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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."
They thought it couldn't be bypassed?
/sig
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.
It's all about deterrence not effectiveness. Adobe just needs to show they made a good faith effort to stem this sort of illegal activity so they can't get nailed when someone dupes a ben franklin.
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
Have you considered they might have been pushed?
I thought that was Humpty Dumpty....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Digital artist Kiera Wooley circumvented the restrictions simply by cutting and pasting a bank-note image from another graphics utility into Photoshop.
how else would you open an image of currency?
great, another protection mechanism that's easily sidestepped by the real crooks but manages to irritate legitimate users
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable
Please, stop making comments on what they should price their software until you take some rudimentary economics courses.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The article says the counterfeit detection scheme was provided to them as a black-box piece of code. They didn't even develop it, and don't actually have any idea what it does or how it works! (Didn't a previous article include a fairly detailed explanation? Something about circles in the blue channel or something? Their solution? Request approved images directly from the government.
This flies in the face of science.
This comment has a description and a useful link.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
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.
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
somewhat clever, but nothing too impressive. Import needed currency image from another program, even earlier versions of Photoshop, then use, save, print as usual, no more image checking is done.
Rather than blast Adobe for including this, a better idea in my opinion is to be somewhat grateful that there's no constant checking in place to waste CPU cycles, or slow down graphic developers everytime an image is saved or loaded.
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.
It seems that it would take one hell of a scanner to produce a passable currency note with the really, really tiny writing. Shouldn't that be enough of a deterrent for a while longer? I don't doubt that some people have that sort of equipment, but it's not like you can go to Best Buy, pick up a scanner on sale, and start counterfeiting money.
Adobe is required by US law to include anti-counterfeiting measures into their software.
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
No. The previous article was about Photoshop containing anti-counterfeiting measures. This article is about it being circumvented.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
"Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable"
They didn't spend any R&D time on the anti-counterfeiting aspect of Photoshop CS.
From the article - "The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group"
Also, their products are priced fairly for the power they have. Photoshop in particular is an invaluable tool, and it's easily possible to get back the money you've invested in it by using it to design many different types of media.
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
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable.
:
and
from the but-the-secret-porn-filter-works-great dept.
So, what do you mean ?
A little bodily activity is more useful than preventing contrefacon ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It was third party code, no? Thus it had little effect on their profit-making.
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!
Silly. Using photoshop has nothing to do with my rights online.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Took about a minute to foil them...
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]
http://www.moneyfactory.com/document.cfm/18/103
(Bureau of Engraving and Printing)
The poster just didn't RTFA
"The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organization established by the governors of the G-10 central banks to promote the use of anti-counterfeit devices in the computer industry....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."
Is secure and anonymous digital cash, not stupid gimicky features or restrictions on technology. The Chaum patents expire in 2005, so we only have a year or two to wait for someone to make a good implementation of them.
Stupid patents. Do more to stifle innovation than they do to help.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I doubt there's ever been as much scanning & loading of bank notes into Photoshop and as much awareness that this was possible. All thanks to Adobe's nannying attempt to stop it. One wonders how this happened. I mean did the Secret Service ask them or did they do this all on their own, it seems very strange that they'd instigate this feature by themselves unless they were trying to head off legislation.
Oh well, looks like we have another counterproductive attempt to control what people do with technology.
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.
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.
Wow, I'm sure Adobe has NO idea what's going into its own products, they just copy and paste government code in like THAT without even looking at it.
When the counterfeit deterrence system detects an attempt to access a currency image, it aborts the operation, displays a warning message and directs the user to a website with information on international counterfeiting laws.
That sure beats a Goatse redirect.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Or rights period.
If you don't like the way they build their product, your RIGHT is to NOT BUY IT.
I was just a few days ago pricing Photoshop CS. I need to buy it for my new business.
It's over $800 Cdn!
No frickin way am I paying that much. $300 would be more reasonable.
I'm just going to get Paint Shop Pro instead. What is Adobe thinking? I want to buy Photoshop, but I'm not stupid.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
Adobe had to know going in that this would be easily circumvented by genuine crooks while frustrating legitimate users with legitimate reasons to include currency in their editorial, creative and commercial graphics. It was a stupid measure and should be removed ASAP.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
"Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable."
I'm sure they are just printing their own money anyway.
Does it only detect features on American currency? I would much prefer to bootleg money from a country that wouldn't hunt me down with a "Secret Service", if I were a criminal.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Never assume that a device, law, or drug does exactly what it's supposed to do, and nothing else.
Other Photoshop CS users said they had successfully imported bank-note images by ... scanning an image in pieces and reassembling it in Photoshop.
I don't even want to think about the reasoning here...
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.
Need an image? Look at this!
Well counterfeiters will use something other than Photoshop or will use Photoshop 8. As there aren't enough raster graphics programs out there. This isn't going to stop crooks so I guess it's a useless measure. Making money counterfeit proof is the answer. They wasted precious programmer hours to do it and the final costs are also supported by the people who actually buy Photoshop. So I suppose this is how Adobe is cutting down costs. They failed to make any new innovations and this is what they do to justify a new version. A friend who's a graphics artist told me Photoshop CS is exactly the same as Photoshop 7, save the version number increment.
Just what we need, more suspicious code included in already closed source software. Wonder if it calls home when the "black box" is tripped.
First iteration of software feature doesn't fix problem 100%. Therefore, we must abandon all attempts at the feature.
Does that mean the Linux kernel will be removing virtual memory and the ext2 filesystem?
This 'feature' is already trespassed! Take a look in this forum (Dutch, sorry). It says there that when you scan multiple bills you won't get an error, and even when you crop them one-by-one, you're still not stopped in your job. Screenshots available.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
Does that mean software like the GIMP is illegal?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Anyone who believes this must also believe that Microsoft is trying hard to lower costs but just can't do it. Face it, this software reflects what they think the market will bear, not what it costs to develop. A few years ago when Photoshop 5.x was out, they also had a "Lite" version that cost about half as much as full Photoshop. Thing was, you could also get the exact same licensed software free with a $100 Maxtor hard drive. Anyone who paid the full price for the "Lite" version was a real chump, but I'm sure there were plenty who did, and thought they were saving money after seeing the cost of the "Full" version.
