Slashdot Mirror
Photoshop CS Adds Banknote Image Detection, Blocking?
Phosphor writes "A visitor to the Adobe Photoshop-for-Windows Forum (registration required to post, can log in as guest) has described a curious 'feature' with Photoshop 8 (also known as 'CS'). Seems this latest version of Adobe's flagship product has the built-in ability to detect that an image is of American currency. Something has been built into Photoshop's core coding that can detect something in images of currency and will prevent the user from opening the file. Apparently it will also do this with Euro notes; info on other currency is pending." According to other online reports, the latest version of Paint Shop Pro has similar restrictions, also known about since late last year.
'This application does not allow the unauthorized viewing of pornographic images...'
I remember hearing an urban legend that copy machines also have a secret counter that detects when money has been copied.
Does this include, for example, the "new $20?" (Or the "old $20" that didn't have the cartoony numbers.) Or is it imprecise? Will different denominations work with it? Inquering counterf---minds want to know... ^.^
I believe many photocopiers have somewhat similar detection and preventitive measures for people trying to copy U.S. currency (printers too I have heard). Really this is one of those things that I know people will gripe about, but I cannot see a single real scenario where this truly makes a problem for anyone.
Now, aside from the fact whether this is a good or a bad feature, but will localized versions of Adobe photoshop CS be detecting local currency, or will they only have routines for U.S. dollars?
:D
I don't want to feel left out, what if I wanted to use photoshop to make some fake Canadian money?
These kinds of restrictions must be placed in hardware (although I think it is idiotic in nature anyway) if it must be enforced, because I could scan it, save it onto the hard drive, load up Gimp (or any other unrestricted software), change the serial number (or add other alteration), and send it to the printer.
I think the hardware I describe does exist, somewhere... perhaps someone can enlighten us about those.
Oh yeah, I do wonder what might happen if somehow this 'feature' may prevent opening of normal, user files (although unlikely).
Hmm... how about any possible DMCA issues surrounding all this?
Please direct all bug reports to
I try copying the new twenty on a Canon CL5000 and it came out black. Old twenty no problem. 100, too. This is USD.
I mean why would they voluntarily add this feature? It makes you wonder if anyone was pushing their buttons about it...
I hope Adobe has a special version for the Treasury Department that doesn't have this restriction!
Photoshop scans every image, and even the clipboard, for banknotes. Since the algo seems to be pretty smart (rotation etc. doesn't matter) i guess it's rather slow. People have been reporting that CS is slower than PS7 on the adobe forums for a while, i guess now we know the reason.
keep it simple.
I find it interesting that the Slashdot community is upset about this 'protection from counterfeiting', but isn't up in arms about the required product activation. With more than half of SlashDot using the Windows platform, you'd think there would be more concern about this.
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
What does the program look for in the bill to decide it is one? Is it looking for seals, or layout of the bill or what? It might be interesting to see if this might be extended to other potential counterfitting items, like bonds or identifications. Or is it already, anyone know?
Oh my, I think Dave just turned into a bear.
I have Photoshop CS on my workstation and I must say this new 'feature' doesn't work very well.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Three days after releasing the new dollar, a forger was caught by Polish police. He made a $1, "hand-made", just for skills and proof-of-concept, but Polish police detected hard to notice mistakes. US police experts when asked about authenticity of the bill couldn't believe it was forged as it passed all their tests and only after pointing out the mistakes by polish experts they admitted it's forged.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You'd need a picture of the money to compare against, right?
More likely, some data corresponding to the internal representation of the image recognition routine.. Perhaps a frequency-domain representation..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I was using Photoshop 7.0 on OS X and ran into a similar problem. I was scanning a Versace ad from a magazine (it was for a random class project), and I needed to be able to blow up a portion of the ad a reasonable amount. I planned to put it on a large print, so I scanned at 800dpi. Photoshop apparently saw some sort of watermark in the ad itself (or the magazine page, it was in one of those gigantic fashion mags with like 500 pages, 8 of which are content) and refused to allow me to do anything with it other than resizing. I scanned at a lower dpi (400), and was able to circumvent the problem. Seemed kind of ghetto to me, though. I haven't tried it under CS, but I'll bet the watermarks exist there, as well.
The first obvious project is to locate and trivially disable the check. This is no harder than disabling routine anti-piracy checks, and we all know those are solved within hours of release.
:D
The second, and far more interesting project is to the reverse engineer the check itself. It would be facinating to see the US government's own algorithm for flagging/detecting US currency. It would then be almost trivial to embed a false "US currency" flag in almost any image. You could post your entire porn collection on the web with an invisible bogus "US currency" watermark
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Well, there are most certainly legit uses for banknote pics.
