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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 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.
Maybe the government requested it?
Government requested that we put it in HP scanners several years ago. We refused as it was technically highly infeasible, if not outright impossible.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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
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?
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...
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.
This is a copy of a post on the Adobe forum, which is now slashdotted:
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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.