Also, several years ago I had a friend who bought a scanner that came with a bundeled and fully licensed copy of the full version of Photoshop (NOT the "Lite" version). At the time scanners were expensive, but he still paid about half of what it would have cost to buy just Photoshop for a good scanner and a Full, legal, upgradeable Photoshop. (he got the Kai with it too!)
They could spend 1/10 of what they now spend on R&D, but they are not going to drop the product price by a penny while they think they can still get current prices. On the other hand, if you shop around you can sometimes get it at a much fairer price.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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
In other news a leading maker of knives, concerned with the fact that criminals are using their products to harm innocent victims have stopped making sharpening stones. Also, all new knives will be shipped with duller blades.
The knife using community have circumvented the problem by using their old sharpening stones to sharpen the new duller knives.
Ugh!
From the article: or by scanning an image in pieces and reassembling it in Photoshop.
Kinda cool to see that my idea worked (posted under the original story).
from the article include:
The code that detects the currency was given to Adobe as a black-box binary (presumably with APIs so Adobe's engineers could hook into it...it's probably not as obvious as a separate DLL; was it given as object code to be linked into the final binary of Photoshop CS?)
To legally obtain high-res, uncrippled banknote images from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a graphic designer must request it in writing from the director of the bureau, entailing an average two-week wait for a reply.
While it is nice that Adobe and Jasc and presumably other companies are voluntarily trying to be "good citizens" by crippling their software, I regret their actions. This is yet another example of companies restricting the abilities of end-users. It is similar to the restrictions of DRM in software or hardware, being unable to copy digital music off of a Mini-Disc or MP3 player onto a computer, etc.
I am not passing judgement, I am not crying "Adobe is infringing our rights" (do people have a legal right to digitally manipulate images?), I am not even whining. However, it is an observation and one that seems to resonate with the bizarre convergence of technology restrictions that are cropping up all over the place. As someone wrote on a website I can't find at the moment: I'm not one to hold truck with conspiracy theorists, but there are a lot of individual efforts out there to solve separate problems using technological restrictions that, when taken together in a big picture, result in a completely different computing landscape.
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
..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...
The dollars i see on movies (when something carring a lot of then explodes or breaks) don't look smaller or white on the other side. Which kind of replica they use?
Photoshop is quite affordable. Photoshop is a complex piece of software that does it's job better than any other similar product out there (sorry, GIMP is not a contender yet). $300 or $400 for a professional application of this type is quite reasonable. I really don't understand where people get this idea that all software should be free or at least under $50. Companies that have a considerable investment in a product should be able to charge a reasonable price for it.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How long before they introduce an "undocumented feature" that prevents you from scanning a page from a book because it's copyrighted? Or scanning a picture from a magazine? This seems like the first step down a long, dark and dangerous road. If I used Windows and had actually paid for Photoshop I would seriously consider demanding a refund from Adobe for including this without telling me it was there.
"...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
That to get a bunch of people working on a problem they might not normally even bother with, all you have to do is tell them they aren't supposed to do it.
Whether this is Adobe or someone pushing Adobe, the result is opposite what was intended.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
The existence of this feature seems to actually be encouraging people to throw money into their scanners (even if it doesn't actually lead to counterfeiting). So now there will be more 20front.psd and 20back.psd files in the world, rather than fewer. Ack!
The anti-counterfeiting part of the application was not developed by Adobe.
...
From the article:
The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organization established by the governors of the G-10 central banks to promote the use of anti-counterfeit devices in the computer industry.
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.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
That's why software firewalls were invented (-:
S
Can a person now use Photoshop as a QA test on how good their fake bills are?
If Photoshop accepts an scan of a fake bill, it is not a good fake. If Photoshop doesn't, it is. Just a thought.
John
I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it. jya.com/ap.htm
Try making a damn $20 bill that doesn't look like Disney money, and maybe it'll be more difficult to counterfeit.
Seriously, the US was like, one of the last countries to finally put watermarks in their bills. Even Turkey had watermarks before we did. Turkey!
Of course, their money is made out of crappier fibers; it doesn't hold up nearly as well as a US bill. From some people who are world travellers, I'm told the people in other countries don't even bother spot-checking a bill to see if it's genuine. They feel it with their hands. Apparently, tt's pretty easy to distinguish the real paper from the fake.
So, ultimately, I think that intricate designs are no longer going to stop counterfeiters. What's going to work is making the composite materials more difficult to mimic. What I think they should do, and I think this would probably work, is to weave the fibers so that there is contrast built into the paper weave itself which spells out the denomination: twenty, ten, etc. All you'd have to do is look at it from an angle or hold it to the light to see the weave. That would make it much, much more difficult to counterfeit.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
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.
It doesn't matter whether it's blackboxed or not. It had to be tested for performance and functionality by Adobe, and calls to it had to be performed at various points. It seems that it will be invoked every time you open an image or paste an image into the editor. That's development effort on Adobe's part. While it's certainly not the effort required had they developed it themselves, it's inclusion is not trivial.
The inclusion of this feature is symptomatic of modern thought. People are killing people with guns? Ban guns! People are counterfeiting money with Photoshop? Edit Photoshop! Getting fat? Sue McDonald's!
Things aren't going to "get better" (or even make sense) until people are capable of taking responsibility for their actions. It shouldn't be Photoshop's job to include this anti-counterfeit plugin. It should be the end user's job to NOT COUNTERFEIT MONEY. No corporation should ever put themselves in a position to be held liable for failing to hold their customers' hands and morally babysit them.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
I've been using Photoshop for years to create fake... Hang on, is that the Secret Service at my door?
Look for my follow up post to this comment in 5-15 years.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
It Sounds like a licence to print money!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Hmm..I can't yet afford *PS CS tm;, so I think I will open up PS 7, scan some hundreds in and print them up...then maybe I can afford PS CS. *PS CS tm; = Piece of Shit Can't Scan The Money
Adobe doesn't even know how it works (it is a black box), not to mention having wasted any effort on it.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Simply make the program follow the laws as stated?
Not really hard to do?
