Slashdot Mirror
HP Discusses Anti-Counterfeiting Measures
JohnA writes "While searching for drivers for an HP printer that was given to me, I noticed an article on the front page of hp.com that brags about how HP's R&D department was able to insert flaws into their products to 'deter' counterfeiting. I'm so glad we have HP looking out for us..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Shit thats terrible. They insert flaws just so we can NOT do things with thier products? Hello, I'm the customer....are they commiting corporate suicide or what? It's like saying, oh we put some holes in your boat - just in case you decide to race against cops they will open and you will sink!
A typical Fiorina-era HP excuse. We inserted these bugs on purpose!
I don't think you need a tin-foil hat to start drawing the dots between Adobe, Jasc, and HP, and coming up with a picture of the government putting pressure on companies to handicap their products like this. It certainly isn't market demand that's motivating them.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
...only outlaws will couterfeit money.
Oh, wait a minute...
... and an add for a new HP computer immediately follows the article.
Beautiful.
At least they're upfront and forthcoming about it. It's they're gamble on if it will affect sales or not, but at least they were responsible enought not to try sneaking it in.
-Trick
Oh, of course: because this way everyone in the developed world pays for it instead of the Americans. Hmmm.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
"In May 2003 U.S. officials announced a radical new design for the $20 bill that includes several new, confidential counterfeit-deterrence features. These measures include adding light shades of blue, peach and green to the $20 bill as an anti-counterfeiting measure. (Note: The peach bills premiered in October 2003)."
Way to keep the confidentiallity going there HP!!!
I know my epson printer seems to have been made to break.
I was in the middle of a last minute, graphic heavy term paper when one of the ink heads (or something) blew up and splattered black all over the non-reachable insides of my printer.
Ever since, black comes out splotchy and the residual ink that I haven't cleaned off the paper feeding gears leaves a trail going up the middle of all my output.
they can make crippled products that won't print money, or they can make money you can't print.
I'd think that if the government of any country is having enough of a problem with fake money they should move to digital money. They already do for bank transfers and credit cards, why not go all the way?
- Dan
If you are prototyping circuit boards, and probably if you are doing other kinds of offset-critical printing (graphic arts?), the behavior of purposefully mis-registering the printouts could be a real pain. In these situations, thousandths of an inch do matter.
www.coattails.net/forum
With queen carly declaring her love for all things drm and protecting the megacorps from the great unwashed masses, one has to wonder where it stops. How long until my printer wont print a copy of a cd label with "adobe" on it? How long until my scanner refuses to scan in the most recent article from "time"? At what point do they stop trying to make my choices for me? This is probably just practice under the auspices of preventing counterfeiting to get things right for upcoming DRM castrated mobos and hard disks. At what point while I stop "owning" hardware I buy and discover in actuality I have license that includes some hardware on the side?
The only HP printer driver I've ever needed was from cups.org. But if someone can tell me why after every print job it spits out one extra piece of paper, I'd be very happy.
The only flaw I've ever had with my printer is that it only prints 4 pages a minute (if you're lucky), hence why I got it for free.
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
...here at the United Counterfitters of North America (UCNA) when I say that we will no longer be patronizing HP for any of their printing products. Crippled products such as this simply don't fit our needs.
That said, HP makes some of the most reliable office printers available, and their printer support is excellent. I've worked on hundreds of HP LaserJet printers in the last couple of years, and they are uniformly fantastic to maintain and repair.
***
Lexmark also protects their stuff by inserting chips into toner and ink cartridges and then suing refillers for breaches under the DMCA. In europe the EU body in charge of monopolies is looking into this, so lets hope they beat the stuffing out of them.
Lexmark is definitely the biggest offender (and also has the highest consumable prices in general, in cents per page), but if they can get away with it, why not follow suit?
- - - Non Caffeine Drink or Drink Error
Of course, HP isn't going into the currency-printing business...
No, that would infringe upon SCO's business model and IP rights....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Foreskin! That's what HP is gooood four!
Through personal experience I have 2 CDRom burners that I cannot get to run without paying for drivers for XP. This is hardware that was sold - not software. They have stopped supporting hardware unless they are paid (no download). This trend has spread to Umax scanners as well (no updated drivers without paying for CD). This frustration has resulted in a personal boycat of anything HP. It may not be much, but it's all I have.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Reminds me of when the Euro came out first, and there were incidents of 'forgers' passing Monopoly money, and pictures of the Euro that had been cut out of the newspaper.
Looks like stupidity knows no nationality.
OK, I'll bite.
The Gov't is putting measures in the money. It takes time. Before teh new muti-colored 20's came out, there were identifier strips inside. One day when I got some cash from teh bank, I got some 50's. I noticed one of the fifties was odd and sure enough, the strip was for a 20 dollar bill.
One of the easiest forms of counterfeiting is to just bleach ink out of hte money and reprint it for a higher denomination. HP color lasers make this easy.
Gotta go...no time to spellcheck.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Not all uses of banknote images are prohibited. For example, a one-sided illustration of a U.S. Federal Reserve Note not between 75% and 150% of actual size is a fair use. Some people have shown how some of the anti-counterfeiting technologies interfere with fair use of banknote images.
How the hell do you make decent counterfeits w/o the polyester paper that bills are made with? ANY half decent cashier can tell paper from a bill by touch, let alone the dozen other easily checked features.
If your store hires people dumb enough to accept 1 sided black and white bills... you have bigger problems.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Our feelings represented by a Victorian poet...
You're forgetting "coercion" as another (probably more likely) possible explanation.
I can't say I am surprised after the lecture on copyrights some people got at CES thanks to Compaq/HP CEO Carlie Forina (spelling?).
...at least, their DesignJet 10ps printer does. I bought two for a client. One has worked fine from day one. As for the other, it was dodgy out of the box-- spontaneous reboots, things of that sort. We shipped it back and got a new one, which lasted only a few days before it became incapable of satisfactorily aligning its print heads, resulting in output blurry enough to give you a headache. Replacement three arrived yesterday. It gave us a flawless print head alignment on the first try, and printed three beautiful pages. Then it freaked out. Subesquent attempts to print, align print heads, or anything else that involved putting ink on paper resulted in the printer going into la-la land.
That's a 75% failure rate, folks, on an ~$800 piece of equipment. Hello, quality control?
HP support recommended returning the printer for a refund and going with another manufacturer(!), which we decided to do in advance if replacement #2 turned out to be a lemon. In light of this article, I'm surprised they didn't tell me, "That's not a bug, it's a feature!"-- then again, my clients do not print anything that remotely resembles currency.
~Philly
HAR HAR The day the U.S. parts with the old familiar greenback is the day Canada owns the White House. Minor changes are all they can get away with. It's a national symbol in the USA.
Where the scanner will connect via the internet to some government site to tell them you scanned money. Who knows. Today they block printing a reproduction. Tommorow they turn you in. Innovation.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
With all the offshoring HP is engadged in, they have no other choice but to call flaws "features".
Bowie J. Poag
Absolutely ridiculous.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
As has been pointed many times before, this technique *has* been introduced into the newer Euro and Sterling notes. This PDF has an explaination of how this apparently works. It's not just Americans who can't fire up Photoshop CS for an extra few drinks at the weekend.
When I read the story I thought it was about what HP is doing to stop counterfit ink. It never occured to me they would be interested in stopping any other type of counterfiting.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I tried to make a copy of a 20$ bill on a cheap HP Officejet G95. It came out perfect, if I where to spend a bit of time roughing it up the result would have been very hard to tell from a real bill. Instead it went into the cross shredder. The point is that most counterfeit bills are not being made in large quantities but by people making one or two fake bills each.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Well, as computers become more and more "trusted", we'll start losing things gradually. Here HP have a patent application on RAM upgrades.
[0015] In one embodiment, non-volatile memory unit 103 has stored upon it firmware for managing the configuration of computer system 100. The firmware comprises instructions for limiting the addressable space of volatile memory unit 102. By limiting the addressable space, the memory density of volatile memory unit 102 can be controlled. For example, volatile memory unit 102 is a 512 MB SDRAM memory module (e.g., has a memory density of 512 MB). The firmware can lower the memory density, for example to 256 MB, by limiting the addressable space of volatile memory unit 102. In the present embodiment, processor 101 is only able to access the addressable space as dictated by the firmware. In one embodiment, volatile memory unit 102 is scalable to provide a plurality of memory densities. The plurality of memory densities comprises a first memory density and a second memory density. In one embodiment, the first memory density is less than the second memory density.
[0016] In one embodiment, a system command is performed to upgrade the memory density of volatile memory unit 102 from the first memory density to the second memory density. In one embodiment, volatile memory unit 102 is a scalable memory unit initially programmed to operate at the first memory density.
Sigh...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
What if I have a legit reason to copy currency?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Is it me or does everyone else think that a printer should just print whatever the f$#k I tell it to print? I mean Jesus Christ is HP gonna decide that I can't print out Miss Nasties teet, a picture of the Dalai Lama, or a passage from some book that is copywrited? Where the hell does it stop? This kind of crap will show up everywhere. What the hell do you mean my computer won't let me download pr0n? Huh? I can't go to /. anymore because my isp doesn't 'endorse' that website? WTF?
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
While searching for drivers for an HP printer that was given to me..
HP printers are textbook-example standards compliant. They don't use drivers.
Now, seriously, what were you doing on HP.com?