Ever try to buy numismatic items online? You really need a pic, both for identification (the note with Timashev's name is worth way more than the one with Shipov's) and for checking quality
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Just wait until Adobe gets payed off to include corporate logos from being scanned or altered either. Seems far fetched? Well...just read my sig.
Life is not for the lazy.
We used to sell photocopiers in our family business around 18 years ago. I remember when the first copier came in, a Sharp, the police also came for a visit not too long afterwards. They wanted to know who was buying it, and expressly forbid either us or any customer from photocopying money. Now, we were very curious, so one of the salesmen took a Canadian $50 and copied the one side of an 8.5"x11" 20lb bond copier paper. To be honest, it was far too glossy to be passed off as a bill, and the paper didn't feel right. Still, in a stack of bills it could easily be passed over in a bill counter if it was properly aligned, which in and of itself was impossible. Essentially, it wasn't feasible. Anyway, fast forward to today, all color copiers come with a currency copying detection system. They detect the paper notes of most major currencies, and if anyone attempts to copy them, a flag is set in the machine such that the next time it gets serviced it actually informs the technician, who then informs the police. I believe some machines even cease operation until a technician is called. It's basically a big mess, so any potential criminal would still be better off using a PC with scanner and inkjet printer, which is how most counterfeiting is done AFAIK.
I don't think they would include a complete copy of currency at all (and if I'm not mistaken, it's illegal to do so unless the image is 50% smaller, or 150% larger than an actual bill.)
What does that mean in a digital-image context, in which image sizes are determined by resolution, anyway? How many pixels are there across a US dollar?
So hopefully, with a little trial and error, one could simply use a piece of paper to mask out some of the marker, scan, move the mask, scan, repeat as necessary, and then stitch the images back together. As others have pointed out, you may have to do the printing with the Gimp or some such, but it's a small price to pay :-)
(This is similar to a technique used by a British counterfeiter of US currency in the 70s, except he had to overlay dozens of pieces of negative to make his plates.)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
I recently evaluated several models of color card scanners to scan drivers licenses and when I misplaced my license I grabbed a bill out of my wallet and tried to use that to test.
Much to my surprise, the bill got about 30% in before the was a pause and the rest of the scanned image was blank. I tried again and got the same results. I turned it around, all four orientations and got the same results. About 1/3 of the bill goes in then scanning would either stop or go blank (depending on scanner).
Curious, I cut out piece of post-it and put it over different parts of the bill. I found that putting a piece over either the beginning edge of the portrait, the entire bill would scan, albeit with yellow section. By repeating it, I could in theory stitch together a complete bill.
This made me wonder...is there something that the Secret Service has forced image scanning and editing providers to adopt? These were all rather cheap scanners, a couple seemed like overseas knock-offs. Yet they all seemed to exhibit the same behavior! That seems a remarkable coincidence.
Perhaps there is a barcode or something near the portait, perhaps not visible to the human eye, but completely noticeable to a scanner (some kind of moire pattern or whatever). Something that is consistant enough to flag in the scanner drivers.
Then again, flat scanners don't seem to have this problem, although the story goes that each will embed its information into the scans to allow for tracking.
Anyway...maybe I'll just hang on to my ancient Asus a while longer...I don't necessarily care to scan money or not...but if *someone* can get this kind of image checking in the drivers of half a dozen card scanners...who knows what else *someone* can get in there?
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
In the police museum in London, they have examples of British 50 penny (5 sided coins) that have had the 'corners' filed off to make 10 penny pieces. I understand the offenders were indeed Irish.
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
In New Zealand, all the notes have a transparent section. If Euro notes and American dollar notes had the same thing then counterfeiting would be next to impossible.
This transparent section would easily be checked even in a dim bar. If you can't see through part of the note, or the transparent section has the wrong shape - call the police!
-Nivag
Hmmm. New potential revenue source for Adobe: Recognize watermarks in images and direct you to a website where you can buy a licensed copy of the image...
Actually, it might be fun to scan a dollar and do a tcpdump of the network. I wonder if the program is calling out anywhere?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Got a new HP Scanjet 5p scsi scanner some years ago when $400 for a scanner /was/ absurdly cheap. I hooked this up and of course the first thing to be scanned was a brand new crisp bill. We scanned, and scanned it, and never could get it scan right. Here we finally had a scanner to play with, capable of 16 million colors and we could only get grayscale!
Finally it dawned on us that this could be an anti-counterfitting measure. So we took out another bill, one that wasn't crisp from the fed and we got color. We repeated the experiment along those lines. Conclusion, the scanner would not scan the color of money! If the bill was even a little bit worn, it would scan correctly, but not if it was still shiny. Note to any feds, never did tried printing any, had no printer.