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
so if you paste in the color channels separately, you should discover the problem
scan bill in using different software, split and save as three images (for each channel) then paste each image into photoshop
bonus points- combine.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
What gripes me and frightens me about technical means of enforcing legal requirements is that they are ALWAYS wrong. They always overreach in the direction of whatever large interest asked to have them put in. As the article makes clear, "Adobe is actually exceeding the requirements of 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."
There are probably other rights, as well. If, for satirical purposes, I want to produce an altered image of $20 bill with a portrait of George Bush or Bart Simpson or my grandmother on it, I believe that is legal. As long as the final product isn't a counterfeit, the fact that there may be intermediate images in RAM that would be counterfeits if printed shouldn't matter.
Similarly, DRM systems don't check to see whether what you want to do is fair use, whether the supposedly copyrighted material is actually in the public domain, etc.
No, these systems are always quick, dirty, and one-sided. And it's always "prior restraint." The software stops you from exercising what may well be your legal rights without due process, without imposing any burden of proof on the entity on whose behalf it is acting, without any appeal (other than returning the software for a refund)...
There is no way to accurately map the complexity of the legal system, which is designed for processing by human brains, into a software specification, for a program to be executed by a computer. All attempts to do so are injurious to the rights of one party or the other. Oddly enough, the injured party always seems to be the consumer.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Would they??
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
To use, start Adobe CS by taking off the cap. Then simply mark a small line on U.S. currency. If the mark is amber, the bill is genuine. If the mark is dark, the bill is suspect. To maintain the effectiveness of Adobe CS, replace cap immediately after each use.
Please note: If you are using Adobe CS to check your counterfeit bills for accuracy, please replace the cap and turn yourself in to your local Secret Service office.
At 4.95, Adobe CS won't last long! Special bulk discounts are available on large purchases of Adobe CS!
Good corporate citizen? That doesn't mean much coming from a company that ships jobs away from its home country. I think they mean "Good citizen among a nation of greedy corporations".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Between 1995 and 2002, the proportion of counterfeit bills that were digitally created grew from 1 percent to 40 percent
Correction: The proportion of counterfeit bills detected grew. I'm guessing that digital copies aren't as good as what the professionals use, and they're more easily detected -- the well made bills stay in circulation. Here's a cool pdf from the GAO that illustrates many types of counterfeits, including the superdollar.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
That would be negligible compared to the rest of the product. Given that Photoshop Elements can be had pretty cheaply, I really don't see the point of this snarkiness.
I'm a nature photographer.
Yeah cause hi-rag(no not exact obviously) content paper isn't available at staples, and the 16 year old at the window at McDonalds can tell the difference, or even cares. How many times does the street vender look at your $10 bill when you buy a dirt water dog or a pretzel... He shoves the money in his apron, and reaches (usually with the same hand) for your food.
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
you gotta hand it to Adobe, they really do have balls of wroght iron for saying something like this:
'As a market leader and a good corporate citizen....'
So, Mr. Connor, how is Dmitry these days?
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
It's detection code. All it does is say "hey! that looks like a note to me! naughty!". It does nothing more. I don't care who wrote it or what's in it. Black box voting systems are a different story - what they do has implications. Telling whether some pr0n is money or not is hardly important.
I'd really like to see a company create something like a "DRM Helmet". If you've ever seen "The man in the iron mask" you can get an idea of what I'm talking about.
These helmets would be organic, and grow as a human grows. They would be locked on the human head at birth, and use a digital rights infrastructure to determine whether the human has the right to breath, view the sky, drink water, eat food, etc.
For the period from birth into the early teens, a human would be allowed substantial freedoms, such as drinking water, eating food, viewing the sky...all for little or no cost.
The parents of a child could pay into a corporate account to allow their child access to better food or water, or travel to pristine "corporate reservations" where magnificent views and vistas are sold to the wealthy. This provides an incentive to parents to support and enhance the corporate model--keeping your manager happy would result in an improved existence for your children. For example, parents looked upon favorably by the corporate oligarchy might be allowed into a lottery, the winners of which would have their children's viewing rights upgraded to higher quality textbooks and their access improved such that they can use higher quality software and tutorials.
After a human reaches their teens, the rights to quality food and water would be erroded...unless they find a way to increase the wealth of the corporate entities. Increasing the wealth of shareholders or board executives substantially would allow the human access to higher quality food and water, and the right to (for example) go to a museum and view artwork, or attend a concert and hear undistorted music.
The top tier of humans contributing to corporate wealth, say the top 1% of the population, could actually enter a lottery in which their family could travel to a national park and be released from their helmets entirely for the span of a week or so.
This plan would greatly improve the living wages of corporate board members and shareholders. It would also insure that only those persons who have earned the right to see the sky, or eat quality food, and view historical or IP restricted items of interest are allowed to do so.
Another bonus is population control and criminal punishment. The lowest economic performers could be denied access to reproductive rights--for example, a "DRM Chastity Belt". This would prevent them from spreading the "laziness gene". The belt could also have a mechanism to apply electrical shocks to the wearer--this would allow punishment for minor offenses, such as offending a corporate shareholder.
Major offenders, such as those who critisize or or satirize the corporate oligarchy, would have their access to food/water/air cut off for a period, at least until their life signs dwindled to some extent. Repeat offenders could have their access cut off permanently. Such a model relieves the oligarchy from having to provide for prisons, gas chambers and other useless expenses.
This type of infrastructure would slowly but surely improve the lives of the upper tier oligarchy, while culling the poorest economic performers in the population. Over time, one would expect the highest tier to have their quality of life enhanced at a near exponential rate, while lowest economic performers (and their descendants) would be removed from the gene pool entirely.
You still have the right to use another package.
Get back to me when your govenment mandates that *all* image processing software *must* include that feature, then I'll start listening to talk of rights.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Wonder if the code to this is included or if some pointers to it can be gleamed?
Now why would this be interesing? Think Windows non-compilable code sharing with China and India etc. Small wonder those countries wants their own distribution of Linux.
Help fight continental drift.
I scanned a nice brand new $20 bill at 4800dpi, and printed it to my laser printer without difficulty.
I also tried printing it to the acrobat distiller, that worked fine too.