Suppose I want to design a certificate or some other artwork which resembles currency in some way, such as an elaborate engraved pattern border. What I don't want is 'COPY COPY COPY' or some crap interferring with it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why do you assume the U.S. mint is doing nothing to deter counterfeits? The newly redesigned currency has many new features in it.
But then it's always easier to just blame Americans isn't it?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Do you honestly think that switching to Digital Money is going to stop counterfeiters? All it would do is change the type of people doing the counterfeiting. Suddenly it would be hackers instead of printers. I for one don't like the idea of my money being digital. I just don't trust the technology yet.
The printer is recieving a Form Feed character. Are you happy now?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
someone who's actually tried this process out! [registration required] http://www.teoti.com/index.php?info=29689 Photoshop has things built into it as well to deture copying of money... How weak... I will just print mine is 3 sections and concatinate them together in the printer que.
seems to me they're acting perfectly ethically and responsibly. Counterfeit currency is a significant cost for many businesses (particularly small cash-based businesses) and the cost ends up being passed on to consumers. Good for HP if they try to prevent their technology being used to facilitate counterfeiting.
It takes a serious disconnect from the real world to see something threatening about this.
I know a photographer who loves this idea. He wants a filter application to make his photos uncopyable. He's even more thrilled that making duplicates of his proofs will disable the printer!
In Australia the notes are made from plastic with a transparent section.
It's not something you could make with a scanner and a printer
In Germany manufacturers of colour photocopiers are required by law to add a feature which will prevent the user from photocopying bank notes. It has been in effect since colour photocopiers were available and affordable also to smaller companies or individuals. It works by detecting a bank note in the first place and refusing to print. It doesn't add flaws or small inaccuracies, therefore a high resolution printout of a PCB layout - as pointed out before - is no problem at all.
They said that at certain densities of bank note green the printer changes color bands noticeably. I am an amateur photographer and have recently taken pictures of some interesting fields and other natural settings just after the sun has completely set but still has the surrounding slightly lit. The green in the pictures is fairly dark but not too dark and I wonder if these new printers would print them out looking like it was day light on the grass and dusk everywhere else. The pictures turned out really nice and I intend to do some other similar ones in the future. I currently print with an HP printer, but I can't see getting another HP being a viable option once this printer breaks. A photographer would like his pictures to print as photorealistic as possible without having to worry about whether or not it will print wierd, especially when your in the middle of shooting. This is ridiculous.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. And no, film is not a viable option, especially long term, considering that major companies like Kodak are going to stop selling film.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who buy HP printers don't care about these things.
HP, like most inkjet printer manufacturers, produces printers which have an inordinately high operating cost due to the cost of ink carts and their relatively short lifespan. But does this stop people from buying them?
Absolutely not.
HP has a reputation for producing inexpensive printers and proving good customer service for them. I have an HP Photosmart 1115, and I had a problem with it. No biggie. They fed-ex'ed me a new one with instructions as to how to package the old one and send it back. It didn't cost me a dime and it took a matter of a couple of days to handle the complete transaction.
They can afford to do this because their profit margins on the ink are so high. And since most people don't add up the cost of ink, they don't realize just how much they're spending. They only know that the printer was cheap and they can actually talk to a human if they want technical support.
This doesn't mean I intend to buy more HP inkjet printers. Since I bought the photosmart, I have learned a lot about inkjets, laser printers, and operating costs. I know there are better alternatives.
But we slashdotters are somewhat unusual among humans in that we tend to research what we buy rather than judging products based on plastic color and price tag at BestBuy. We are, unfortunately, a tiny minority. Those who are not like us will continue to buy more and more HP printers and ink carts.
Actually, domestically, due to the sheer magnitude of the US (i'm talking geography, here), we've got tons of machines that read money. Vending machines, lottery machines, atms, car washes, cigarette machines, laudry, post office stamp machines, etc etc etc ...
Literally, we have millions of machines that deal with our money. Retrofitting or upgrading all of them to detect currency correctly would cost billions of dollars.
Already, we've had enough problems with the recent slew of new bills over the past few years. Changing it AGAIN would create more problems. Inluding installing fancy new hardware that can detect the UV ink or phosphorescent threads that you might want to introduce.
This is an example of the US gov't actually trying to save you some money, rather than forcing the entire country into an upgrade cycle.
The article states that counterfeiters turned out 44$million last year. Do you honestly think anyone would spend 100 times as much money to stop that?
roflmao
"...we at HP have to have a zero-tolerance policy for counterfeiting."
Because, you know, counterfeiting is sort of like terrorisim. And besides, zero-tolerance policies are in style.
Except... now the strip is in different places for diff. denominations, and the watermark is a real bitch to fake.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
As a researcher into colour perception, I calibrate printers to produce accurate coloured pictures for use in experiments. Some of these anti-counterfit measures could seriously piss me off.
One measure used by a scanner to detect currency is to look for five small circles, arranged in a specific pattern. These may be found on certain major currencies, including Euros, Pounds and Dollars.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
that's all I have to say. except that maybe some of you people should try thinking critically once in a blue moon.
Yea remember she said the reason they have to out-source to India is because she cannot find any good enigneers in the US. So its OK to hate them now. Actually I would be happy if HP changed their name, since they are so obviously not. Maybe they still make good industrial equipment; I don't know anymore.
The Gov't is putting measures in the money. It takes time.
My favourite part of the article: "Until the 1990s... U.S. banknotes had changed little for decades. Federal officials told the HP team they wanted to keep it that way." (my italics)
And they wonder why they're seeing more and more counterfeit bills...
Maybe not strictly on topic, but what I found really interesting about the frequent discussions on how Photoshop et al were doing currency detection was the this post which explains how currency can be machine-detected by looking for a five dot geometrical pattern present on many countries' currency (Euro, dollar, pound, and many more.)
... is to make the notes so fancy that a color printer cannot reproduce them in any way that would fool anyone. The problem is that US paper currency looks and feels like something printed on plain paper, and is therefore easy to fake. The US could learn something from the Europeans here (take a look at Euro-notes, or pre-Euro Dutch notes for example).
this doesn't really take a lot of time. it simply requires banks to keep old notes, and replace them for new notes.
this type of thing can happen in less than 2 months - take for example, the new canadian $10 bill. 2 months after it was introduced, it was "difficult" to find an old version. today, near impossible.
and before you say "but you dont have the number of bills incirculation", just add some sort of multilpier, we'll say 10 (cause we have 28 million people, and the US 280). add another 4 because of world circulation - so, 14. multiple 14 by 2, 28. 28 months. how hard is that? most peoples car payments are 60 months....
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
HP doesn't care about you. Know why? You don't make them money. They make money by selling ink. You know who doesn't buy much? You.
You know who does? Companies who do a lot of printing. You know what they don't want? The Secret Service showing up and seizing hardware because an employee thought he was doing something harmless.
This new "feature" causes a dilemma for the professional photographic community. Image if you will the wedding where the bridesmaids' dresses are in a lovely shade of "banknote green" (quite possible given the wild colors we see at weddings) and that the printer decides that it must put banding in the proof prints, because it might be counterfiet money. Now, imagine explaining to the the bride's mother why the stripes in the pictures are there. Ugh. HP broke their printers intentionally, and it will come back and bite them in strange and wonderful ways.
Yes, what they describe may indeed work great for the intended purpose of reducing the accuracy of their printers under certain circumstances, but the fact of reducing their output quality will sometimes cause user problems which are totally unrelated to counterfeiting. Their software simply cannot be smart enough to avoid the false positives which will most certainly occur.
Soli Deo Gloria
HP is not the only one doing this. All major color copier manufacturers do the same thing, but use a variety of techniques.
I don't know of a single copier that can copy real money. All these copiers are doing is reproducing worthless pieces of paper that the government tells us to use for money. I'll be impressed when I can use a copier to reproduce my wedding ring.
--Guns don't kill people, abortion clinics kill people.
Now I know where the colours on the new American $20 note come from - they have obviously switched to using HP printers at the US mint.
Not everyone in the world is using "green" money. Some countries have long advanced to colored money, ie, Canada. Maybe US should catch up again.
P.S. And no, film is not a viable option, especially long term, considering that major companies like Kodak are going to stop selling film.
I must have missed the press release where Kodak announced that they were going to stop making film.
Digital might be competitive for 35 mm but plenty of photographers need more than that. Nothing on the market can compete with 6x7 or larger formats.
Kodak will be making film for quite a while.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Until the 1990s, when the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing added new security measures such as a watermark and a security thread, U.S. banknotes had changed little for decades. Federal officials told the HP team they wanted to keep it that way.
That precluded any major changes to the currency itself, including techniques used by some other currencies. The Euro, for example, contains fluorescent fibers and foil features, which cannot easily be reproduced by conventional copiers or printers.
So, the US government is too lazy to fix their "broken" currency? Instead, they compel private companies to fix their problem for them.
Nice.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Then HP can make printers that won't print green, red, blue or yellow correctly. :)
Like this makes sense. The criminals may not know what to put in their bills to avoid detection by the Secret Service specialists, but the public at large equally doesn't know what to look for to detect counterfeits, which is where they are going to get passed.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Counterfeit currency is a significant cost for many businesses"
Oh good, facts without proof. Can I play?
Counterfeiting actually helps the typical small business in that it increases the number and amount of cash flowing through the local economy.
Surprising, and counterintuitively, studies have indicated for years that counterfeiting is mostly a concern of hollywood movies and that in a large economy such as that of the united states, counterfeiting has proven to be so difficult as to be a non-problem.