I think the most important security feature of US currency is the paper. According to some show on the history channel, most counterfeits are found because 'experience money handlers' i.e. bank tellers notice a difference in the feel of the paper.
And apparently most good counterfeits are made by bleaching the ink off of $1 bills and printing $20 bills on the paper.
--
lds
If you try and scan or copy a bill, the scanner or copier will lock up and require service. When it's service it will be plainly obvious to the service technician that you tried to copy money.
Most scanners and copiers already have this protection built in.
No Wonder Photoshop CS Seems Slow - It's Analiyzing Images For Content!
Brian NoSpam - 10:02am Jan 7, 2004 Pacific
We received a TIFF image from a customer, of a $20 bill. The image does
*not* violate any laws regarding reproduction of currency (it's not even
close to actual-size, and it's not a "flat" portrayal - it's wavy, as if
it's fluttering in the wind. Nor is it real-color.
However, Photoshop CS refuses to open the image, and provides an error
message regarding the (il)legality of currency reproduction and an
"information" button that takes you to the web. (Photoshop 7, of course,
has no such qualms).
What the hell is this? In my book this is completely unacceptable -
Photoshop is an image editor, not a censor, government policy enforcer
or anything else.
Adobe, you've got some explaining to do.
Brian
I work at an large investment bank, doing graphics. Guess what one of the analysts' favorite images is? The final designs never are confused with the real thing (although there is occasionally the guy who wants something modified for an internal joke). For one thing, we almost always end up using small portions of bills in collages, and they are printed off-color and off-size to avoid snagging on the fair-use copyright law.
But we still have to start from the base root-of-all-evil image. And using portions of the bills means scanning them in at higher resolution as the fragments are used larger than normal. I just tried pasting the image somebody posted into a new copy of Mac version of Photoshop CS (this jpeg has "specimen" written on it twice). PS CS pops up dialog: "This application does not support the unauthorized processing of banknote images."
Can we still copy little fragments? How about taking high-res photos and pasting in? Our department haw always used common sense regarding fair use and never had a problem; we do high-volume output, and don't have time to screw around with this stuff. Thanks for making our life harder, Adobe! You just lost one upgrade sale, because I will make sure we keep a copy of PS 7 specifically to circumvent this hassle.
Has anyone tried running the new bill through a 2 d fft spectrum analyzer (FFTPro?) process. It might be interesting to see what, if anything new is there. -- Geccie
This is a copy of a post on the Adobe forum, which is now slashdotted:
---
Markus G. Kuhn - 03:45am Jan 8, 2004 Pacific(#106 of 110)
How it works:
For those of you curious about how this algorithm detects a banknote, here is a slide of a short talk that I gave to our local research group soon after I discovered the "EURion Constellation" two years ago while experimenting with a new Xerox color photocopier and a 10 euro note:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf
The algorithm looks in the blue channel of a color image for little circles and most likely examines the distance distribution encountered. I have discovered a small constellation of just five circles (a bit like Orion with the belt starts merged) that will be rejected by a Xerox color photocopier installed next door from here as a banknote. Black on white circles do not work.
These little yellow, green or orange 1 mm large circles have been on European banknotes for many years. I found them on German marks, British pounds and the euro notes. In the US, they showed up only very recently on the new 20$ bill. On some notes like the euro, the circles are blatantly obvious, whereas on others the artists carefully integrated them into their design. On the 20 pound note, they appear as "notes" in an unlikely short music score, in the old German 50 mark note, they are neatly embedded into the background pattern, and in the new 20 dollar bill, they are used as the 0 of all the yellow 20 number printed across the note. The constellation are probably detected by the fact that the squares of the distances of the circles are integer multiples of the smallest one.
I have later been told that this scheme was invented by Omron and that the circle patter also encodes the issuing bank.
This is already evident due to the fact that they've released two different $20s in the last 6 years.
I speculate he Treasury Dept/SS discovered counterfeiters having a great deal of success using Photoshop in their operations. They must have approached Adobe and encouraged them to add a feature to deter any future use of their software in that fashion.
Adobe was probably trying to do the right thing. Or they didn't want a tangle with the US Treas. if this was the case.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I was able to scan, save and open a 10 and 20 dollar bill no problem. Scanned at 300 and 1200 dpi without a hitch.
When does this kick in? I see nothing from preventing me in making Andrew Jackson bedsheets!
I opened a very detailed image of a 50 dollar bill yesterday to create this for a fark photoshop contest. It didn't stop me from opening the much larger picture of the 50 and copying it into the jobs/mayer picture. I used PhotoshopCS. Guess this story is bogus.
