Slashdot Mirror
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."
Silly. There are thousands of possible reasons why someone might want to work with graphical images of banknotes other than counterfeiting. Blocking all those legal uses to prevent one illegal use is a violation of our rights.
Took about a minute to foil them...
Can GIMP plugins be closed-source and still be compatible with the GPL on the GIMP?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How comfortable would you be using a "counterfeit deterrence system" that you had no idea how it works. Makes you wonder if it also has the capability to "phone home" when someone tries to make anything remotely resembling a banknote, or whether there are back doors.
"...U.S. law, which allows color reproductions of U.S. bank notes so long as the reproductions are smaller than 75 percent or larger than 150 percent of actual size. The reproduction must be one-sided, and all materials, including graphic files that were used to make the reproduction, must be destroyed afterward. "
I used to work on Television Commercials and the Ad Agencies would all go nuts over those rules anytime we did a commercial that showed ANY US Currency (think Lottery Commercials...)
Fairly Realistic "Fake" Money Exists that can be used for showing huge piles of Cash and it's handy when you do need to have the appearance of money blowing around all over the place.
But sometimes the job entailed filming a SINGLE US banknote and the Ad Agency would insist we use "Fake" money because they did not want to get in trouble with the Treasury dept. Never mind that the image was going to appear on a TV screen, it existed on 35mm film before going to videotape.
What really pissed me off one day was when -on set- the Art Director was complaining that the "Fake"Money we were using did not look "real" enough. *sigh*
The "fake" money we were using was as real as the US Treasury allowed. There is a printing company in California that comes up with this stuff for the Film Biz and they had been through many generations of "fake" styles. Each generation looked better than the previous one.
Apparently one of their "styles" of "fake" bills went too far and the US Treasury confiscated the printed bills AND the plates used to print them.
I've made a bunch of "REAL" money over the years in overtime and other things thanks to the Ad Agencies confusion over the interpretation of this law.
I like microcars
Taken to extremes, will Adobe build in Child Pornography checking? Or scan your hard drives for incriminating pictures or files? Where does it end? And why is something I buy for editing images checking and deciding what I can do with the files I create?
At least, this could open Adobe up to legal problems - if their checks fail and someone is 'allowed' to do what should have been 'prevented'.
All in all, it sucks. If I wanted a counterfeit currency checker, I'd buy a 4.95 felt tip pen.
Software (and to a lesser extent, hardware) prices are based on percieved value. When Microsoft charges $400 for Office, do you really believe that R&D cost them $350 for every copy? The upfront cost was in the tens of millions, but the cost to print the CD, box and manual is right around $5. Does that mean that we should be paying $10 for office? After all, a 50% profit margin is pretty good, right?
Adobe doesn't charge $650 for PS-CS because their costs are high. They charge that much because that's what the market will bear. That's what it seems to be worth.
-- Hamster
I see where you're coming from, but in my experience, development doesn't work like that. Nobody just drops some mystery code into their product and releases it (can you imagine this code breaking some other feature and Adobe tells their customers "well, the Fed. told us this code would work...sorry 'bout that"?). Features like this are typically worked into design specs and engineering specs. It also needs to be integrated into their codebase (even if they were just a bunch of precompiled methods) -- it needs to interface with their software somehow, no? Code like this also has to be tested, which can be a pretty major undertaking. Furthermore, for every change that's made to any part of the code, features like this (and all others) are usually tested in regression.
While Adobe may not have spent time developing the code itself, I'm fairly certain that this code adds to the bottom line of development costs...which also adds to the bottom line of the product cost to the end user (unless they tack that expenditure onto some other product).
In the end, we all pay for a "feature" that we don't want...even though we do pay for it, we'll never notice (unless we're counterfitters, in which case, we'll either use a different product, or find a way to easily circumvent the "feature"). It's downright lame and it's not their job to enforce the law. Besides, what's illegal about scanning in a $20 bill? I can think of 10 legitimate reasons to do just that right now.
What's next, anti kiddie-porn protection? At least the code will actually prevent a law from being broken (unless you're taking baby pictures and your kids like to be nude...it happens).
-Turkey
What I want is the Gimp plugin that adds the "Eurion Constellation" or whatever it is to my picture so that Photoshop won't open it. I think it would be quite funny to start trying to put the magic watermark as many places as possible, making Photoshop break as often as possible.
I personally have zero respect for companies that go out of their way to cripple their product in one way or another. Software has enough unintentional bugs without the developers deciding to break it on purpose.
Plugins are considered a stand alone program, and as long as you distubute it as a plugin without distrubitng Gimp you can release a closed source plugin, and you can charge what you like for it, much as macromedia has released a closed source flash plugin for Mozilla (that I don't use)
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Oh, trust me, we did get found out, and the SS did come "pay us a visit". They laid out what the consequences were, which i'm not afraid to admit scared the shit out of me, and we assured them it was just a one-time prank. They decided not to press charges since it was a small-time deal and we didn't seem to be serious about it. I never found out who squealed, though the little "talk" did discourage me from trying it again.