Do you see how easy it is when you can just make up facts? You make up facts, I make up facts, we all make up facts, and we still have no understanding, just the word of a *lawyer* to shed light on the truth. Please, no snickering from the back row.
It's "irrespective" or "regardless," not "irregardless."
It looks like you're scanning some currency. Would you like me to:
- Download the relevant statutes related to currency reproduction.
- Contact the Secret Service.
- Arrange for you to turn yourself in.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Carly bought Compaq for many Billions and then effectively buried the brand.
Remember when Compaq bought DEC? Remember what a waste of money it was? Remember that acquistion effectively SANK Compaq.
HP just did the same thing. No value to the shareholders or consumers.
Its like Carly doing anti-counterfeiting, or working with hollywood to take away your rights. It brings no value to the shareholders and consumers.
She ain't good looking enough to be that stupid. She has got to go.
Is so different in texture and weight from everyday paper you have to worry about anyone that accepted a scanned and printed bill.
Preventing the distribution of currenct paper seems far more effective imvho.
If their just being used in criminal circles well then the billions that the criminals are alledged to have are virtually worthless.
Worst
What Canada has done is to use a UV ink design that will readily show up under even the simplest UV light source. If cashier desks are set up with a small UV lamp facing down towards the cash desk, the money simply has to be passed under this lamp and forgeries spotted in a fraction of a second as the UV ink design flouresces quite brightly.
I have yet to see any home printer that can take UV inks, so I'd be willing to bet that the reasources required to obtain one would mostly defeat the purpose of counterfeitting anyways.
Btw, for people who think just throwing money at the cashier and walking away might offer a counterfeitter a way past this, my experience is that for movies, they won't even let you into the seating area at all without your receipt from the cash desk (which means you have to hang onto the receipt for the duration of the film, since you will need it to get back in if you momentarily leave to get popcorn, for example).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Brown, too. (hundred-dollar notes)
What is failed to be mentioned here, is that some of these techniques are also for forensics purposes. Take a look at some of the output from an HP color laser printer. AFAIK, there are dots on all the printouts. Depending on the size, color and placement on the paper, one can tell from which printer the document originated. If you can say "this forged bill came from a dj6122" because of x, y, z. And the suspect had that model of printer, it would be much easier to make the case.
Iran used to be the biggest counterfitter of US currency as part of a goal to destabilize it (morons), flooding the market with around 100 million in fake dollars a year. Considering Neil Bush has lost more than that on multiple occasions, and managed to misplace an impressive 2 billion on one of them, and two of his relatives were elected president. Yeah, good luck.
Absolutely wrong. Too many times in this age, people are punished for what they MAY do wrong. That is NOT the way it was intended for this country to function.
I really get bent out of shape over this type of lawmaking (DVD/CD encryption, Macrovision, currency detection) are all. I don't care if only ONE SINGLE PERSON is out there using any technology lawfully, then it is wrong to do this. Punish the people who actually DO the wrong thing. Not everyone.
.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
HP is infringing on my rights to backup and store copies of my currency for archival purposes. ;)
Their print drivers are now all goofy, and they force you to install buggy 'print management' software, which makes them function very poorly as network printers. Also, the quality of their Jet Direct cards is declining. And whoever put in their web based printer management should be shot; it comes from the factory completely open, meaning anybody setting it up who doesnt lock it down will leave it open to the whole network.
They also stopped, for the most part, making combined drivers, again making their printers bad for network printers. If you need different drivers for 95, 98, 98se, me, nt, 2000, and xp, it makes it impossible to centrally manage the drivers. A windows print server groups drivers as 95/98/me, nt/2000, and 2000/xp. So separate drivers dont really work in a mixed environment, and they dont put anything into the driver which will flag it as invalid. Meaning many printers need to be set up by hand, raising your support costs.
Its a shame there isnt really an alternative to HP for corporate customers. They may not be as good as they once were, but they are still better than their competition.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
What is the fair use in you making 40 copies of acd? What is the fair use in making an exact look a like copy of a dollar bill?
Get over it!
to make copies of money on an HP copier. I did a 20, 5, and 1 dollar bill. It was black and white, they were a bit too big, and the quality was less then stellar, but I'm sure with some tweaking I could have created a fairly decent looking bill. Now I just need to get my lighter and burn them in case someone really thinks I was going to try and spend a black and white one sided 20 dollar bill.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
This has nothing to do with laws, crimes or punishment.
If HP wants to make a printer that prints all text in piglatin and all images inside out and upside down, they can go ahead and do so. No law says you have to buy or use it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It was an official Epson branded Ink cartridge and the printer was 6 months old. The model was The epson C62.
Why would I complain if MY corner cutting resulted in my problems?
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=31&art_id= qw1076044871107B252&set_id=1
Plants give up secret of splitting water
February 06 2004 at 07:21AM
Washington - Researchers said on Thursday they had taken another step toward understanding how plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms - which may provide a cheap way to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel.
Producing hydrogen from water is the stuff of science fiction - and some comments by US President George Bush. But the team at Imperial College London and Japan Science and Technology Corp. in Yokohama said they had taken the best pictures yet of the plant structures that do it every day.
They used high-resolution x-ray crystallography to make an image of the tiny atomic splitter that separates the two hydrogen atoms from an oxygen atom in a water molecule.
"Results by other groups, including those obtained using lower resolution x-ray crystallography at 3.7 angstroms have shown that the splitting of water occurs at a catalytic center that consists of four manganese atoms," said So Iwata of Imperial's Department of Biological Sciences.
'Together this arrangement gives strong hints about the water-splitting chemistry'
"We've taken this further by showing that three of the manganese atoms, a calcium atom and four oxygen atoms form a cube-like structure, which brings stability to the catalytic center," Iwata added in a statement.
Writing in the journal Science, Iwata and colleagues said they looked at a plant bacterium called Thermosynechococcus elongatus. "Without photosynthesis life on Earth would not exist as we know it," Jim Barber of Imperial's Department of Biological Sciences said in a statement.
"Oxygen derived from this process is part of the air we breathe and maintains the ozone layer needed to protect us from ultraviolet radiation.
"Now hydrogen also contained in water could be one of the most promising energy sources for the future. Unlike fossil fuels it's highly efficient, low-polluting and is mobile so it can be used for power generation in remote regions where it's difficult to access electricity."
Water has always seemed a logical source for hydrogen but the only known feasible method to separate it, electrolysis, costs ten times as much as natural gas, and is three times as expensive as gasoline, Barber said.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8 &oe=UTF-8&q=20+dollar+bill&btnG=Google+Sea rch
Nope, just takes a penchant for graphic design and a liking of the design of the money. If you have trouble scanning and printing things that look like money, you have a very difficult time trying to parody bills.
-----------------------
You are what you think.
As far as the offset, couldn't you just offset the image to print on the backside to accomodate for the slight change?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
It is not the place of a printer manufacturer to censor it's clients.
They are deciding what their clients may and may not print.
Today it is money... tomorrow it is legislation they don't approve of.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
That's a practice that's been around for awhile. ie: maps have streets that aren't there. And books have the occasional misspelling.
I have no problem with counterfeit measures in Abobe or now in HP's product.
That is as long as I know that it is there. My real concern is all the gunk that is inside commercial closed source software the we do not know.
Think the CIA has not placed a few lines inside Windows? I bet you that a lot of the behind the scene actions against FOOS is driven by Government agencies and politicians Not because the like MS or Adobe etc, but because they know that this is the only way to plant "National Security Hooks"
Help fight continental drift.
"So how is this a first amendment issue?"
Nobody said it was. Nice straw man, wrong issue.
HP can legitimately put anything into their products they want.
I want to ask why you think its inappropriate to discuss it?
My scanner at home refused to scan a drawing I did of a flower (botanical drawing) because of anti-counterfeiting measures in photoshop. How's that for lovely.
Bah!
Kids today and their new fangled color laser printers and 9600dpi scanners.
Back when I was a kid we started with two blocks of solid steel, a sharp pokey scrapey tool, and a magnifying glass. Then we painstakingly had to carve away at the steel until we had a matched set of plates, loaded up a super pressure stomper and fed it special linen based paper and uberGreen ink. Took months, maybe a year to get a good rig running.
And we were THANKFUL!
Ever want to see some good old school counterfeiting, watch 'To Live and Die in LA'. Those guys would cut up Carly and use her for fish food.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
We as the consumers and public should not have to settle for purposefullly flawed merchandise. Especially as this could set a rather nasty precident fullly in the manufacturers favor.
When companies introduce flaws into their product as a means to prevent theft, we are the ones paying the price.
This is not the first such "flaw" that has been introduced, remember those audio CD's that were given "flawed" audio so as to make them unreproduceable?
The problem with this flaw is that it is the actual mechanics of the merchandise we are buying. They will be selling a printer that is made to not print as well as it could.
Any one want to challenge this in court?
It's fully in HP's favor and could set precident for many other manufacturers. Down the road this could have serious implications as to the quallity of the technology the public recieves. In effect, rolling back decades of progress and empowerment of the common man. Multi-media and desktop publishing were still very expensive in the early 90's... look at the cost to get into that now, magnitudes of order less. What this threatens is to lock us out of the high-end, and put the power back into the hands of the businesses. This effect will not be felt this year or the next, but in 5 or 6 years.
