Every­one has seen them and many know what they do. The famil­iar “beep” when one passes over the reader at the cash register often rings in our ears and in Europe they are called EAN on the back of a book ISBN. Whatever you call them, they are those lovel dark black lines with a num­ber under­neath on the back of a good or on the back of a book. IN the BDSM world this has been exploited as a mark­ing by the slave register. Once registered and assigned your cer­ti­fic­ate you can actu­ally down­load a PDF with your gen­er­ated bar­code which will trans­late to your num­ber on the certificate.

Num­bers are a little bleak though, no one likes to be a num­ber and you are quite restric­ted in what you can express, unless you all of a sud­den start talk­ing in bin­ary code. The industray has recog­nised this a long time ago and thought of a clever way on how to con­nect the off­line world to the online world. Behold they have come up with some­thing, it is called QR which is short for “Quick Repsonse” and was developed in Japan by a com­pany called Denso-Wave. Without going into the nitty gritty detail of 2D Mat­rix encod­ing these niftly little pic­tures allow you to encode char­ac­ters you want in a vari­ety of char­ac­ter sets and you can encode up to 4296 alpha­nu­meric char­ac­ters. Which is a lot.

The other good thing about QR codes is their abil­ity to provide you with Error Cor­rec­tion, which means if the tat­too artist screws up or your slave’s tat­too fades after 15 years, most read­ers will still be able to con­struct the right con­tent from the pic­ture they are presen­ted with and that works up to a stag­ger­ing amount of 30% (so if 30% have been des­troyed, that is how much can be recovered).

Just think about the pos­sib­il­it­ies, you can tat­too half your slave’s life onto her neck, ass, cunt or wherever you want to have it, up to 4296 char­actes count­ing whitespaces that is. That should give you ample amount to play with though. I would ima­gine that it can end up being a little, uni­ver­sal pro­file. That is what I am pro­pos­ing here, a uni­ver­sal slave pro­file which can be encoded in QR.

My sug­ges­tion is some­what like this:

• Name: jane smith
• Nick­name: babygirl
• Status: owned
• Owner: Jon Doe
• Play: yes
• Lim­its: no per­man­ent mark­ings, no scat, onwer must be present
• Homepage: http://blah.com/her_profile

In QR code this would look some­what like this:

It looks com­plic­ated and prone to error when somone would try to tat­too that onto the human body, but I am sure that you can cre­ate sten­cils on a com­puter and as this pic­ture is scaled up to a reas­on­able size, it should become easier to mark the flesh. Altern­at­ively these can be etched onto a plate or any other means of tag­ging or mark­ing your property.

Google has a fairly easy API to gen­er­ate these graph­ics on the fly, have a look at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

I hope you have enjoyed this little trip into geekland and hope­fully we can build on the idea. If you are a tat­too artist or know tat­too artists, maybe you can ask them whether this is pos­sible or not.

Reader devices for QR codes are fairly easy to find, most cell phones can be used, provided they have a decent cam­era and there is soft­ware avail­aible for them. As iPhone user I have an applic­a­tion installed on mine which enables me to read QR codes. Most people carry their phone with them, so read­ing a slave’s tag should never be a hassle.