Does whatever protection exist only work when you are printing to a color printer or something?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Of course, this raises doubts about whether such technology would prevent the scanning of images which were *NOT* actually currency. At least while it's in software we still have choice. Enjoy it while you can.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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?
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 suspect that the bill detection uses the color histogram of the image along with the aspect ratio, such a technique would have few false positive and be fairly accurate for detecting money
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Brothers should put that in their ads. "The fax machine that pays for itself."
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable
Ha! I doubt Adobe is spending much money on Photoshop R&D. The program is finished, basically. The only features they've been adding for the last little while - text on a path, layer sets, layer sets within layer sets, scaling layer effects - are all features that have been obvious for many versions and that users have been screaming for.
All Adobe is doing now is slowly adding obvious features that should have been there many versions ago. Some, like non-square pixels, seem particularly glaring but others, such as text on a path, are more underhanded.
And if you think this is a new trend, think of the hundred layer limit. The only reason the limit ever existed was to increase sales of the next version. So lame.
I mentioned this in the previous article, but how about currency listings? Maybe I want to print out which currencies belong to specific countries. Maybe I want my employees to know what a real (insert X denomination) bill looks like.
Both are not as uncommon as one might think, and perfectly legitimate uses.
Any measure which blocks a vast array of legitimate uses in order to hamper a small group performing illigitimate use it stupid. How many times will we pay for somebody else's money-copying/piracy/etc/etc
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 :)
Do you think Adobe really cares? You download Photoshop at home and learn how to use it. You go in to work, and your company gets some new task which requires image editing. What are you going to tell your boss to buy?
Also, for the most part, an illegal copy of Photoshop usually does not mean one less copy of Photoshop sold, but rather one less copy sold of Paint Shop or something else in that price range. That helps Adobe's market share figures.
I work for a bank that sponsors a couple of websites that help teach kids about financial responsibility and I use images of money constantly in that endeavor. We won't be "upgrading" to CS as a consequence.
It might be annoying or inappropriate, but please explain how this is a violation of your rights, and specifically which rights are being violated.
irb(main):001:0>
Good news - Photoshop and color copieris can not be used to counterfeit the "golden dollar", and thank god for that - no one would recognize the copy anyway.
--- What?
Perhaps Adobe should mimic the approach that Alias uses with Maya. Offer it free for non-commercial use. Then they wouldn't be wasting resources on useless security measures.
Does CS stand for Counterfeit Stopper? Customer Scalper? What? What's wrong with numbers all of the sudden? Software is priced like cars so we should start naming them like cars? What?
I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5 (And actually started paying for it by version 4. Those present who seem to feel 600 dollars is a reasonable price for software need their head examined. It doesn't matter if it makes economic sense to the company...it makes no sense to the end user. It used to be that a graphic designer needed a ruler, an exacto knife and some whiteout to make a living. Now he needs several thousand dollars worth of equipment and software. That's not progress, that's larceny. But I digress... ) and I must say that PS CS is the most disappointing upgrade I have seen. All your money buys you is a bunch of DRM stuff and one or two token tweaks. PC users even have to deal with remote activation. Skip this upgrade if you can.
While I am ranting about PS upgrades, WTF is up with the line tool? It used to be to draw a line was a one step process. After several upgrades worth of improvements, it is now a three or four step process.
If ever-evolving file formats and OS's weren't such an issue, I think I would still be perfectly happy with Photoshop 4.
BTW, bonus points to anyone who knows what company originally wrote Photoshop...
CLERK: And this attachment is for shooting down police helicopters.
HOMER: Oh, I don't need anything like that...yet. Just gimme my gun!
"Adobe Photoshop CS: $649.00, $0.00 after rebate"
"Print your own US$649.00 rebate in CASH on the included currency paper sheets."
It looks for files that are named: "20 dollar bill.psd"
This is easily the worst post I've ever seen on Slashdot. The Poster didn't read the article, and his conclusions are senseless. Furthermore, no one's rights are infringed upon if Adobe decides to add a feature that deters counterfeiting. Since when is it anyone's right to counterfeit money? Let's say that isn't your intention and you simply want to use the image of currency in a composition, you mean to tell me you can't find an image elsewhere? Get real. Adobe added a feature to their software package to deter counterfeiting so that they could presumably sleep better at night. They probably understand that it won't stop everyone as there is always some determined individual out there that will find a way. With what they added to PS, it should at least stop some 14 year old kid who gets it in his head to start making some bills to spend on video games and skateboard trucks.
As for the prohibitive pricing of PS, speaking as a graphic design professional, I am perfectly fine with the pricing. If you're going to pirate it, and then try to compete against me for GD business, be prepared to have the BSA called on you. I'm tired of hearing, "...Well my 15 year old daughter could make me a website/flyer/brochure/logo/etc." If you can't afford to own it as a professional, then you have no business using the software in any other way other than for educational purposes. Go download GIMP otherwise.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
Can you copy $100 bills with Gimp?!! I'm there, dude!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm so sick of this argument. Just because you don't use a feature, it doesn't mean that nobody else needs it. Photoshop is a application designed for professionals. I'm a professional, and at least once per week I don't open an image of money. Just because Joe random geek in his parents' basement dabbles around with a few pictures and never has the need to not open an image of cash, it doesn't mean that Adobe should deprive the rest of us the from not opening images of money just to save a few cents.
Hey, if you don't think that you're ever not going to open an image of money, you've got plenty of free or cheap choices out there. Even Adobe makes consumer grade apps. Some of us, however, make a living with this software, and the price is a drop in the bucket compared to what we do with it. I sure as hell don't want to lose a job just because it involves not editing images of cash.
Despite the fact that even I, a Professional, may not use every feature in Photoshop, I still appreciate Adobe's efforts to provide me with every possible feature they can. And I don't care that this feature isn't bulletproof. If I use it to not open images of money and it works in 90% of the cases, that still saves me time.
Do you have any proof that its' capabilities are limited to that? Didn't think so.
If you need an image of a banknote your central bank is required to provide you with an appropriate image. You just need to ask.
GIMP != Photoshop..... not by a long shot, one hell of a long shot.
I reject your reality
Why would 99% of legitimate users ever need to scan a bill?
