Tinkering with my Mini and thought I’d take a pic and share it in case anyone else was interested.
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You should probably edit out that QR code as it may be leaking unique identifiers.
I can confirm that the quality of the image is good enough to scan the QR code right now.
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Good idea, done.
thanks for bringing that up. what is the minimum resolution the image would need to have to be QR-code-scanable ?
I don’t know, @reC. My comment was strictly based on having done exactly that!
If it’s a perfect image, 1 pixel per element of the barcode should be enough. On top of that there is ECC, so even a few broken pixels might be OK.
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Doesn’t Purism disable the Intel Management engine? What significance does the QR code have?
Exactly. You don’t know. So why would you publish it on the internet?
For all I know it could be the initial unique random password and the user hasn’t changed the password yet. (Any half decent recent network equipment will work like that but they don’t usually provide the password as a QR code.)
If you know the significance of the QR code then you can make a judgement regarding what risk you are taking by publishing it.
Since this is Purism hardware, presumably you can ask them what the significance is and you would trust the answer.
If I had to take a guess, I would say it’s a (unique) serial number. So it isn’t ideal to be publishing it on the internet, particularly if you lose custody of the computer at some future time. The risk of the serial number being exposed on the internet by the computer itself is less severe when you use exclusively open source software.
On the overall scale of risks, it probably isn’t a big one. I just thought it appropriate to give the user the choice.
