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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."
great, another protection mechanism that's easily sidestepped by the real crooks but manages to irritate legitimate users
Hmm sounds just like software companies that are conned into spending boatloads of money on elaberate copy-protection schemes which are broken in days instead of hours.
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable.
No kidding. And that only starts the downward spiral. Once your software is over a couple hundred dollars a lot of people who would like to pay for it can't afford it. Those people either use it without paying for it, or don't use it at all. Either way, they aren't paying, which leads to a further increase in cost to the remainder who are buying. And on and on...
I almost choke when I see the prices on some of the software bundles, especially Adobe.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I'm sure they weren't really trying to make it impossible to counterfeit, because it would make so many other image processing tasks more difficult, or at least increase the program's overhead. All they have to do is make a cursory effort to sort of say that they tried. Then again, I'm not too clear on the reasons for doing that either, maybe good PR? Still, it seems like it should be pretty readily apparent that this is an impossible task. They probably stopped all the fourteen year old kids counterfeiting perfect 20s, though.
-1, "1337" speak
From the article: The inner workings of the counterfeit deterrence system are so secret that not even Adobe is privy to them. The Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group provides the software as a black box without revealing its precise inner workings, Connor said.
So Adobe just plugged in an OCX in their program or something similarly easy. It's not this "feature" that bloats the price tag, I'm afraid.
Also, why all this secrecy on the "inner workings" of the software, when it's so easily circumvented (e.g. copy and paste from another app)? Why should scanning money be illegal? It's ridiculous - it's like banning knives because they could be dangerous. It's not the technology, it's the use you make of it. I don't understand why politicians fail to understand this simple concept: technology is not evil or good, it does not pose new moral problems. It's always the same problems, just with a different twist in the details.
My Stack Overflow user
I am an amatuer photographer. Its really funny how just about EVERYONE I know who is into photography has a copy of photoshop. Hmmm... They can't afford a new $500 flash, but they can afford $500 for Photoshop.
Its obvious to me the Photoshop is way, way overpriced. Now, Adobe is free to charge whatever they want for it, but the average Joe is not willing to dump $500 on software.
True, counterfeiting software is not a "right", but its bound to happen when companies overcharge. Why do you think people are so quick to download music and copy CDs?
[FromTheMorning]
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable
First off, every company spends time/money for R&D on features or products that never even reach the consumer, let alone generate a profit. Any company that hasn't done so would take over the entire planet in a short amount of time.
Secondly, Photoshop has been expensive for the last decade. Do you really think they sat down 10 years ago and budgetted 50 million dollars to add an anti-counterfeitting feature? You charge what the market can bear. And the market has been able to bear a $700 price tag (or whatever they're charging). As proof of this, I submit the fact that Adobe is still in business.
It's fine to whine about MS charging $XXX for products that aren't anywhere near the best tool for any job, but Photoshop is an incredible tool and worth every penny.
Never assume that a device, law, or drug does exactly what it's supposed to do, and nothing else.
How about, instead of insulting people and their intelligence, you give us a easy to understand explanation of why this person is wrong since you imply that you know so much about economics.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I think the point is that including anti-counterfitting measures in a product that is designed ostensibly to touch up photo's is both ridiculous and inappropriate.
:)
Counterfeiting is specifically illegal, and is Not Our Right Anywhere, I did not see any suggestion or insinuation that it ought to be. However, having to pay a "big brother tax" for ill-conceived or impossible to implement "crime prevention" features is an idea that many find offensive.
On the other hand, while almost everyone I know uses photoshop, almost no one I know has actually paid for it, or could afford it. Obviously their crime prevention abilities are somewhat limited
For whom? The $ dependency reaches from the US Government into the taxpayer wallet.
IOW, maybe we should all buy the rest of the product, as we're already subsidizing it anyway.
I guess I could warm to the nannyism, if it actually prevented lawbreaking.
I have no way of knowing, but I Guess the Illegitimate Might Procure something else for their dark deeds.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Hmmm - but do you think the right time to complain about things like that, is when they already made their way into the law? It seems it might be more effective to make your concerns known earlier than that.
They say it's not going to hurt performance, and I'd like to see this verified by comparing load times of large hi-res images (as used by graphics professionals every day) between previous photoshop versions and this new crippled version.
Even if such a test turns out to reveal whatever might arbitrarily be perceived as a 'reasonable' performance hit, it doesn't leave me overly inclined to upgrade (I am a licensed user of Photoshop 7.0.)
No matter how you bend it, such a black box is by any definition yet another a crippling feature, an abomination to productivity even if you never need to scan currency.
But what if you do? No law says you can't use currency texture for e.g. a finance related site. The mentioned two-week 'maybe' turnaround time on the written permission and dubious-quality sample set from the Bureau of Engraving is laughable for anyone in the graphics biz with deadlines measured in hours, not months.
While the black box spews a browser window [with a traceable referrer? someone post the URL please] and stops the load and does nothing more, you CAN evidently bypass the 'feature' without problem after this initial nuisance as described in the article. You just need to WORK a little more and your smooth graphics pipeline has suddenly become crippled and bent with a couple needless ninety-degree turns as bothersome as those in the Breezewood, PA I-70/I-78 interchange (but without the tacky motels).
So why is the black box even THERE? It's just ANOTHER performance retarding stopping block. Back in the day when Adobe first started bundling the annoying Digimarc watermark stuff with Photoshop, I was bristling over the substantial performance hit it had on everyday photoshop work. I DOWNGRADED to the previous version and stayed on that for several years.
Eventually the PCs increased in CPU muscle enough that it was no longer an 'issue' for me, and perhaps the digimarc stuff in the latter versions of photoshop was optimized, or whatever. All I'm saying is, THAT useless black box was there in the first place, so THIS is just another. Which one comes NEXT? Where does it END?
Will Photoshop, the good corporate patriot citizen, commission additional black boxes to detect things like:
- Drivers' licenses and passports
- All government-issued papers
- Corporate trademarks (with database of associated legal depts)
- Barcodes (cue:cat redux)
- Celebrities imagery of which subject to royalties
- Heads of state and top bureaucrats (to stem the fark.com floods of Dubya photoshops)
Gotta love feature creep. But no worry, soon as PCs clock 10 GHz, you will barely notice the extended load times.