. They did it out of altruistic reasons. They wanted to say, look, this is something that can happen and look, I figured out a way to make it easy for people. Somebody else could have figured this out. So it was for good reasons that they did it. It was not to be, you know, a lot of this kind of thing that you hear about with viruses and malware and whatnot is because people want to be dangerous and destructive. And this is a totally opposite reason, which I thought was very interesting. Yeah. And the last time I checked actually on the website where you can get the code for Fireship, there's a download counter. And last I checked, it was like over half a million downloads. Wow. Now some of it are people like me who aren't really going to use it. Right. Well, and the purpose for it was, as this guy said, was for people to get it and even use it to test and see, look, you're wide open. Use it on your own local Wi-Fi to see how somebody could get into it. So it was like a testing software for you at your library to get it and on purpose do this and say, oh my gosh, what? Yeah. Yeah. So here at the commission we have public Wi-Fi, but it is password protected. You need to ask us what it is. At my house I have Wi-Fi, which is not technically public, but the name of my Wi-Fi is actually my house address because now my neighbors know where it's coming from. But I've actually put a 63 character long random password on it. I just did it because I could. Trust me, it would take 30 million years to figure out what my password is. But I keep it on a flash drive and it's just a little tech. And so if somebody comes in with a new laptop, I just copy it onto their machine and type it in. And I have had to type it in on iPods. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I've never had to type it twice. I've always been very careful. But it's like numbers and letters and characters and punctuation. So I literally did it to prove I could do it. That's all. So anyways, I mean that's my talk about fire sheep and Wi-Fi security. I do have one more question. One more question? Good. Another question. Are there other programs out there like fire sheep we should be aware of? I don't know what I mean by like. Not to this level. I mean there is another, when I talk about the people who really know what they're doing, they're generally using a piece of software called Wireshark, which is the program that will literally grab everything it can out of the air. But it will literally dump tons and tons of data on year screening. You've got to figure out what to do with it. And I've used that to troubleshoot some things. I mean, I understand how it works in theory sort of thing. But. And for a lot of them, they're doing their own thing too. Yeah. Their programmers, they've created their own way of doing it. So it's not really that there's other easy quick grab program. Like there's tons of, I don't know if I'd say millions or thousands of add-ons and plugins for the Firefox. Firefox, yeah. Too many fires. And nothing this simple as this. Yeah, no. Nothing like this. It was done this before. That's why it's a big deal. If you have a full-blown network administrator, they know about Wireshark. I mean, they've probably even used it to troubleshoot your network. But again, then you've got to know what to do with that data. And that's the difficult part. Yeah. So yeah, nothing else I can think of that would really fall into this category of easy-to-use, straightforward and available. So any other questions about this issue, Firesheap, Wi-Fi security? Please, everybody, today, tomorrow, well, not tomorrow, over the weekend, talk to whoever runs your Wi-Fi, make them listen to this, although we probably won't have the recording up until next Monday. We might. We might. I'll try to get this recording up this afternoon. If not, it will be up on Monday. We can guarantee that. Make them listen to this. Like I said, there's other links. I'll show you at the end that you can get to. We will provide a link to the links in the recording, that sort of thing. Please, please, please, please, please, turn this on, protect your patrons from this. This is big. I almost didn't want to wait three weeks to do this. I had to do some research. I had to get it to work. I had to spy on myself. Okay. Any other outstanding questions on this? No? Okay. All right. So let's go on to my other topic. I'm going to kind of run through some of this a little quick because I gave a one-hour presentation on this and it looks like I have about 25 minutes. I didn't have too many slides. We'll find out. But I want to talk about QR codes. Okay. And there's an example of a QR code. Let's do another quick little survey. Raise your hand if you've ever seen a QR code. I'm not asking you if you understand it. Just raise your hand if you've seen one of these before. Okay. So a little more than half. About 50%. Okay. All right. I'm going to put your hands down. Next question. How many of you actually have used a QR code before? Know what that's going on here. Amy. Yes. I know you. Hi, Amy. That's Sarah. Okay. Yes. Okay. Just a few of you. All right. So let's talk about this. Okay. Why am I giving this talk again? Basically because I was away at Internet Librarian last month in October. And excuse me, this was also was Internet Librarian before or after NLA? After. It was after