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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...'
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... ^.^
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?
I try copying the new twenty on a Canon CL5000 and it came out black. Old twenty no problem. 100, too. This is USD.
From Adobe:
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
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
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
It's a tool that doesn't work right and that has arbitrary restrictions built into it that are not disclosed. What's next - looking for a little RIAA watermark in an image and refusing to work on those?
There's a typical argument trotted out of "there's no legitimate reason to do X therefore you shouldn't complain if you are prevented from doing X". Typically it just shows a lack of imagination for the person making the argument. There are many good reasons why I might want to work with an image of currency. My child might be writing a report for school about money. I might like to have pictures of money on my desktop. When my wife gave birth here in Japan we had to pay the hospital bill in cash. I have a picture of hundreds of 10,000 yen bills since I'll probably never have that much in cash in hand again. What's wrong with me taking that picture and using it?
We're starting to see more and more software that won't allow you to do "X" because someone thinks it's naughty. We stand at the beginning of a new age as products become "smarter". The political thinking and attitudes that we develop now about products that are "good guys" preventing us from committing crimes will be with us for some time. Would you like automobiles that do not allow you to speed? How about a hammer that refuses to break windows?
They do. I work for a major manufacturer - all of our colur machines have this feature and will actually lock up, displaying an error code.
However - even if you managed to somehow work around this, there is still a way (which I will not disclose) to find out on what machine (manufacturer, model, serial number) a color copy was taken. Supposedly another legal requirement.
(And yes, I have seen it and does work...)
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.