What I find rather ugly about this is that currency is something that enjoys uncontested proprietaryship in it's manufacture. A few years back they did a massive overhaul, adding special strips woven into the paper fibers, special inks that would last through wear/tear and show up under UV light, a special paper fabrication, and now the color process and microdetialing that has been added to this years 20's.
Why is it that the consumer must pay when our goverment has the ability to alter the currency at will? The only argument I could see that would make sense is the old "greenback" that can still be found in circulation.
And if that's the case, do like the euro and put out a public moratorium worlwide, "Redeem you greenbacks for up to date currency by so and so date" and those who miss that date, tough.
But to stifle the consumer and intentionally flaw the product? There may be a day not too far from now where noothing really works as well as it should.
kodak is NOT going to stop selling film, they are only going to stop selling film cameras. And only in the US, Canada, and parts of europe. They make all their money on film anyway, not the hardware.
"Heaven forbid that a company has a motive to do anything but market demand. Like ethics and corporate responsiblity."
Unfortunately, a corporation's responsibility is to the shareholders, which means that their ONLY reason for existance is to maximize shareholder value. It would be unethical for the officers to violate the trust of their owners and spend money on anything just because it made the world a better place. Now a privately held company (and its owners) can decide to give half its profits to AIDS research or something equally good, but not a corporation. So in this example HP is "self-regulating" in order to avoid lawmakers getting involved and perhaps passing something that would be more expensive for them.
My point is that Corporations are amoral by their design. To the extent that they follow the laws, it is because it would be expensive not to. To the extent that they give to charity, it is because they think it will improve their public relations and give them an edge in winning sales. When Microsoft gives software to schools, it is because they want you make sure youngsters are learning MS stuff instead of Apple or Linux, and because they want to look like they aren't bullys. When Bill Gates gives millions of dollars away, it is his own money, not Microsoft's.
Don't anthropomorphize corporations. They don't want anything, they are a machine designed to make money. Once you accept this, it is easier to understand their actions and see through the PR.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I know I am in the minority of slashdoters here but I think that HP is being ethical and responsible in their efforts to protect currency from unauthorized duplication.
My concern isn't that they are doing this but that the methods and perhaps the very technology that they use may (and in some cases will) interfere with legit uses. Crooks are smart, inventive, and resourceful. This means that the "lock" that HP and other manufacturers use has to be tough and almost necessarily will interfere with some legal uses.
The part that I keyed on was the front to back registration. If it is so small that humans won't notice it, how will that prevent counterfiting? Yet, in some applications, where you are printing on transparent Mylar, I can see this being a significant drawback! I know that this kind of stuff isn't done by everyone every day but it can be done for artistic purposes now. Laying a background layer on the backside of a transparency adds richness and depth to the foreground. I am not an engineer but I suspect that this same kind of trick is often used when designing limited run double sided circuit board masks.
Crooks can walk into any computer store and buy a box of blank checks and print out whatever they want on the checks including whatever routing number and account number they want. These checks can then be easily passed wherever a check can be cashed using a fake ID purchased over the internet or from someone who specializes in such forgeries. Why hasn't there been a hue and cry over this? Because it isn't currency, banks and people eat the cost of these crimes.
HP has the right idea but needs a better implimentation. People (especially clerks) need to be better at spotting counterfit bills, and even high schoolers with scanners and printers have to be afraid of getting busted. Counterfitting is a crime that is being done more frequently by juveniles who get their hands slapped only if they get caught. The "system" needs to fix this.
But for some reason I get fired.
> It takes a serious disconnect from the real world to see something threatening about this.
I disagree. The threat here is that this is step number 1 in a long series of incremental steps that will start forcibly restricting what people can do with technology -- all for the sake of appeasing the interests of large entities (governmental and corporate).
In the long term, you can expect that all devices will contain technology to disable the copying of "protected" materials. Top on the list will be the "protection" of MP3s and MPEGs that the entertainment industry does not want copied.
Eventually, we'll have systems where all copying must be first cleared through a central server to make sure we have the rights to copy it. (Microsoft is working on this today.) The next thing you know, you will find yourself unable to make a copy of "subversive" writings because they are "protected". The potential for abuse is staggering.
We're going to fight this every step of the way. Not because we want to encourage counterfeiting. But because we understand the long-term damage that will be caused by establishing a precedent for this behaviour.
While this is only speculation, I would be willing to bet that a company that refused the "polite requests" would have a very hard time getting their various business forms processed in a timely fashion. Or at all. Among other things.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Cynical though it might seem, I do not think HP (et al.) are doing this as a public service. Nor do I think they are doing it because of .GOV pressure. They are certainly doing it to limit the liability of the companies that purchase HP (et al.) imaging products.
/.er who has been in procurement or facilities management can comment?
We would have to fire up the WayBackMachine, but I suspect there must have been some high profile counterfeit issue when color first showed up, say when the mighty color Xerox came out. I recall wanting to use that machine at one point at my Univeristy when it first showed up in the library and being told that they had to watch me working so as to guard against currency and ID fraud. Maybe that was just them being anal...but maybe there really was an issue. Back then.
It must be easier to sell these things to large institutions when the sales people can claim that the machine has built in safe guards against many kinds of fraudulent use. Perhaps some
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
This just in:
Thanks to forward-thinking engineers at HP, HP printers now have the ability to perform text recognition on any document before it is printed. If any words or phrases are found which indicate potential anti-government sentiment, an email is sent to the authorities and you will be placed under arrest.
"Buy HP! We love America!"
from that company that routes wires through the heatsink to save on the cost of cable ties.
If you start coming up with new bills every other year, you flood the streets with dozens of different versions of the 20, and make counterfeiting easier. It's more likely I can hand you some monopoly money and tell you it's just the '86 version..
Plus the other nuisance.. I've tried to spend new $20's and had moron clerks tell me it's not real money and refuse it.
BTW, they aren't seeing more and more counterfeit bills, they're actually seeing less and less.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you read the SEC filing you would see that about 90% of their profits comes from INK! No wonder they want to do R&D into ways of controlling us further from printing.
I have a Canon for the record, but their INK! is just as expensive. but i prefer to use a company that does innovate instead of stagnate.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Just like in the Adobe case people seem to be igoring the "why" of the whole situation.
Does HP want to include these technologies? Hell no. Just like Adobe [and every other company that makes imaging software, printers, scanners and copiers] they're under tremendous pressure from the government to include this stuff. I don't know exactly what legal precedent the feds have over including this stuff but everyone in the industry is complying.
There's several more techniques that aren't mentioned in that article as well including ways for counterfeits to be traced to specific [as in serial number] devices on higher-end equipment.
so that's what they call faulty defective products; "to prevent counterfeiting" or as a new feature....
o wait...didn't Microsoft do this?
wonder if linux printer drivers have this same "feature"?
>I must have missed the press release where Kodak announced that they were going to stop making film.
1 12 2757,00.html
Here you go. (pardon my non-leet html)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,
How the hell is the parent a troll? Wake up mods.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
this is plain stupid:
:)
1. uses CPU power to detect faked currency, making usage of personal computer a bigger harrassment than it currently is.
2. does not prevent criminals from counterfeiting at all - if they are smart enough to use correct paper they will be smart enough to use other printer or other drivers
3. I'm sure you will get more argumets why this idea is stupid, as I have ran out of mine.
please consider your market strategy again
(btw: shame what you did to HP49, nonetheless you're still for me a great company)
they told me:
Thank you for taking the time to rate and comment. Your input is greatly appreciated and will help us better understand your informational needs. We strive to improve our content based on readership comment.
okay, fine
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
So, the printer refuses to print something that has a certain pattern of dots/circles/whatevers in it.
So what is to prevent you from simply printing the pattern in two passes, so that each print run bypasses the filter but the end result is the same? The biggest hurdle there would be making sure the second pass properly lines up with the first, so everything is printed in the correct place.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
you're being punished? Do you plan on printing money? No? Then this doesn't affect you.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Keep believing that, buddy.
Digital can't touch the light sensitivity or color gamut of film. If you're willing to drop 10 grand on a digital 4x5 back, you can approach the resolution of medium-format film, but those are only good for still life, as they're scanning backs, not giant full-frame sensors.
Kodak, Fuji, et al are not "going to stop selling film" anytime soon. Probably not in my lifetime.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
They are deliberately introducing one of the worst things about home printing - BANDING!!!
Nasty.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Although your link is not working I don't believe Kodak has stopped making film. They've announced that they are going to stop making film based cameras and are shifting away from film in North America and Europe.
Good: HP likes Linux and open source
Bad: HP supports DRM and "trusted computing"
Somebody please...tell me. Am I sopposed to like HP or hate HP?
What?
I mean those companies that market those currency detecting markers must be making millions..
One wonders if they have any stock =)
Bah... I forgot to finish my post. What I meant was to say that they're *not* getting out of the film business, but here's how that story got started. Thanks for the backup.
Yes we should get rid of the dollar and go to the Triganic Pu. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever counterfeited enough to own one Pu.
The plastic security threads embedded in all US bills $5 and up are UV sensitive; they all glow different colors according to the denomination of the bill. I've seen doormen at clubs in NYC with small blacklight boxes.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
And another thought I've had recently, take a dollar and if you could follow it around for ten years or so. Count how many times that dollar was taxed. I think it would create a monetary wormhole and collapse back on itself. The collective COST of using that said dollar would far suprass the face value.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Yeah, you totally missed the press release. I must have missed the press release where Kodak announced that they were going to stop making film. You DO know how to use google right? http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3948032/ Kodak will be making film for quite a while. ROFLMAO... You're insightful.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
One day after I lose my mod points too...