NLA. Okay. So I gave a QR codes presentation under state conference. And then I went to Internet Librarian and on my way back I had a layover at the Denver International Airport. And I saw this. This is a giant like six foot tall, 10, 14 foot wide illuminated sign next to an escalator. If you can kind of see the escalator running behind it there. Okay. And it read free books. And there were QR codes to Treasure Island, Moby Dick, and the Art of War. Okay. Cool. I'm in the airport. I might have nothing to read. I might want to read a free book. Okay. Now explain how this works in a minute. But here's what got my eye. Please notice down here who is doing this. Bank. A bank. A local bank. Okay. I'm sorry. I should have labeled this sign library fail. That should say Denver public library. Okay. Yes. Exactly. I mean, this is, you know, I don't know if I can, I can highlight my fail across the slide or something. I mean, this, this, this, this just, I mean, I'd already been talking about QR codes. I'd already been encouraging people to use them. And then I saw this and my brain about exploded. I was just like, this is so wrong. This needs to be done by the library. Now, can you afford to put an ad in the local airport? Airport. Probably not. Okay. But it's, it's, it's signs like these. It's signs like free Wi-Fi at Wendy's that make me think why is the library not doing this? Okay. So this is going to be kind of an upcoming crusade. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. But this is stage one. Okay. So let's talk about QR codes. It's a lot of people aren't necessarily sure. QR codes are what's known as a matrix barcode or a two dimensional code. We're all familiar with UPCs. Those little, or barcodes, those lines. Okay. If you're in a library, you know barcodes. Okay. Yes. You know barcodes, especially if you're into processing or circulation. Okay. Well, what a QR code is, is it kind of makes it into a square, gives it two dimensions instead of one, which is the lines and the thickness, gives it little blocks. And it can include way more information than a barcode can. Okay. A barcode, you have to have a certain set of individual character. QR codes can contain a lot more information than a barcode. Okay. In fact, this is how much information. Okay. If you are just numbers, you can include up to over 7,000 characters worth of information. If you want letters and numbers, you can do over 4,200 characters. Binary, kanji, we're not in Japan, we won't worry about those. But basically you can carry about four to seven K worth of information in a single bar code. Question? Comment? Awesome. Gene from Ohio County Public Library said, I just used my phone to scan this. That was just cool. Thank you. Okay. That's why I wanted to leave it on the screen a little bit to see if anybody could do that. She said this would be great for larger libraries. Not sure about smaller libraries. Okay. Well, let me give you some examples and we'll work with that. I'm going to run through a lot of examples here and kind of tell you how this works. By the way, I'm throwing the ubergeeks in the room who want to actually figure out how these things work. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to go over that. It's in the recording. You can come back to it. That's from the Wikipedia article, actually. Okay. What do you need? You're going to need some hardware and you're going to need some software. Okay. Basically any cell phone with a camera and the ability to install software that can interpret the code. Okay. So if you've got a dumb phone that has a camera but you can't install applications as Krista nods her head. That's fine. That won't work. Camera, great, but no software. Okay. So we're talking droids, iPhones, blackberries, you know, smart phones is basically what we're doing. Okay. And then what happens to the data depends on your phone too. Like if it links to a website, you need a data plan so you can actually go to a website. That sort of thing. Okay. Software. Here's just some examples. I actually use one called Barcode Scanner on my Android phone. Okay. Quick mark. There are others. Just pulled up a quick example here. You install those on your device. Okay. And then you go find some QR codes. Okay. Here's one actually that's in a store here in Lincoln that's linking to Google and we're a favorite place on Google. Notice there's a QR code. So I go, I wonder what this is about. So what I do is I open up my phone. Okay. And if you look kind of in the upper right here I have that Barcode Scanner software installed so I bring that up. And this is a little hard to see. But you can see that kind of red line across there. Okay. It's almost like a Cylon kind of thing. It's very faint. You know, it's on black. It's hard to do screenshots of some of this stuff. I would want that. I would get the red line and I would hold my camera up to the QR code. Now this will read bar codes. This also read QR codes. Okay. And what I would actually see in my window is what my camera is looking at. Unfortunately my screen shots software would not show me what the camera is seeing. I need a camera to take a picture of it. Yeah. I didn't go there. But good idea. I hadn't thought of that. Anyways. All right. So then what happens and I actually did scan a different example here. But in this case it's a, the next screen