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Photoshop Fails At Counterfeit Prevention
JediDan writes "Wired reports that the 'Anti-counterfeiting provisions in the latest version of Adobe Systems' flagship product have proven little more than a speed bump, but company representatives insist that including them was the right thing to do.' Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for professional digital imaging said, 'As a market leader and a good corporate citizen, this just seems like the right thing to do.' Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable."
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable.
Maybe they should just skip the product and go directly to printing the money.
"From Adobe's standpoint, all we're concerned about really is that it doesn't have a performance impact on customers, that it's stable and doesn't cause crashes and that it's not going to produce false positives -- that it's going to tell someone that a picture of someone's grandmother is a $20 bill," Connor said.
That's good, because there's nothing like having a top-of-the-line imaging program tell you that your grandmother looks like Andrew Jackson. Yikes!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Let's all forget about counterfeiting, and concentrate on Photoshop's real purpose: pasting celebrities' heads on nude bodies.
This just in, the GIMP is providing an optional anti-counterfeiting plugin, for people who want it. Seems fair.
That's awesome...let me fire up my dot matrix printer and I'll be in the money in no time! Woo!
The anti-salmon
The fact that Adobe's products aren't affordable is yet another anti-counterfeiting feature. Users who can afford Photoshop have more money (and thus less need to counterfeit) than the general population.
The next version promises to be even less affordable, to the degree that no matter how rich you are, you'll have to counterfeit money just to buy it--thus ensuring that you don't use it to make the counterfeits!
but it's not like you can go to Best Buy, pick up a scanner on sale, and start counterfeiting money.
I want to BestBuy last week, and sure enough, right there next to those little photograph printers, was an illegal currency printer. The side of the box said,:
HP Illegal Currency Printer (USB)
Plug and Play technology
System Requirements:
Pentium II 200 MHz or better
128 MBytes Ram
Windows 98/NT/2000/XP
Note: Does not work with Adobe Photoshop CS
Don't forget HP Bank Note Paper and Ink Cartridges (HP-ICP-701).
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
This feature was asked for by the US government. Adobe is probably being reimbursed by the goverment and in return, Adobe promises to include this feature. In otherwords, it would probably make the product less expensive to produce.
The Television Wiki
Development effort for protection scheme: $150,000
Cost in added crypo components (100,000 units): $1.2 Million
Look on CEO's face when some kid in Sweden breaks the copy protection 12 hours before the product is officially released: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there are gullable shareholders.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The answer to this wonderful question is knowable through the simple process of "Ancedotal Induction."
At some point during the development of the mentioned version of the application, someone in product management induced a design constraint along the lines of "don't enable counterfeiters." None of the other product managment types cared because "we'll get that for free from the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group."
Product managmeent gave this new design constraint to a behind-schedule-implementation-manager. This poor guy said "sure", because, well... they're paid to agree with product managment. Especially since it was something "we'll get for free from the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group."
So the behind-schedule-implementation-manager went to the engineering team and said "we need to add counterfeit deterrence, give me the schedule impact, but I've already decided it shouldn't take _any_ time at all, because we'll get it for free from the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group."
The engineers decided immediately that actual counterfeit deterrence would require software slightly more capable than the average bartender, and that there was no good place in the image processing design to hook in something like that anyway. However, since it wasn't their code that'd take the blame when it didn't work... who cares. They told the implementation manager that it'd add as many hours to the schedule as they were currently behind and went back to work.
Eventually, the component (let's be realistic: an old version of a dll, and the wrong typelib, and a corrupted Word document claiming to be the "design document and manual) shows up in an engineer's inbox. He hacks it in on a branch to one part of the image import processing logic, fires up the build, and doesn't see it crash. It gets merged back to the main line immediately.
The last it was ever heard from before shipping was when someone from the test team called some friends over to "hey, look at this"--whereupon he showed them that you could get really good quality images of currency... but only if you used the "raw" settings from the twain image capture page.
Next stop