I copied a 20 as joke and it came out noticably yellow, and this was back in 2001.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Vote Quimby.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Sorry, but I think you missed the press release.
They're not going to sell CAMERAS anymore. And when was the last time Kodak sold a camera that was worth buying? Probably the brownie cameras from waaaaaay back.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
as I recall many years ago when that big company with the big blue logo was the only maker of PC computers all of the companies that wanted to be able to present thier own computers as "compatible"had to make as exact a copy of the original as possible including all of the "warts and flaws". Even though they could fix the flaws, fixing the flaws may mean that the copy was not the exact same and may not run an OS or software that had been kludged to work around the known problems.
I agree with BTL. Why would this be a problem? It solves a serious problem with only a minor inconveinience. I believe that this has been being done for years on color laser and color copy machines and no one seems to notice. (except maybe the counterfeiters, but I've never heard/read of any complaints about it from them.)
If I understood the article correctly, then I agree with HP. And all the other companies doing the same thing. Counterfeiting should be left to the skilled professional. I am tired of armature counterfeiters passing me shoty craftsmanship. Give me a high quality job from and engraved plate the way it was intended. No self respecting counterfeiter should want to bring a bill into a paint program and send it to a consumer printer only to be produced on a corporate copier.
That is way American is falling behind the world now. Lazy armatures with no pride in their work! Show some respect to the elderly, and spend a little time with them. Learn how it was done in the good old days before them there computer thingies. They had no concern for big brother. Just use cash, and mechanical equip. That way the service tech did not know your operation when they come to reset your equipment after it detects something that resembles money. You unbolt things, get the worn part, take it to a machine shop, slide the cash (could be fake if you wanted) and fix the thing yourself. Back in business. No RFID, no card swipe trail, no knowledge of where your equip is. Nothing.
So I say to hell with today's armature. Let them use crippled equipment. Maybe after enough of them get rounded up and locked away, we can get back to good old American quality. I LOVE AMERICA. MAY SHE ALWAYS BE BLESSED WITH THE BEST.
But just like the image loading restrictions in Photoshop CS, it can be a problem if it hinders honest, lawful uses. It is lawful to print money at less than 75% or greater than 150% of actual size. It is also lawful to print it as part of a large graphics design that wouldn't be mistaked for actual money. If it hinders those actions, it is punishing the honest user for doing nothing wrong.
I'm disappointed that everyone is focusing on the FUD related to the money factor and ignoring the other items in the article, such as the "FAX back" and barcoding schemes. Do you think they may be valuable?
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
RTFA.
Since when has it been the job of HP to enforce laws?
Since when was it the job of any company to enforce laws?
I have an idea, how about companies stick to offering the best products/services they can and let the law enforcement officers handle enforcing the law?
Talk about "Big Brother". Soon, the big corporations will be trying to enforce tons of laws on us. How can this be acceptable to you? Do you want MS, HP, Intel, IBM, etc telling you what is right or wrong? Do you want them to enforce their ideas of what is right or wrong in their products without giving you any alternative?
Let businesses stick to business.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Guess this means I can no longer print out my Wally World Bucks (National Lampoons Vacation). Mr. Wally World
Thank you Mr. AC- you made a good point here.
Also- this is a case of a company/industry regulating itself. I would much prefer self-regulation of the imaging industry (copiers, printers, etc) than the government finally stepping in, because the machinery is used for rampant counterfeiting.
And- to the guy who is upset because maybe his pictures of birds wouldn't come out...(the grass/fields are dark green)
I used a color copier with this protection on it for many, many years. The ONLY thing that ever tripped the counterfeiting sensors was money. Never did any other photograph cause any problems. Only money (US currency).
No reason to lie.
Looks like CounterfeitCarly (DVDJon? eh whatever) is PUBLICLY ANNOUNCING that the products her company makes are used in the production of counterfeit bills. It doesn't matter that you can also print out the front page of Slashdot with it, it's a COUNTERFEIT BILL PRODUCER! Someone ought to go to prison for a while.
I'm quite curious just exactly what they mean by flaws to deter counterfeiting. If I send an image to the printer that I want printed, I don't want my printer altering that image in any way-- regardless of what the image may be. If the printer doesn't do its job, then it's going in the trash. Period.
Why so many companies are choosing to focus on anti-counterfeiting measures anymore also confuses me. Unless things have really changed in recent years, counterfeiting isn't exactly a big problem. You might see a news story or two about it on occasion, but it's really just not that common, and there are good reasons why.
For one thing, standard printers are simply not very good at making even sub-standard counterfeit bills. The texture isn't right, the colors aren't quite right, there's no authenticity strip embedded in the paper (in $5's and above), and even the aroma of the paper and ink isn't quite right-- money has its own smell. Because of this, anybody who knows anything about money and has had their hands on cash at least a few times during their life can easily tell the difference between a real and a fake if they bother to pay the least bit of attention to these properties.
Second of all, the time and effort required to produce anything of acceptable quality that won't be checked for authenticity (ie, less than $100) using a commercial printer far outweighs the value of money counterfitted. Yeah, you may be able to get away with faking a handful of 20's, but you'll have spent a good couple thousand dollars on a printer that's good enough, the proper equipment to cut everything, the paper, etc. Anybody willing to invest this much time and effort into counterfitting is going to expect more return from it, and so they are going to find some other method.
What it comes down to is that these companies probably invested a lot more money into creating these anti-counterfeiting technologies than will be saved from bad money. So in essence, they've crippled my photoshop software and my printer for nothing.
KappaStone
What exactly is your sig all about?
--Mike--
I've come up with a clever but cheap method to make money much harder to counterfeit. I'd guarantee that no color copier or printer could duplicate it.
The only catch is that it requires use of gold or silver nearly equal in value to the money itself...
[Could it be that the government wants to reserve the right to counterfeit money to itself? Naahh - that'd cause inflation! Sigh - how fondly I remember the dime soda pop of my youth...]
>P.S. And no, film is not a viable option, especially long term, considering that major companies like Kodak are going to stop selling film.
Kodak announced that they were stopping production on a particular TYPE of 35mm film. Mainly because it's replacement was already next to it on the shelf.
They also announced that they were ceasing development on non single use 35mm cameras. Maybe they quit this market AGAIN, because they couldn't compete AGAIN? (They quit this market 15 or 20 years ago, then decided to jump back into it with the crappy APS format. It didn't work, so they are exitting again).
I guess I shouldn't have said "work on them". I meant maintain them, and when the occassional secretary sticks a piece of gum in the feeder tray, I repair them also. For those of you who said their support is terrible, well, I guess you haven't spent all that much time on the phone with them. Not bad at all - certainly better than Dell or Gateway (for their branded printers/computers). For one thing, their operators speak english fluently. The same CANNOT be said for Dell. Frustration.
***
-1, insipid stupidity.
Kodak is going to stop selling cameras. They will continue to sell film and disposable cameras. They make most of their money from film!
Oh, and incidentally, Steve, a photographer's photos will be "photorealistic" if he uses film! Sheesh. A budding n00b.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
He's a fake!
A real member of the United Counterfeiters of North America would not have misspelled the name of our glorious and patriotic organization.
The United Counterfitters of North America are dedicated to advancing the rights of people who install kitchen surfaces. Down the hall on your left.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
>> people are punished for what they MAY do wrong.
Punished? If you don't actually try to counterfeit, you're not punished. If the printer prints everything else perfectly, what's the problem? If it doesn't print other stuff correctly, you return it as defective.
Your response is a typical knee-jerk liberty-rant. Not allowing you to break the law isn't a punishment if it doesn't infringe on any legal rights.
And this is a company, not the government. HP can't "punish" you because you're free to go buy an Epson.
Reminds me about back when some students in my high school printed out phony $20 bills in the computer lab and then spent them downstairs in the cafeteria. The bills were printed in black and white on regular printer paper, which is good enough when you're dealing with lunchladies.
> We need to keep the look of our currency intact if we want a
> stable currency system.
Not really. Many other nations, with quite stable currencies, revamp the look of their banknotes every so often, simply as a matter of course. It is the US that is the "odd man out" for having ours look so similar for so long.
As an example that's coming up sooner than later; do you really think that when Elisibeth II dies, and every banknote and coin in the commonwealth is redone to feature Charles, that the new LOOK of the money is going to destablize the currencies of every (or any, for that matter) member?
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Hmmm... this argument is familiar.
The image is *not* the difficult part of counterfeiting. The hard part is getting your hands on the right kind of paper.
Stopping counterfeiting by keeping printers from printing the image of money is like preventing nuclear proliferation by keeping countries from buying bomb casings rather than keeping them from buying plutonium.
All's true that is mistrusted
In that scenario, the problems would be common knowledge from all the returns of the printer. It's nothing like this ninja technology that watches unsuspecting printouts until it thinks it needs to act.
Should we quit being concerned with spyware, too, since no law says you have to install it? What if there's nothing but spyware, because Palladium has effectively destroyed anti-spyware companies because Microsoft refuses to sign their products? Just because there's no law granting some company or technology a monopoly does not mean it won't happen.
Something that always bothers me about these articles is that they never seem to specify whether the anti-counterfeiting measures pay attention to the final size of the bill. I imagine Photoshop doesn't, though, because until its printed, it does not know what the final size will be.