comes up and it says, hey, this contains the following information. My name for a person's name, person's email address and URL. Okay. And notice over here on the left where it says type it's this address book. So what my software does is it says, hey, I notice this is address information. Would you like to add this person as a contact to your phone? Would you like to send them an email? Okay. Or I can click on this URL and actually go to the website. Okay. Just lots of examples I'm going to run through here. Here's one where it actually links you to a URL. Okay. In this case it happens to be a maps.google.com URL. Now what's real cool here is this is from a copy of Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. And what they've done is they put QR codes throughout the book. The special edition of it. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I can now share this via text message, share this via email, or open it in my browser. And if I open it in my browser, actually this wasn't from that book. I'm sorry. But this actually takes me to a store on Essex Street in New York. Here is one where somebody actually crossed stitched a QR code which links to their Facebook profile. Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry. And here we go. And it took me to Facebook on my book. This one here links to a URL which took me to a realty site. Okay. I was just talking to somebody, and Amy it may have been you in the audience if I remember correctly. Going around looking at houses. And if the house, yes, there's the flyer, but there's also a QR code attached to the house so that you can get more information on your mobile device. Amy said yep. Yeah. Okay. That was Amy. Good. Thank you very much, Amy. In Sonoma she said it was. In Sonoma. All right. Here's one for Gotham Guide. This is actually a travel guide around New York. Okay. And that takes you to, in this case it says viewer available. All right. Okay. Well, let's view that. And what it actually did was it actually took me to an audio file about the building I'm standing in front of. Cool. Here, this one was kind of cute. This was on, I think, on a sticker that said you are and you had to read the QR code and the last one was next. They're just being cute. So you are next. Also, there's another application I have on my phone called App Refer. This is just another use for QR codes. And what this does, and I've actually done this with Angela at UNL. Actually, she also has an Android phone. It pulled up a list of applications I have on my phone. And she went, oh, well, I want one of those apps. I said, okay, so I picked it and it gave me a QR code for it. And then she took her phone, scanned the QR code, and it went to the store for that piece of software there so she can install it on her phone. So you can like share it. Right. So instead of saying, okay, go to the store, search for this. I just say, here's a QR code on my screen. Please scan it and then she has it. I thought that was pretty cool. Now, library ideas. What can we do with libraries? I have some examples. Here are some other ones. Hours, branch locations, call number locations, tours, art descriptions. These are all ones I've heard about. And I have some actual examples. Here's UNL libraries. I was actually at Love Library about a month or so ago, maybe two months ago. And in this case, what it did was it linked to the hours. So this was on the door. Lincoln City's libraries also does this. They have QR codes next to their hours. You can bring that up. So all they're doing literally, they're not putting all the hours into the QR code. They're linking to a web page which has the hours, exactly. Oh, in fact, here's Bennett Martin, Lincoln City Libraries. There's their QR code. And again, that links off to their website. This one was pretty cool. This photo I took actually got featured in an issue of American Libraries Direct. This was, it's a little table talker. Okay. And it's got a QR code that says, hey, you know, we have health and wellness resources at linkinlibraries.org. Then click on research tools. Then click on research resources. Or scan this QR code. And it took my phone right to their databases. Right on my phone. Now, how will the databases work on a phone? That's up to the vendor. Well, that's, yeah. That is not related to this. But I got there. Right, exactly. So I scanned that. And it took me right to their researchers page. Okay. The Beacon Shawnee County Library, which those of you who know this show, know we've talked to David Lee King, who's the head of their digital initiatives out there. The digital branch, excuse me. I use them as an example a lot. They're doing a big read of the Maltese Falcon. And they're actually having a QR code-based scavenger hunt around the city. The whole city. Yeah. I've not, I've not looked into this much more yet. I've been really busy. But I just, I think that's what's up with this. Okay. Here's another cool example that I found on Lifehacker. These are flashcards that you can't cheat on. Because the answer, you have to scan with your phone to get the answer. The answer is not on the backside of the card. So this person actually made QR codes of just text of what all the answers were to their flashcards. Okay. So, you know, there you go. Another interesting idea. Here's the Around the World example. Okay. This is a publisher