Money is a topic that is very important in our society, as such it is frequently discussed in our society. Some people like to add the use of visual aids to their discussion to boost it's pursuasive power. The subject of the discussion is often incorporated into the visual aid for greater effect.
So you tell me why some high schooler in an econ class shouldn't be able to use a scan of a $20 for bars in a chart.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
According to the article its a black box.. It's not a black box if it has extra hidden throughputs.
"A black box is a system where we have a well defined understanding of its inputs and output characteristics, but no idea what's going on inside."
-Wikipedia
I dunno what it'd be called otherwise.. maybe just module. Not that I think they'll be that precise with their language.
"Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable."
That way more people could afford to counterfeit money? Oh wait, somehow I doubt that those who are counterfeiting money actually OWN a license to Photoshop!
How comfortable would you be to call an sound pocessing API or a OS kernel call or a image processng API or a database when you do not know how it works??
Most programmers have no idea how the SQL query optimizer works when they send a query to the database. Few programers can tell you exactly what happns insde a simple fopen() call. Even fewer would be able to explain a MP3 player. Hey, maybe that player is phoning home! Scared yet?
For that matter do you know how the transistors in your computer work? Do you know exactly how your CPU work? I did not think so. I do no think there is ayone in the world who knows exactly how every nuance and part in yor computer works. I am not even going into distributed systems where you have routers and things in play.
Almost no programmers do not understand exactly how 80% of the code that is executed by their own programs work bcause it is spent inside some OS call or library. Certainly not more or less than the blackbox to detect currency fraud.
Black box programing and pluggable components that work with an interface is called "good software engineering" where I come from, not "oh my go its time for a stupid kneejerk reaction"
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable.
Seems like no one reads the articles these days. The article was about conterfeitting money, NOT PS.
It seems that banknotes are quite frequently used as graphical elements in advertisments etc. Since Photoshop seems to target the professional market I can see how that would be annoying for said professionals.
Besides whining about price and summarily bashing any company that has a successful product (a hallmark of a successful Slashdot post for sure), has anyone looked at Photoshop Elements? It does 90% of what Photoshop does and is perfect for the professional consumer and digital hobbyist. It's also way cheaper at 15% of the cost of Photoshop. I think that Adobe has given folks a choice: Adobe Photoshop Elements Product Page
How much of a performance hit will the average Photoshop user take waiting for this useless code to evaluate every image? What if it crashes the application for some inputs?
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
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.
Blocking all those legal uses to prevent one illegal use is a violation of our rights.
It appears that someone at Adobie agrees with you. There are so many ways around this that its hard to believe that whomever was responsible for its implimentation intended it to be a serious effort.
It seems to me that it is more of a token gesture to satisfy some political connection.
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable.
Adobe's aim (if they're sensible) is to price Photoshop at the point which will create the most profit. Period. Development costs are irrelevant to this.
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
How comfortable would you be to call an sound pocessing API or a OS kernel call or a image processng API or a database when you do not know how it works??
How comfortable would you be using a government provided closed source operating system?
This isn't about not knowing how it works, its about not knowing how it works, not trusting the software provider and being forced to run the software anyway (microsoft users have a choice not to use microsoft, users of thise version of photoshop don't have a choice not to use this blackbox software. Yes, they could use something else).
Overall, this is a minor issue, but it would get big much faster if the government decideds that people have to run special blackbox software for other reasons too. Its difficult to show that they are not being monitored by the software.
I agree that its borderline tin-foil hat stuff, but if we dismiss that stuff outright, without at least doing a bit of poking around first, it makes it that much easier for someone to actually do it without being noticed.
..."Photshop fails it" ;P
Just kidding folks.
Un-news
You know, until know I didn't really care if software was open-source or not, as long as it did the job. But now that commercial vendors are including bits of government-provided code that they don't even know the exact function of, I'm starting to think that maybe I should be using more open-source applications.
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
Since when is Adobe a good citizen?
Remember Dmitry Sklyarov?
Oh, I get it now. They mean a good corporate citizen, as in they are a good citizen in the government Of the Corporations, By the Corporations and For the Corporations.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
No, what they need is a good scanner, a good printer and some very good, feel-like-money-like paper. Scanners usually come with some kind of scanning software, even with copy functions sometimes. Scan and print, and that's it: Sweet luxurious life forever - until they get caught.
Oh, THAT's what CSS is about! I always wondered how anyone could come up with such a bizarre "encryption" scheme.
Are you swedish by any chance, or what's the thing about wise-ass kids in sweden?
ssssh! It's called "money sharing". Money wants to be free!
As for the rest of your questions
- re what happens within an fopen() call, I can give you a pretty good description. A decade ago I wrote my own version in assembler "just for the hell of it" and was able to get twice the rated throughput out of what was at the time a "huge, fast" 85-meg wd caviar drive.
- whether I know how transistors work - of course I do. Electronics was a hobby of mine back in the days when we were transitioning from tubes to transistors
- whether I know how a cpu works - the general principles, sure. I know that what I write in assembler isn't necessarily the microcode the cpu is executing, that there are translations going on .
- blackbox programming that doesn't do what it was supposed to do in the first place is not only a sign of bad engineering, but makes me suspect that there's additional cruft that was included that got in the way of them devoting 100% to the task at hand
Now, back on-topic, and more to the point: their "black box code" doesn't work. It was a stupid idea to begin with. Counterfeiting of $100.00 bills has gotten to the point where most stores here have signs up saying they won't take them any more. The real solution is to move more of the currency away from paper and into large-denomination coins.Even though that it will not stop a hard core counterfeiter, whom is probably smart enough to circumvent most anti-counterfeiting countermeasures (Is this an actual Secret Service term?), it will probably stop the stupid kids and idiots who are either playing or are actually stupid enough to try to print out a couple of Benjamin's.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
it all depends on what kind of paper you use. Also you might consider fooling with a can of starch, some isopropyl alcohol, an 'authentic' bill and one of those four dollar pens. the only people they catch are the people who aren't paying attention to the composition of the paper, or maybe the three or four farmers in the middle of khakistan who haven't heard about the 'magic' counterfiet detection pen.