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
If I was a stockholder of HP I'd be pissed that the company spends money on things that do not bring benefits, just because some officials "asked" them.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Multi-level detection and deterrence - a detection scheme that uses an algorithm to separate suspicious documents from those free of suspicion." Ummm.... isn't that kind of stating the obvious? Kind of like saying the solution to the homeland security issue is to come up with a way to separate suspicious people from non-suspicious people..
If it's hurting businesses then maybe the US should do what every other country in the world has done and make banknotes that are hard to forge?
Trying to solve the problem at the printer level is ridiculous; it's like trying to solve the spam problem with intelligent monitors.
All of this discussion of anti-counterfeiting misses a significant point: ALL US currency is counterfeit. Has been for decades.
The US once printed "Silver Certificates". These were a promise to hand over, on demand, N dollars (defined as a particular weight of silver) in exchange for the certificates.
In reaction to the banking crisis around the crash of '29 and the depression of the '30s, the government established the Federal Reserve System. Silver Certificates (exchangable for actual money, in the form of a useful and valuable metal) were gradually replaced by Federal Reserve Notes (backed only by the government's threat to use force to require that everyone accept them as payment of debts).
The government can arrange to have as many of these printed as it wishes, injecting them into circulation as loans (in competition with private investors) to lower the interest rate. Sometimes it wishes to print a lot of them. This is the cause of inflation.
So by the definition of money as a valuable commodity or something exchangable for one, US paper currency has been counterfeit since the retirement of the Silver Certificates. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I said:
In reaction to the banking crisis around the crash of '29 and the depression of the '30s, the government established the Federal Reserve System.
Actually it was established in 1913. (Gotta keep my banking crises sorted out...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A friend of mine got a high quality Tektronix color printer, with a skid load of supplies, for free a few months ago. He works as one of those guys who builds cubicles and pulls cable. He got the printer for free because he noticed it at the loading dock on it's way to the trash.
It works perfectly.
As long as tech like that is randomly available to joe-sixpack (the kind of person my friend is) there will be problems.
---
It was *intended* as a wry, witty observation, meant to spark a little thought, and I fear that the moderators kneejerked before they did so.
Think about this a minute: what is a dollar, but t politician's promise? There's nothing backing them. They're not a promise to pay anything. And the Fed has been on a crazy printing spree for the last few years, desperately trying to paper over the damage from the tech bubble (which WE are mostly feeling, regardless.) There's a reason the dollar has been dropping so fast over the last two years. The Dow may be at 10,000 now, but the measuring stick has changed.
You say 'it's the best we can do', but that just isn't the case. I am of the firm belief that floating currencies is a lot of what is behind the steady siphoning of wealth from the general public and into the hands of the very, very rich. Floating money allows for the rise of a speculative class, and currency speculations are zero-sum; if I win, you lose. In essence, currency traders extract a lot of value out of the economy while providing nothing in exchange; they are vultures. Commodity money prevents this, except in cases where governments are abusing their money supplies. (ie, increasing the currency base without increasing the reserves.)
Remember, what you have in your wallet is a politician's promise to pay nothing. I was trying to point this out, because the anti-counterfeiting stance struck me as amusing....it's okay if the government does it, but if private citizens do it, we'd have too much of it. I believe that ANY counterfeiting is too much, and that's pretty much what's going on every day.
Well, okay, I guess it's not quite counterfeiting. It's a 100% genuine promise to pay nothing. :-)
The governments in many other parts of the world are so unstable, and their currency collapses or withers away from inflation so fast, that it's trivial for them to roll out totally new currency quite often.
That phenomenon isn't the case in the US. US currency has changed very little for close to a century.
People take the old greenback a lot more seriously than they do the full color mickeymouse currency from a lot of other places (i.e. Disneyworld, Canada, France, etc.)
---
They should weave Tyvek into currency... have you ever tried to tear one of those FedEx envelopes??
Somebody needs to cut up Carly for fish food. Problem is, the Mississipi carp are already contaminated enough.
It's too bad we can't just beat her to death with RPN calculators.
---
my "best we can do.." should have had {sarcasm} tags around it :)
Yeah, money is pretty abstract but I believe the original intent and practice is that for every dollar, there is a dollars worth of gold/silver in the treasury, so the bill was just a representative of the actual valuable metals. And carrying around $20 of gold bar in your pocket can be a pisser!
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I think the German Govt and others may be sources of the pressure, rather than just the US.
The silly thing is, the fundamental flaw is that the US notes are so easy to copy. Modern EU ones have big reflective bits that cannot be printed properly at all; they come out grey not bright silver. Yet I am sure the governments blame the messengers (adobe, HP) not the message, when the message is 'our tools are so good at near-perfectly duplicating your current notes, because your notes are so good'.
Now, to change topics slightly, the current Western Governments, EU and US both, view cash transactions as suspicious. Really. You try living cash-only these days -even stay in motels- and people view you as a drug dealer or a terrorist.
If you want to worry about what the governments are up to with cash, cracking down on copying is nothing. Its abolishing it in large denominations; its adding RFIDs and other tracking mechanisms. If they could generate a paper trail from every transaction, they'd do it. Compared to that, what a few printer and software vendors do is noise.
So what happens if the printer thinks that your special form with SCO Logo Watermark is some kind of "Protected Content"? Or what happens if you print out the picture at an angle? Does it still recognize it? As long as there is a fair chance that it could make a mistake, I don't want to use that printer. I don't want it to screw my documents. I think I'll look at Lexmark....
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Your world is fun, in a weird, "I'm living in my parents house" kind of way.
Please realize two things:
1. This will end up in all of the print drivers for anything sold as "computer printers" sooner rather than later. So just because we print on high-end printers, the problem is not going away.
2. Sure, all of our color printers say "Epson" on them - the old Epson EX used (yes indeed!) for customer proofing, and the big, expensive Epson 7600 which takes 100 foot rolls of paper up to two feet wide, but that will not make the problem go away. You can bet that the same technology is being forced on all of the printer vendors - not just HP. So, now we can expect that when the updated printer drivers come available to fix flaws, they will certainly now contain the same variety of intentionally inserted flaws.
I used to own a Canon that bubblejet would tilt the paper slightly so that my images and documents would not only be offset, but crooked. And this was in 1998! Stupid HP just can't get it right, I guess...
Who would have thought the inability to line up a print head or feed straight would ever be thought of as a feature....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I have every sympathy for you, but if you RTFA you'll find out that that has absolutely nothing to do with HP.
That badly designed anti-counterfeiting algorithm may well cause serious problems with perfectly legitimate uses, it doesn't follow that all anti-counterfeiting algorithms are bad.
I don't have any recent HP hardware, so I can't comment from experience, but from the article it sounds like they're trying pretty hard to make sure their algorithms don't interfere with legitimate uses. After all, nobody's forcing you to print your greetings cards in banknote green...
If you say 'glossy photo paper' on a modern printer, it chucks out more ink to get good depth of colour on the glossy substrate that the paper has. It absolutely saturates normal paper which gets too wet and has ruined prints.
So if the 'green hack' was smart enough to disable itself on a photo print -and we know nothing here, I am only guessing and hoping- then it could not damage green.
Can we test this? well, we can ask to see if anyone has noticed that their photos come out wrong.
and all images inside out and upside down,
Actually, my school just got a new HP inkjet for the front office that flips their logo both vertically and horizontally, but only when it's in the orientation that they want. Trying to flip it so that it shows up on screen wrong but on paper right doesn't work either.
You're right - in normal conditions most people can spot counterfeit notes almost without thinking about it. That's why most counterfeits are passed in busy poorly-lit bars and suchlike.
Funny thing you should mention it. In a "Professional environment" we generally do not do paper proofs at all any more. We shoot digitally and show the customer the images using the LCD projector. If they like the pictures, they buy them, and if not, the bits go back in the bit bucket. Proofing is a lousy idea, in that non-final images go out the door, which have not had the full treatment (i.e. taking 25 lbs off of mama, taking the zits off of junior, and straightening papa's tie...)
However, we do use a conventional small color printer to make "preview magazines" which show in thumbnail form all of the pictures for a wedding, so that the customer may pick out the ones they want us to print properly for their album. Why not use an inexpensive little printer for that? The results are good enough, and as small business people we have to cut costs in order to make it through the off-season.
Please realize that the wedding and portrait photography business is a great way to go broke. Although there are a few well-known names who do well, according to the Professional Photographers of America, the average mom-and-pop photo business clears about $27K per year, and that is with two people working full time plus more. We could do better, with much less effort, being greeters at Wal-Mart. So yes indeed we cut costs any way we can.
The European Central Bank is proposing European legislation which would ban the distribution of software and devices not including such anti-counterfeiting technology: this has possible serious implications for open source software.
See: this document
If you think lexmark isn't far behind you're fooling yourself. This is the way it's going to be. Don't go around thinking "hey lexmark is going to be the defender of our right to make funny money" because they most certainly aren't. This whole thing reminds me of a scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian:
...
Judith: Any Anti-Imperialist group like ours must *reflect* such a divergence of interests within its power-base.
Reg: Agreed. (General nodding.) Francis?
Francis: I think Judith's point of view is valid here, Reg, provided the Movement never forgets that it is the inalienable right of every man--
Stan: Or woman.
Francis: Or woman...to rid himself--
Stan: Or herself.