called Ubimark. And you literally, as you're reading along, you can scan QR codes. I scanned one that was connected to a map on my screen. What it literally did was it took me to a Google map of where the balloon is at that time during the story. So I kind of interactivity sort of thing. Okay. And then I can get more information and it tells me, you know, over a thousand people so, you know, it's, it was being user. And we're at 7 Saville Row and usually you get a little balloon icon and they pretty much customize that. Pretty darn well. That is pretty cool in making the whole story and trying to make it a little more interactive. Yeah. Exactly. Scan another one and this actually took me to the online text. So if I'm on chapter 28 and I've got well, you know what? I'm going to put the book down but I'm going on the road. Another book that's come out with some QR codes in it is a book I'm currently reading called I Live in the Future and here's how it works. And what they've done is they've in the beginning of each chapter is a QR code connected to a website about that chapter and discussion forums and whatnot. So a little less interactive in a different way. I don't want to say less interactive but interactive in a different way. And in fact I even pulled up I found a picture of this book that's the QR codes built. Okay. So I though there's something weird to me about the idea of holding an electronic book and scanning something with your phone so you can get it on your phone from the electronic book. There's just some sort of recursiveness starts happening there and the world explodes. But anyways. So while those blue on black are really bad don't worry about it. I was not thinking I do have all these links and delicious we'll show you. But there's lots of websites out there where you can generate your own QR codes. It's really easy to do. Literally it's filling out a form. We do post up these PowerPoint slides for the presentation. I will make Michael change this before we put this live. Yeah. That's probably not a bad idea. But let me let me bring up one of them here just to show you an example. Literally this is the QR code generator from the Zing project and you basically get a question for example a phone number send just plain old text link to a URL so let's say I want to link to a URL okay and we're just going to link to whoops I got my cap clock on and I'll see .state.ne.us and I want a large barcode maybe a smaller medium I just click generate and there is my large barcode that is now just an image I can save that image I can copy and paste it I can do whatever I want and literally now somebody scans that code and it gives them the ability to link directly to that URL I have one on my home page of my website that's contact information so you can get my name my email address I can link my phone to my other things like that literally that's all you need to do that's the cool thing too is that someone like you can put it out there for people to get to me but it's not to create them it has nothing to do with software you have what phone you have it's just to access them afterwards I've seen lots of other I've seen and heard about lots of other interesting examples love library at UNL has also got one set up it's one of these old university libraries where there are like half floors and east side and you can get lost in this very easily you can set it up they've got it set up so that if you're on a floor you can scan a qr code and then get a map of the floor of where everything is on your phone so you can take the map with you on your phone I've heard of examples where they're adding qr codes to the opac so that you scan the code for the book and it will show you then it will show you where you're scanning the code I was talking to somebody else where they were going to have their library work with the local historical society to put qr codes this is jasmine in fact we'll be talking to her in January to work with the local historical society to put up qr codes on historical buildings but have the information hosted by the library on their website so that you scan the qr code in the building and it links you back to the library okay you got to reach out and that's from the connections to the rest of your community making the library the heart of the community US parks have started putting qr codes on their signs like out in the park like Yellowstone I think was one of the examples and you scan the qr code and you get a video from YouTube of a park ranger telling you about where you're standing I mean park ranger with you yes exactly literally take the park ranger you know this assumes you have a data connection to your phone in Yellowstone but you know you never know but it seems to work or else they wouldn't have done it exactly so you know Yellowstone seems to be covered I mean the possibilities here are basically what information do you think your patrons might want on their mobile device if you can find an answer to that question you can generate a qr code that will do it I mean basically that's it I think creatively yeah I mean and what's funny is all it's going to always nobody has any of this but it's not going to take any money it's just going to take some time you got to make the codes I don't want to know how free the person who created the flashcards I don't want to know how long it