// Empires come and go we live forever
I was wondering about the Swedish thing too. Maybe he's thinking about Jon Johansen, the DeCSS GUI designer; some people don't seem to know the difference between Sweden and Norway.
Lalala
This isn't copy protection... its little more than a way to say 'if they're doing it, they've already compromised our software, so its obvious that we have no liability in Sven's counterfeiting ring'
Seems like a good investment to me.
Not only that.. I can never get those damn swedish kids to stay off my lawn!
"The 2400dpi was so precise you could actually see where some black text bled on fibers of the bill."
How did the microprint come out?
I'm told (but I haven't had my hands on one since being told) that one feature of the newest bills is a figure of a "constellation" with some strange geometry that's hard to duplicate for some reason. I figure it's a fractal pattern.
Thought that was interesting, but I haven't gotten one of the technicolor bills from the ATM lately.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And your proof it's trying to take over the world is....?
So regular people can't use Photoshop for "fair use" currency reproductions, while counterfeiters still can. More demonstrations of the contempt corporate people have for mere mortals, treating us as second class citizens. Of course, open source software can be edited to drop such "safeguards" against its owners.
--
make install -not war
Let's see. About five thousand people, with about $75-80K in average yearly salary and an additional $30K in non-monetary benefits (medical insurance, blah blah blah). Then the actual cost of having all those buildings, servers and computers, advertisement and whatnot. There you go, a billion bucks per year.
Hey, being a good corporate citizen starts first with producing a product that isn't crippled. If it is crippled, it should say so on the box. I don't think removing functionality from a product is being a good corporate citizen, unless it says so right on the front of the $650 box.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
"The reproduction must be one-sided, and all materials, including graphic files that were used to make the reproduction, must be destroyed afterward."
Who else read this and thought it meant you have to destroy the $20 bill you were copying too? If someone scanned in the currency and sent you the image file to use in Photoshop, would you have to ensure they destroyed their $20 bill?
Ed: Thanks for the $20 bill image.
Bob: No problem.
Ed: Can I see the original?
Bob: Sure, here you go.
Ed:
Bob: What the hell are you doing?
Ed:
Bob: oh. Okay. You owe me $20 though.
I can't afford a sig!
The first amendment does not trump all. It does not give you the right to freely write down an exact copy of someone else's work and sell it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are special rules about currency; certainly in the US the secret service can really ruin your day if they don't like how you're using currency, and I bet they have the force of law.
But even if there weren't special laws, it seems like all you'd have to do is for the government to claim artistic copyright on a bill and then issue a blanket license for everyone in the world to use it only for the purposes of monetary transaction, but not for reproduction in any form.
"Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable."
JediDan;
The price of a product usually does not have a strong correlation to how much it cost to make it, unless it is a commodity, of which this is not.
Price usually is determined by maximizing how many people will buy the product at various prices and choosing the one with the most profitability.
-Arthur Bialowas
Believe it or not, this type of anti-counterfeiting technology has actually been used by another company before: Nintendo, Inc. Gamers may remember that the Nintendo 64 hardware was primarily designed by Siligon Graphics, Inc. What they may not know is that the 64-bit "Reality" graphics co-processor actually disallowed the display of certain graphical patterns. Apparently, unlicensed developers had gotten their hands on N64 SDKs; Nintendo somehow acquired the beta versions of their projects and incorporated this technology to thwart the unlicensed developers! Nintendo has always come down hard on those who would abuse their IP... Bottom line, such pattern-recognition technology is not new.
Many government mints work with special versions of Photoshop and Illustrator that Adobe creates custom for their uses. It has features such as massive resolution handling capabilities, zoom functions up to 16,000% or 32,000% (as opposed to 1,200%), special color handling abilities (for color shifting inks, and such, to make it easier to work with these materials), and more. They get paid quite well for these versions and features, and so the addition of code co-developed by these banking institutions and governments with Adobe was not a financial decision, but a performance one. Once the performance penalties were solved, they included it. I'm sure Adobe knew it would be easily circumvented, but it makes life slightly more difficult for counterfeiters, and it satisfied the governments (who really aren't good at grasping anti-anything circumvention techniques).
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Standard "security" implementation. Make things harder for ordinary people, while making things no more difficult for the villains.
About 12 years ago I tried to open a bank account. They said - sorry, due to security, you need a drivers licence. I asked how a drivers licence would help - if I were a real crim I would just present them with a fake one and they'd be none the wiser. "No licence, no account" was all I could get out of them.
Took my licence to the bank a few days later, got the account, same teller, so I asked her - so how are you better off now? How do you know that licence isn't fake? She couldn't give a shit - they'd done their bit, at that was all that mattered.
It's all about doing stuff for the sake of being seen to do stuff, rather than actually trying to prevent crime, which really pisses me off.
The only truly effective security measures I've seen are those taken where security really matters - at airports and similar - having risk databases, grounding suspect planes and so on.
Sounds like the CBCDG might be in cahoots with Diebold from the look of the "black boxes."
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
I feel sorry for the programmers that worked on Photoshop because i can tell that the decision to implement counterfeit prevention was a management one and if it was me i would be very pissed off that some idiot had demanded that i taint my software with a stupid mechanism that hasnt a chance in hell of working properly. What did they think they would achieve? would criminals suddenly give up because the latest version of photoshop wouldnt let them open money? im no expert but im almost certain that the system wouldnt prevent even one single counterfeiter. To me it says that Adobe management hold a very arrogent view on their products, (well actually ive thought that since Dimitry Sklyarov and this and i just hope that the negative impact it has on the programs performance and price is bloody minimal.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Thanks for making me shoot tea out of my nose!!
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Like how long is this going to take for someone to reverse engineer?
People live and breathe just to do things like this...
...and the rest of us appreciate that they're here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
First, does this mean I have to drop my hard drive through the shredder afterwards, lest some hard disc forensics program uncover the image after it has departed the Recycle Bin?
Also, I though I knew a lot about Photoshop, but I have yet to be able to create a two-sided image, or find the two-sided printer to print it. Can anyone help?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
PS is expensive for several reasons, most noteably because its exclusive nature prevents it from being packaged with any popular hardware. Rarely do companies like Dell, Gateway, or even Kodac or FujiFilm package PHOTOSHOP in with their hardware and software packages, even though Photoshop is clearly the best Photo-editing software available.