Reg: Or herself. Agreed. Thank you, brother.
Stan: Or sister.
Francis: Thank you, brother. Or sister. Where was I?
Reg: I thought you'd finished.
Francis: Oh, did I? Right.
Reg: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man
Stan: Or woman.
Reg: Why don't you shut up about women, Stan, you're putting us off.
Stan: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg.
Francis: Why are you always on about women, Stan?
Stan: (pause) I want to be one.
(pregnant pause)
Reg: What?
Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on I want you all to call me Loretta.
Reg: What!?
Stan: It's my right as a man.
Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?!
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies.
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
(Stan starts crying.)
Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister, sorry.
Reg: (pissed) What's the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
From the article: Another challenge: Most people can't identify a counterfeit bill. Sang says federal officials showed him one-sided bills and even black and white bills that had been passed.
Do you really think the 16 year old cashier at Wal-Mart or the local grocery store can tell the difference between a real and fake bill- or cares? My guess is that more counterfied currency gets passed than people realized. Heck, there was a story a while ago about someone successfully using a fake TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL.
The fact is that I doubt it cost HP too much money, or they wouldn't have bothered - and it sounded like a lot of the efforts were more advice to the government on how to design the current crop of new peach $20's to not copy on their printers than modifications on their printer to not copy them.
I have blog like everyone else
You geeks are funny. Everybody's blah-blah-blahing about printers and nobody's noticed "Neerja Raman, director of the Imaging Systems Lab at HP Labs."
Homina homina homina.
You know, instead of just making it impossible to print a fake bill, why not make it to where you can't print a fake bill based on the media you use to print on?
One of the easiest forms of counterfeiting is to just bleach ink out of hte money and reprint it for a higher denomination. HP color lasers make this easy.
The fact that all US money is the same size doesn't help. In many countries, the less a bill is worth the smaller it is. This also makes it possible for blind or visually impaired people to tell two denominations apart.
I have this printer, and from what I have read it does incorporate some protection against currency printing.
No, I'm not a photo professional, but I do take a lot of high-end digital photos. And yes, at high resolution with good paper, this printer will print pictures that are about on par with studio pictures in many cases. Besides, who says this is restricted to $200 printers, and who considers $200 cheap? While I might consider a $50 lexmark throwaway printer cheap... in terms of my bank account and many others $200-300 for a printer isn't exactly cheap.
And no, it doesn't have to be the professional wedding photographer who gets his pictures ruined, it could be anyone who takes a decent picture only to have it mangled by the printer misrecognising it as money.
You play both sides of the fence here, but the fact is that for my $200-$400 when I buy a printer, I expect it to print all my pictures without interference and without bias. It doesn't matter whether I'm a professional photographer buying a printer for $2000 or a semi-amateur buying one for $200, the printer should fit the purpose it was intended (printing pictures with clarity to the best of its abilities).
And just to mention it, a fair bit money was probably also spent developing/incorporating such features. Maybe if they hadn't spent $XX on stupid things like this they could have given me better features that I actually want for my money... or maybe lessened the cost of the printer itself
The reason the printing companies are doing this is because they want to avoid liability similar to dram shop laws -- the laws that say the bar is responsible for you getting drunk, driving home, and plowing into a minivan full of good Christian children on their way to band camp.
If the printing companies continued to make better and better equipment without building in protections against counterfeiting, the government would eventually step in and force them to -- and most likely in a way that would be dramatic and expensive to implement.
The big problem is that counterfeiting is going from being a big-time operation to small-time. Teenagers on up now have the ability to print bills good enough to fool the Quick Stop clerk. These clerks, who cannot be bothered to run a counterfeit detection pen over the bill or even hold it up to the light to look for a watermark, don't give a rats ass about whether or not the bills they accept are real or not.
But Johnny Freeloader, he can go out, get some high-quality parchment paper, print out a load of $20s, throw them in the dryer, and by stopping at various gas stations to puchase bubble-gum can amass several hundred dollars in small bills with little more than a cheap Lexmark, a pack of paper, and a few skipped classes.
This is why there's a sudden interest in counterfeit prevention. Not to stop the drug runners from mass-producing the bills, but to stop your kids from doing it.
Crooks are smart, inventive, and resourceful.
This statement is why you are the minority. But impairing printers for all their customers, HP is making a statement that they consider all their customers to be potential crooks.
What percentage of people using these printers do you think counterfeit money? Less than 5%, maybe less than 1%. Crooks may be resourceful, and I would applaud if HP made attempts to go after counterfeiters that didn't involve tainting the output of printers for the other 99% of us that are only interested in getting pictures of that nice sunset we saw last Friday to print out nicely.
HP has the right idea but needs a better implimentation
Here you've got it nailed. Stopping counterfeiting is good, so if HP is worried about it why not donate to anti-counterfeiting education programs, or developing tools that could easily spot counterfeit currency quickly.
And one last point... it's easy to catch these things. They look wrong, feel wrong, smell wrong, or many other factors. The fact that my last pictures turned into a spotted mess when they got a tiny bit of snow/moisture on them indicate to me that catching a counterfeit bill could be as simple as keeping a small bowl of water to dip the corner at your till...
Considering that printers are already good enough to pass muster in the world as you see it, why aren't they doing what you say already.
The sad fact is, that distortions that would be immediately obvious for the purposes of counterfeit detection are also going to be grossly obvious in other printing tasks. Anything they're doing has to be so damned subtle to not be immediately noticeable. And then you're back to the problem you state, because they're not going to bother to check for watermarks or the security thread in the bill, let alone run the little counterfeit pen over the bill- and since they're not going to do that, they're sure as hell not going to look at them closely enough to notice the microprint's not there or the little twenties aren't the right shape or size...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The simple solution to that is to take a bunch of $1 bills, bleach them, then reprint your $20 on the paper. Then you pass the bills to people who are too busy to notice, like the over-pierced bimbo chick at McDonalds (aka Liberal Arts grad student) during lunch time. You eliminate the texture/feel/smell problem and maximize your return on investment (the original $1 bill). If you do get caught, whip out a real $20, loudly exclaim WTF?!, pay for the purchase and get the hell outta there.
NOT that I've ever done that before... Honestly! I just remember reading that out of one of the "Getting Even" or "Revenge" type books...
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
If HP wants to make a printer that prints all text in piglatin and all images inside out and upside down, they can go ahead and do so. No law says you have to buy or use it.
Hold on, the law does say you half to use their stuff in more ways than you know. HP, and many large companies like them, are what one might call unnaturally large. That is they get to their size and might NOT thru genuine free market forces and consumer loyality, but more thru government intervention - like tax laws that offer special favors, or patent laws that restrict what people can immitate, or even environmental laws (like how Ford pushed thru new environmental regulations not to protect the environment, but to force used cars out of the market and special saftey federal approval regulations to make it harder for startups to compete). The law has plenty to do with it because you are being coerced to use their stuff in more ways than you know, and that gives government cronies more leverage than they should have in enforcing other rules.
your dictionary needs to update the entry for 'significant'. if you re-read the article, you'll see that's about USD 0.15 per person last year. yes, cash based businesses are going to be targeted, because that is what is being faked - cash!
after a little digging, i came up with the hypothesis that most small, cash based stores will be more concerned with shoplifting and its ilk. USD 31 billion / 290,342,554 --> ~ $106 per person per year, which should... ummm... overshadow 15 cents per person per year.
don't confuse significant concern (businesses do, after all, have to justify and/or mitigate all expenses) with significant cost.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
BBSpot made an article that can be view as the source of this measure: read here
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
It takes a serious disconnect from the real world to see something threatening about this.
Threatining? How about the "digital barcodes" mentioned that woulld allow hp to detirmine which computer created any printout. If that doesn't invade your privicy nothing does.
Given that we have one time use credit cards, a banking system which has a lot of wire transfer traffic on it, and a thousand other things that give us virtual* money...why trouble yourself with creating the real-world equilivant? As pointed out in numerous other posts, there are several things which you can do wrong which can catch you. Not to mention what this and other articles itself talks about and imply.
The trouble to learn the bank's electronic transfer systems as well as gaining access cannot be any harder than getting the proper equipment to pull off a good, large scale counterfeiting scheme. Let's not even go into how all most all banks still are very, very quiet when someone does do an electronic break in. It took the feds, what? Three years to get that bank in NY to fess up that the Russian mob had used fake electronic transfers to help launder billions of dollars?
*[With a fait money system, such as the one used in the US, the money is never back with a material component such as gold, silver, or diamonds. In essense, all such money not backed in that way is virtual since you can't look at a physical object and say that the value of the money and the value of the object are the same.]
This article reminds me of the Microsoft photo/GPS one posted later in the day. Big company trying to impress us with all the nifty research they are doing to make our lives better.
Except the web site is down, or the text includes typos that would be caught by a third grader. Or the concept has a tendency to excuse or mollify poor performance of existing products. Or the proposed solution has a tendency to line the big companies pockets with money.
Back in the "good ole days" big companies made HARDWARE primarily and software was a secondary concern. Research into faster disk drives, memory devices and CPUs had obvious benefits to both manufacturer and consumer (and this is still the case). But these software research operation always give me the creeps. In both cases we have some highly proprietary thing being worked on, that they would REALLY like to tell us about, but which have secrecy as a primary component.