took them to create all those qr codes individually and copy and print them and then paste them on it I mean it was work but it didn't cost anything that's the thing all these code generators all this is free exactly no software to purchase or yeah like with my wifi grant I got so excited about public wifi I could offer a grant there's no grants here you should have made a grant for the time yeah yeah exactly I mean grants will hire somebody to do it I don't know maybe but if you got any ideas as to how we can help you Nebraska libraries with this please let me know if anything you know give me a call send me an email I'll talk to you more about it there are ideas out there that we can share with you just real quick there are a couple other types of codes out there there's what's called a micro qr code these are usually used for like inventory and sort of thing like 35 characters okay and then Microsoft because Microsoft always has to do their own thing this is actually kind of cool though they call it the high capacity color bar code and I have an example right here on the screen it uses triangles instead of squares and it uses color and it's actually as far as I can tell infinitely expandable qr codes have an upper limit okay you can just keep making these bigger with more triangles and it can contain up to 3500 characters per square inch alright well because once you add triangles take up less space and then once you add color you can do that right exactly and if you install pieces of Microsoft tag you can do this however I've never seen these in the wild so qr tags though are out there qr codes once you see them you'll just start looking ads in airports like every other ad in that airport had a qr code in the quarter it's becoming like standard slapping qr code magazine ads just start I haven't seen them on television yet but I have seen them at the end of youtube videos I've seen them at the end of movie trailers I've seen them in movie theaters on scan this bar code and then take it up for free popcorn they're out there and you're gonna start seeing more and more of them big in Asia first really starting to pick up here in the states and I kind of cheated here you know I'll show you where the links are but for those of you I'll leave this up for a minute if you want my contact information or if you want a link to the links on your phone I know at least one person in the audience can scan these I did it before I know Amy can probably a few others we'll have a traditional paper yes we this is just like now that you know how to do this exactly here's another example any questions are there any already come in nothing new okay we start about five minutes I have about five more minutes let me show you the links and talk about one other thing here is the links to my version of on my delicious account for the official archive we will also copy these over to the commission's delicious account and have an official link to this but right now delicious.com slash travel librarian slash tech talk plus November 10 which is 2010 not November 10 so if you want to see previous ones it's tech talk plus October 10 September SEPT 10 I think things like that or just tech talk without the date and you'll get all of this stuff I've talked about tech talks the one other thing I wanted to talk about real quick is Google made an announcement like Monday I think where they're going to have a feature they haven't released it yet that will allow you to work on your Google docs in office oh I saw a headline okay yes yes but it's not out yet they just announced it it's like internal testing sort of thing okay this to some people is super over cool okay because then you don't have to go to Google docs you just open it up in office and it downloads it from Google docs allows you to edit will allow you to actually co-work on things while you're in the office with that really really cool if you're a Google docs user if you're impatient there's already something I've been using for over a year that lets you do practically the same thing called office officeink which I will bring up here officeink.com and what this will allow you to do it won't allow you to co-work on documents in office but it will allow you to edit anything from Google docs in office so basically it gives you another ribbon toolbar for officeink and you say show me what's in my Google docs account it logs in it shows you you open it it downloads it you edit it you click save it sends it back so ultimately and it's free see free download ultimately the Google version might be better I don't know it's not out yet but I know people had been reading about this and I just want to let you know that there's something that will practically do this already I've been using it for over a year it's really handy that way I don't have to usually offices open on my computer I don't have to go off to Google box to edit that so that's kind of my one other oddball not necessarily big news but news that you might want to be aware of questions comments concerns I'll go back to the links page pretty much everything I talked about I will also point to episode 272 of security now which is the podcast I was talking about that's one where they specifically talk about fire sheet for the majority of the program episode 273 is what they call a Q&A episode and some people have some questions