Jasc PaintShopPro and other cheaper editing programs are hundreds of dollars less than Adobe's products because they get endorsement revenue from hardware companies that they under contract with.
Mike
I've spent too much time chasing windmills.
A basic economics class will tell you that the formula goes something like:
Total profit = q*(p(q)-c(q))-I/q where q is quantity, p is price, c is cost and I is fixed investment.
c(q) is the cost of reproducing a unit - let's say that it is ~0, as CDs + box hardly costs much. Investments, well they are mostly paid for already, both for Windows and Photoshop. These are investments *for* the product, not in other products.
What do you end up with? PR = q*p(q). Just what the market will bear. Then they can either a) hold on to it b) pay dividends c) invest in new R&D. But none of that is related to their current pricetag.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
-
In the context of protecting euro banknotes against counterfeiting the European Central Bank (ECB)invites manufacturers
based in the European Union (EU)and importers or
distributors of products capable of handling digital images
(hereinafter 'the industry ') to submit comments in connection
with the ECB's request to the Commission of the European
Communities to initiate legislation making it mandatory to
incorporate counterfeit deterrence technology into such
products.Such legislation would apply to products produced,
imported or distributed in the EU.Any individual,organisation
or group of organisations may submit comments.
The comment period closed December 19th, but it might still be worthwhile to send in comments if you're in the EU.Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable
I thought this implied that Photoshop was too expensive to reach anything but a commercial environment, and that if they dropped the cost, they would make up the loss per unit by vastly increasing demand and volume. Software, obviously, has a tiny manufacturing cost after R&D. So, price goes down, demand goes up -- elasticity of demand, right? I'm honestly asking, IANAEconomist. 'Just heard of this term in the previous post.
We discuss this concept in MCAD a lot, though. We work in the highest part of the field; our packages can easily reach six figures per seat without support. The assumption is that we only sell to big aerospace, automotive, and consumer goods, so we have to make up the gigantic R&D cost with a high unit cost, since we sell to a relative small number of companies. But what about the oodles of small shops that are using AutoCAD or another low- to mid-end products? If we dropped our price to that level, given the huge functionality/performance/process improvements in this kind of product, would the volume more than cover the per-unit price drop? It's something all the major MCAD players try to do in some contrived fashion, but it never quite works as expected.
I suppose PhotoShop elements tries to do a similar thing, disabling what they believe to be irrelevent home-user features, and dropping the price accordingly. It would be interesting to see what those sales figures look like compared to the mainstream product. I would guess that despite the gigantic number of dig-camera users, the number of home users wanting to dick with the images, beyond contrast changes o maybe cropping, is pretty small.
Seriously, where does this end?
WIll they soon prevent you from editing images of playing cards, classic paintings, books, or even the face of a 'star'. Unless of course you have proper licensing to edit the image in question.
This is absurd.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Menu -> File -> Import -> Scanner -> UMax PowerLook 4000 .477 inches
Resolution 3140 dpi
Height =
Width = 1.146 inches
Menu -> Image -> Size
Resample = No
New Resolution = 600 dpi
WARNING: THIS PROGRAM MAY NOT BE USED FOR SCANNING OR EDITING CURRENCY. GO TO: WWW.I'M-A-COUNTERFEITER.GOV.
Menu -> Image -> Mode -> Grayscale
NEVERMIND!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Whenever I get or try out a new scanner, I scan a $20, $50 or $100 bill. Not to copy it - I scan it to see how well the scanner picks up the microprinting around the portrait. I find that this is a very good test of scanner quality and can easily show some serious scanner problems. Of course, its a good test of scanner resolution, but it also helps detect problems with registration between the colors.
For now I can keep an old copy of Photoshop around, but at some point I'll be running on Hardware and Software that will not support the old copies of Photoshop (You should see how confused Photoshop 2 gets with the memory in modern computers). When it's finally gone I'll miss the ability to scan the microprinting on a bill. Maybe blocking out part of a bill will work, maybe not, it all depends on the secret blackbox software they use with each version.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... but the US Mint only makes coins. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing makes all the bills.
Sean
NOT! It might take one hell of a scanner to provide a passable currency note to an expert with a microscope, but the average person can't read that tiny writing anyway, and has no clue if it's there, or not.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I can certainly see many legitimate reasons. I've made novelty money before. They certainly wouldn't fool anyone (by design).
The problem with any technology with this is that it removes law from the realm of human decision and instead slavishly enforces a limited and unmovable interpretation of the law. The result is that a number of perfectly legal and ethical actions are rendered impossible. It is only defects in the software that allows it to be bypassed at all.
For every prohibition out there, there probably exists some unforseen exception. When those happen, we need to apply human judgement, not simple rulesets.
For most of us, this particular case won't be a serious problem. However, the more accepted this sort of thing becomes, the more likely each of us is to come across one or more cases where something like this turns the simple and legal into the impossible.
Even worse, eventually we will see this sort of thing used to end-run the constitution. With the DMCA, it can be argued that we have already seen a case of that.
Of course they didn't know. Works like this:
1. Put in undocumented bug 2. Wait for it to be discovered and posted to /. /. geeks explain it all to them better than government ever could.
3.
4. Profit! (from printing money now that bugFeature is understood
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
the more expensive, the better. more impetus for the GIMP and other open source tools.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
1: Hold down Shift key
2: Insert currency
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I recall, without being able to find the reference, that a few months ago someone on /. mentioned a commercial paper that feels like US currency. Said it made for GREAT resumes, because the people receiving them subconsciously reacted to the feel of something valuable.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
nobody's mentioned the most stupid thing about this "feature" -- it adds a performance penalty to millions of legitimate users, just to try to inconvenience a handful of people that might use it to scan bills. Anybody have any numbers on how much slower it reads in images because it has to scan for currency markings? How can Adobe justify making their product work worse?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Did you not notice that Adobe isn't actively trying to prevent piracy? Someone else did the work, all they did was plugged into their code. It took very little effort on their part to do, so they felt it was worth doing.
