[voltagex_]

>“General speaking, we can make [a barcode scanner] to 'type' any keys to the host system, not only the 0-9 and a-z,” Yu said. He claims this lets someone create a boarding pass to “execute any command on computer.”

At a guess, they encoded Win+R cmd <enter> into a barcode. It's a neat trick with big potential.

[slaesche]

I'm still confused. This seems completely trivial.

[downer70]

The point being that it assuredly is trivial, but also potentially a gaping hole left open across a wide array of software.

In these sorts of situations, as with the Y2K bug, the problem is more often the product of social circumstances than technical circumstances.

Nonetheless, this doesn't prevent technical adversaries from preying upon the flaw, and taking advantage of social patterns of behavior, such as the casual tendency to presume barcodes are intrinsically safe.