about fire sheet that kind of clarifies some things so you might want to listen to episode 272 and 273 if you have any interest or involvement in computer security at all listen to the security now podcast I've been listening to it for five years now it is a lot of podcasts if I miss an episode I just oh well I miss the episode and I go on this one I miss an episode in fact I just got caught up with a four week back lock of these episodes I listen to this these guys are it's Leo Laporte I've just totally forgotten Steve Gibson is the security guy he's a genius and he can explain things that make sense to people who are not super nerds or super geeks if I understand it you can understand it too sometimes though you do have to listen to some things like wait a backup but really good if you want a little if you want more technical detail about fire sheep and why WPA beats it and kills it that podcast will explain it so you know anybody else I explained it to the best of my ability if you want more detail listen to that one I will specifically point out are there questions outstanding your comments and I took on my hour we did have a comment back sort of on Twitter if you notice in the beginning we have our slides we do have a hashtag for Encompass Live that we use and sometimes during the session when I'm on here I will tweet out interesting things just to say what we're talking about and I sent out the link to that photo of the bank picture of the QR codes and then my airport and we do have a comment from someone or someone we may know Karen Dalziel here in Lincoln those books and I was going to mention when this picture was up and we kind of went past it and so I didn't get to it she said free read on us ha ha ha way to use the public domain bank those books that were on that step that's one thing I was going to mention those are all the kind of the books they're free not that the bank paid something to get access for them for you they're public domain already they're shown if you notice the titles they're not copyright protected they're out there free anyways so the bank didn't do anything special to get you access they just made the QR codes and set it up so that's something you can do to your library you don't have to pay to get access to special books there are ones that are already out there that you can just create QR codes for and yeah and in fact if I remember correctly I tried one and it doesn't even link to try to remember I think it linked to a bank web page which then linked you to the book on project Gutenberg yeah go there find the link use it in our case at a library I'm sure we would give credit in that way say get this on project Gutenberg actually no I wouldn't even do that I would go one step further they're in the public domain and project well okay I would give credit for project Gutenberg but what I would actually do is I would download a copy to the library's website because in the book file it says from project Gutenberg so their credit is there right so or you know to be honest you know it says you know instead of having to say first bank I would say you know link in public libraries link in city libraries and link directly to the book don't make them go to the library website then click on another link to get the book just link to the garden book you kind of got the credit there you know that's the yeah cool that Karen mentioned this as something I wanted to say when this slide was up but we went on to other things yeah these are public domain yeah I've been meaning to write a blog post and then I decided to talk about it here but I think I still will and I will probably add library fail to this because yeah it's just it's a spectacular idea why didn't we think of it and if we thought of it why aren't we doing it I mean that's really what it what it probably comes we should be for all the banks idea thanks bank yep okay yes we just have a couple that said thanks it's been fun someone had lug off thank you thank you very much everyone for attending as I said this has been recorded and will be available this afternoon we'll see how quick it gets uploaded right yes and we hope you'll join us next Wednesday December 1st oh in December where we will have what we're calling fall conference roundup our next encompass live session the library commission provides grants to library staff around the state to attend conferences they may want to go to and we have a couple of people who have attended couple conferences one about circulation and one about volunteer coordinators conference and they're going to talk about their experiences at these two conferences and getting the grants and everything so that'll be our next one next Wednesday 10 a.m. so hopefully we'll see some of you there that's it that's it that's it yes thank you everybody for attending oh that's nice oh Laura says happy Thanksgiving oh yeah yes yes I almost forgot that that's tomorrow so we're up to happy Thanksgiving thank you for coming and showing up the day before I guess you all have to be at work so do we yep and Dave McStourford from the city this is the most informative webinar I have ever attended wow uh oh we're going to take that I'm in trouble next month right now somewhere yeah how are you going to I'll have to interview Dave no we've already done that yes okay alright thanks again see you next week bye bye bye