Don't know if it would be worth the cost though
I know of one person who paid $600 at one time for a version of photoshop. He claimed to have gotten lousy to mediocre support.
After a year or so of testing other software, he concluded that paintshop pro was just a better overall package. Less special effects, but 1000 times easier to draw with. Paintshop is about $100 nowadays.
Yeah, definitely useless. If they didn't include the "feature" that prevents counterfeiting, EVERYTHING would get a lot cheaper.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I had not read anything on this until after a friend emailed me the photo. http://www.krebs2003.com/adobe%20test%20image.zip
.psd (it's in .jpg) then opened it fine in PhotoshopCS. Perfect conversion.
Sure enough to my surprise, it didn't work and gave the error.
So I opened it in ACDSee (my default image browser), saved as a
Dirk
Bull.
Yeah, if all you want to do is remove red-eye and crop your images then it sure is overpriced, but there are much better and easier alternatives for you.
For doing PROFFESIONAL graphic design jobs, it's damn cheap. You get some crappy photos taken by a photographer, do you spend 5 grand easy to reshoot, or spend 600 buck to buy photoshop and fix the image up, and get to keep to tool to do so for every time you get crappy images sent to you. That's cheap.
Add to that the interoperability with the rest of Adobe's programs (Indesign/Illustrator) and it's looking almost free.
"The Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group provides the software as a black box without revealing its precise inner workings, Connor said."
Going by this, nobody really knows what it does. What's to be certian that it doesn't "
phone home" automatically if you do for some reason access images of currency.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
Their product has already been covered by several /. articles, just because of this features. And in terms of PR, it can be interpreted by Joe-6-pack as "Photoshop is such a powerfull tool that we had to introduce a money-copy-protection system into it! Just imagine the amazing fake pr0n you could make with such a killer app!"
--
the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about (O.Wilde)
"Gullible" is, though.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I don't know what the US Bureau of Engraving uses, but I know for sure that the US Mint uses PhotoShop for image editing. I guess that would be a legal use...
I think the proportion of ANYTHING that was digitally created grew at least that much during the time period mentioned.
Lies, damn lies,
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Might I recommend Paint Shop Pro? No anticash tech included (to my knowledge).
Dumb Adobe. For a company with such good products, they sure go to some effort to fuck it up. The PDF hacking case debacle and now this ...
And there is the argument for making open source imaging tools illegal--they are merely a tool to circumvent lawful software's restrictions against counterfeiting.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I just spent some time here in Photoshop CS (REGISTERED LEGAL COPY) scanning in a $20 Andrew Jackson and nothing has happened. I scanned it in at 600 DPI and then at 3200 DPI then I saved it as a JPG and I saved it as a PSD at 3200 DPI, I then closed the file and opened with Photoshop CS as the PSD and nothing happened. I even went to "print" it with print preview enabled and nothing happened. Does this even WORK? Maybe I got the 3l33t Counterfeiter's Edition?
If they really need to take pathetic steps like this to fitght counterfeit, it is already lost.
If you really want to prevent it, there is no way around abolishing cash and replacing it entirely by chipcards. It would solve many problems including money laundring, theft etc.
Maybe if people stopped paying for it and turned to alternatives it would be more affordable.
;)
Adobe is making money, so obviously they're doing something right. Economics controls the price in the end, though, not Adobe.
Sure, they might sell more copies at a lower price, but they might not make as much money (just as if they charged a higher price they wouldn't sell as many copies and might make less money.)
I'm sorry if the equilibrium price is more than you can afford, but then again, you should be a corporation and this wouldn't be a problem
Sure, they could put the proceeds from the next job towards upgrade licenses, but shouldn't they also eat? Add on the cost of some of the other packages thhey should have like Quark, and there isn't a lot of spare cash going around. The market is extremely competitive at the moment and software licenses aren't the top item on anyone's shopping list.
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.A product's value is whatever it was most recently traded for. A product's price is whatever the guy who's pushing it chooses it to be. That could be set based on a random number generator, it could be a number restrained by cash flow, maybe theories that one's product will lead to sales of another product from which they will profit (even if they're selling at a loss), or just a number set usingGiffen Good strategies.
However, no matter how you slice it, playing any market, including the market of life itself, is a zero sum game.
Apparently timothy didn't make it to the second page, where it was clearly stated that the Central Bank made the software and gave it to graphic app developers as a black box.
Maybe someone should clue timothy into the fact that "editors" are supposed to edit, not editorialize.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Anti-Piracy Software in Photoshop is pointless for several reasons. The first one being: many users, including myself, use photoshop and make no money from what we do. We are hobyists. People like me are not going to pay for a professional tool simply to satisfy a hobby. People who make money from photoshop are going to pay for it. I know many people who, as soon as their company takes off, DO go out and buy legit copies of photoshop, 3DSMax, and other professional apps. So all in all, I think that the money Adobe looses is not actually losty at all, because I do not think that these illegal copies would be purchased, because I think it is mainly hobyists who use them.
Considering how easy it is to loose change, I wouldn't even want a $5 coin, let alone $100!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
touchy touchy ;)
If I were to write all my terrorist-letters in Microsoft Word, would that hold Microsoft liable?
Even if you can (and obviously some people do) use Photoshop for couterfeiting money, how would that make Adobe liable?
I thought we all here freaking agreed that making a tool making a crime possible really isn't a crime. It's doing the actual crime that is forbidden. And so it should be unless ofcourse the tool made is made specificly and exclusivly for performing criminal activities. That makes it a somewhat shadier case.
I haven't seen anyone here disagree with that priniciple so far. In fact I have never seen any law disagree with this general principle. With a slight DeCSS/DMCA-exception ofcourse...
The simple act of trying to prevent this, more than anything implies that Adobe is aware of their software being abused, and thus in my eyes makes them if anything more liable.
But my point is that the people doing crime are the criminals. Not the guys who manufacture tools.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
That just got added to my article on badger mania
The World's Worst Webcomic!
or hack someone ELSE's body. :D *brandishes an axe*
The World's Worst Webcomic!
This isn't exclusively about US currency. In fact, the body that wrote the black box code is in Europe, I think sponsored by the Euro central bank.