According to the Secret Service, color reproductions of currency may be made as long as all of the following conditions are met:
So, if this rumor about Photoshop is indeed true, it is worrisome that Adobe would choose to censor it's users and prevent perfectly legal reproductions of currency.
Your example made me thinking about legitimate uses for currency scan photoshopping. Numismatics. There are countless sites like ATSnotes that post scans of banknotes. Certainly there are cases when you need to open Photoshop to clean the scan, adjust the colours, etc. Apparently, Adobe felt that they have the authority on what activities are permissible. I fucking hate them. The only thing that prevents me from boycotting Adobe is the fact that I use pirated versions of their soft anyway and don't actually use Photoshop (PhotoImpact more pleasant to use.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Print your counterfeits on Crane's Crest Fluorescent Opaque White. Doesn't have the red/blue fibers, but the feel is almost identical. Print out your next batch of resumes on this paper. Your resume will stand out from the others because is "feels more valuable".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I also ran into the block when trying to paste the jpg (also, thanks). Cutting and pasting the image by using long thin strips worked best, so as not to get a full image of any remarkable feature of the bill. What's interesting to note (no pun intended... :( is that once the bill is fully pasted into Photoshop, you can then save it as a PSD and re-open it in Photoshop with no problems.
Working along the same lines, (using Mac OSX) I then pasted the jpg into Preview and exported to a Photoshop document. It opened with no problem! It seems almost as if Photoshop just doesn't trust any "unreliable" source of image input.
==========
support the arts!
www.smadness.com
On the Bureau of Printing and Engraving's website, we can find information on Conterfeiting Laws and Reproduction of Currency.
While it's legal to make certain reproductions of currency, I think it's Adobe's right to write code however they want, and it's your right to purchase image manipulation software by other manufacturers. Adobe would be stepping into a messy legal area if the software reported the use of currency images.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Full disclosure: I also work at Adobe, on Photoshop, and am passing along this reply
c.f. Article at the Adobe User to User Forums website
Kevin Connor - 06:33pm Jan 8, 2004 Pacific (#269 of 319)
As someone at Adobe who was involved in the decision to include counterfeit deterrence in Photoshop CS, let me finally provide you with a response to all of these concerns and questions. Sorry for the delay!:
Photoshop CS does indeed include a counterfeit deterrence system (CDS) to prevent the illegal duplication of banknotes. The CDS was created by a consortium of central banks from around the world. We, along with other hardware and software manufacturers, have included CDS in our products at their request to address the threat posed by the use of digital technologies in the counterfeiting of banknotes. There are other software products from other companies that already use this same technology. There are also hardware products that use the same or similar technology. For example, most color copiers sold today will not allow you to copy currency.
As digital imaging technology advances, becoming more broadly available and user friendly, the old barriers to currency reproduction are becoming less effective. The unscrupulous are taking advantage of the functionality that is being provided to the vast majority of honest users for the purposes of counterfeiting currency. In the US and around the world, counterfeiting through digital means is increasing exponentially, and retailers and the general public--including our own customers--are at risk.
Counterfeit currency is essentially a hot potato. Whoever holds it last, loses. The person who loses isn't necessarily the counterfeiter. There's no government body in place to "reimburse" people who, through no fault of their own, get paid with currency that turns out to be counterfeit. In our implementation of CDS, we've worked very hard to balance the need to protect these unsuspecting victims of counterfeiting along with the need to continue to provide a product that efficiently does what honest customers need it to do.
There appear to be several major concerns and objections repeated throughout this message thread, so I'll try to address each one individually:
1. Performance: CDS does not cause any noticeable slowdown in Photoshop performance. During most operations performed in Photoshop, CDS is not used at all. When it is used, the performance impact often is just a fraction of a second.
2. Legal use of notes: It is true that the current implementation of CDS will prevent you from scanning in your own banknotes even if your usage intent is entirely within legal boundaries. Regulations for using banknote images vary by country. It is the responsibility of the central bank in each country to provide images that can be used within the legal guidelines of that country. In other words, if you want to legally reproduce images of the new $20US bills on a Web site or in a marketing brochure, you can contact the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing for legal images that can be opened and manipulated in Photoshop CS. (You can visit them at www.moneyfactory.com.) Similar solutions should be available in other countries. If you find that your central bank is not providing adequate support to permit legal uses of their banknote images, then you should let them know.
3. Adobe's intentions: Please be assured that this implementation of CDS is not a step down the road towards Adobe becoming "Big Brother." We know that one of the reasons people love Photoshop is because it's an incredibly flexible tool that can be used for so many different things. That's also one of the reasons we at Adobe enjoy working on new versions. Finding ways to prevent you from doing things in Photoshop really doesn't interest us! Moreover, the CDS is not Adobe technology, but was provided by the central banks, who would have no reason to want to restric