Have worked with barcodes and product lookup software (that I helped develop), the data between the separator lines are what we used to look up the product.
I must admit I don’t know if the data separator lines are in fact read as 6 (but it wouldn’t surprise me). However the data was parsed from the scan gun, only the data between those lines was collected and sent to my program. It’s been awhile since I refined the original routine (program was still in alpha development when I took over the project for a major retailer). No, I never name them. But you would know them.
For my purposes, the product code was passed from the scan gun to my program which I converted to SQL to pull all the particular product data from the database. Certain products had a “supplemental” barcode which was required to augment the generic barcode to identify a particular product.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Mark of the Beast wound up being some sort of bar code or QR code. In fact, a QR code was offered to some, for their phones, to prove their “vaccination status”.
These are very disturbing trends in light of today’s (dark) world.
Further MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) like for check encoders (a friend worked on them when we were in banking I/T several decades ago) has become possible for tattoos. I have heard it’s been tested but I must admit I’ve never witnessed such in person.
As the RFID-tagging becomes more cost-effective, and it will, the following IBM commercial will become reality. In some places in the world, it has been in place for more than 15 years though it’s still not in widespread use in the United States.
I saw this on TV in 2007
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFhBGKU6HA