I don't think they needed to do any research to make the colorization of printed currency questionable. I can't get one page in ten to come out properly on a consumer grade inkjet printer. By the time I account for ink cartridges that are ALMOST empty, print head that are dried up after only a day of not being used, and the astronomical cost of ink, I'd much rather pay more for a black toner laser printer and skip color until some company in Hong Kong has figured out how to do it economically, probably 10 years from now.
The solution to counterfeiting is to get away from paper currency. Any "research" between here and there is a waste of time.
If it doesn't print other stuff correctly, you return it as defective.
I've tried doing this with "defective" DVDs that have copy protection. Its a hassle to take stuff back and get quizzed about it.
"It works OK here"
"Well, it won't play on my computer."
"Maybe your computer is defective"
and, no, I don't do filesharing.
At least one problem with this - why won't the counterfeiters just buy a new printer of some different brand? Is this a major reduction in their profit margin to get even a top-of-the-line laser printer from another company?
Favorite Quote: "Printer identification - Researchers provided data on how officials could better measure properties of a counterfeit to identify what kind of printer and ink may have been used to produce it."
I'm thinking microscopic RFID tags suspended in the ink would work nicely.
Gotta go. Big Brother is Watching.
Sigs are for lusers. Hey! wait a second...
This problem exists in many industries...
Most laws are like that if you get down to it...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I actually still have a silver certificate. I got it from my grandfather, and it is a special part of my coin collection.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
1.- The CEO's becoming rich will pay more taxes, and so will do the shareholders that obtain higer dividends or whose shares climb as a consequence of the savings made.
2.- The standard of living in the US is artificially high and it is artificially low in India or China (the first as a consequence of colonialism and then protectionism, the second as a consequence of feudalism and then communism). There is no way in which the Western world can remain extremely rich while half the world population in these two countries remains too poor. We have two options: we either help India and China have a soft landing in capitalism by means of allowing competition (no matter how one sided is on their favour) or we live to regret the consequences. The standard of living in the US *has* to decrease, that means all those wasteful SUVs, money wasted in trash entertainment, excesive consumerism, will be curbed. People in rich nations will have to curb their appetite for superflous goods, refocus and become more responisble with credit, and that way will be able to accept lower salaries (that by no means will make them serfs as you ridicuosly claim) in order to become competitive again. When people in the US are earning 7 or 8 times more for the same work there is no way to stop the evening out once some of the constraints that allow economic pressures to work are lessened by technology (communications mainly).
Something that normaly escapes protectionist people is how by protecting "national jobs", they punish the consumer in their own country. When companies save money by outsourcing, the savings are passed to the consumer. The steel controversy stirred by Mr Populist Bush showed that nicely.
3.-Although there is a widening between the very rich and the rest of us, in average people live better everywhere where stable goverments commited to free markets are in power, it is ironic that the same people that cry for local jobs being shipped abroad very often also refuse to allow to tax the rich to allow for some basic redistribution of income by means of social projects.
In rich countries particularly, the major causes of decease and mortality are related to excess, consumerism , overconsumption and hedonism (traffic accidents, obesity related problems, smoking, AIDS) from the point of view of poorer countries one just can't see how it is that the level of life is worsening on rich countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
3 years later:
"HP and Adobe both broadly support the implementation of the Protect Our Economy act, which requires manufacturers and software developers to implement Anti Counterfeiting measures."
Bye bye free software to compete with Adobe and people who don't want to pay for HP patents.
1. All the Slashdotters complaining about "crippled printers" or "having their images reduced to crap"... not one of you noticed this before. I challenge you to find one non-currency image that is printed out broken...
2. The US Government: Adding a bit of Peach to the new $20, eh? How about this... a thin VISIBLE foil strip... or some silver or other metallic print? Lets see anyone try print THAT with a CMYK printer. Every non-US currency note I've seen has that.
Fluoroscent markings, watermarks, chemically sensitive paper and security threads and all are fine... except that most of us don't carry around UV lights or hold every bill we receive to the light.
Counterfeiters aren't going to take a wad of freshly printed bills and go deposit them in the bank! They're going to go to your local McDonalds, supermarket or whatever. All you need to do is go buy a few dollars worth of stuff, hand over a $20 and pocket the nice legit currency you get in return.
So, the US government is too lazy to fix their "broken" currency? Instead, they compel private companies to fix their problem for them.
I've often wondered about this. Media from other countries make much of the USA's laughably counterfeitable currency. Some have gone so far as to suggest that there is some reason why the US gov't WANTS a currency that can easily be duplicated.
Now, I can't think why that would be the case - but really, you've got to wonder...
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Mexican 20 pesos bills have a transparent section too.
Adobe's Photoshop CS has already been patched to disable to anti-couterfeiting measures. I don't think the HP drivers would pose much of a challenge either... unless you have a TCPA-enabled machine/OS/driver in which case you're stuck! No, they never told you that. Yes they may criple more things too.
Microsoft has been adding these features to their products for years!!!! :P
-J
People take the old greenback a lot more seriously than they do the full color mickeymouse currency from a lot of other places (i.e. Disneyworld, Canada, France, etc.)
I call horse-puckey trollbait. Effective anti-counterfeiting measures have been absent from USA currency for a long time, and even now the US lags far behind most of the world. I would suggest that the only people who take the "greenback" more seriously (as a piece of paper) than other banknotes are counterfeiters -- and, of course, US citizens with some odd romantic (or maybe jingoistic) attachment to archaic technology.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
No, these aren't free speech issues in general. (This particular situation might be; despite HP's warm and fuzzy claims I suspect that the government strongly encouraged them.) There is no law against this behavior. But it's unethical (not that that bothers most large businesses). As citizens we should stand up and demand that companies actually try to serve their customers first.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
You carry around a little device sort of like a USB drive, with a thumb print reader on it. it stores your balance, and will only transfer datawhen it senses YOUR thumbprint. You can check your balance by a small LCD. A central server (or even distributed ones, linked up together) stores the exact same balance. Two devices can be connected to transfer money and would update the server the next time they made a transaction at a "hard" device (one that remains in one place, like a cash register, etc.)
If some clever H4X0r changes the balance on his device, it won't match the server's value and will be flagged for human examination. The same thing would happen if the server value changed, a human would look at the logs of your account, and determine where the missing/extra money is.
Anonymity is not cowardace.
Awhile back (I think it was on /., maybe K5), there was a piece on the EURion constellation, a set of little circles in a particular pattern -- look at the 0's in the little 20's on the back of the newest US$20 note.
Similar patterns are on Canadian, European, British, and deprecated German currency.
I'm quite curious just exactly what they mean by flaws to deter counterfeiting. If I send an image to the printer that I want printed, I don't want my printer altering that image in any way-- regardless of what the image may be. If the printer doesn't do its job, then it's going in the trash. Period.
I pretty much agree with you. but rather than throwing it away you'd be better off returning the printer to Office Max and getting your counterfeit bills back.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The way this works is that there is a pattern that is now printed on money in most countries. It's a series of circles of a certain size in a particular pattern. I don't have the link handy, but if you search for Eurion, you'll find it.
So what this means is that if you don't want Photoshop users to be able to scan an image of your copyrighted artwork, you only need insert this pattern of circles into it. (Photoshop CS has the same "technology" as the printer in question.)
We could easily end up in a situation where every company starts putting this pattern all over their products or logos. Soon, you go to take a picture of an urban scene, and your camera won't take it, or your software won't load it, or your printer won't print it. Boy, I can't wait for that world!
"Counterfeiting actually helps the typical small business in that it increases the number and amount of cash flowing through the local economy."
Here, I have some proof that makes this statement moot.
I work at a bank and I handle the transactions of small businesses every day. The process of taking counterfeits out of the economy is as follows:
When I find a counterfeit bill (generally a $100 bill, or $100 dollars in 20s) I inform the small business owner that I have found a counterfeit. Because they are usually trying to deposit that money, I have to refuse their deposit, or deposit the rest minus the counterfeit.
The counterfeit bill is then mailed to the Secret Service. If the bill is fake, they say 'thanks' and burn it. If it was indeed real, they send it back to us (the bank) and we credit the small busniess' account. So in fact the small business has to take the loss from the counterfeit.
I have no idea how in any form this could be helping them. Counterfeiting doesn't stimulate the economy any more than the government printing money. Except when the government prints money, the small business can deposit it into the bank.
Actually Kodak has some pretty nice digitals out there, such as the DCS series. I wonder if they mean film cameras?
"Here, I have some proof that makes this statement moot."
Re-read the parent post. It was sarcasm.
HP use laser to burn a few dots on the selenium drum. When you make a print out, you will observe such defect under high magnification. The output image is not compromised to naked eyes. By examining the defects of the output, HP can identify which machine is responsible for the crime.
This is going to make it very difficult for me to do my job and help make the budget ends meet.
-- John Snow, Secretary of the Treasury, United States of America
At one point we were about to start our Susan B. Anthony line, but then the right-wingers killed the dollar coins. It cost the gov four cents to make, and we, being privately owned were able to cut the cost to less than 3 cents. Now they're coming back with a tan, but they're as rare as two-dollar bills and most clerks reject them out-of-hand. Oh, and yes, old change machines do accept single-sided xerox copies. Xerox is just not as patriotic as HP.
Go anywhere in the third world and find out what gets accepted more readily: A US $100 bill or a Canadian $100 bill.
:-)
As it happens, I'm a citizen of both countries, and I've had occasion to use both types of money in several first- and third-world countries. Never had a problem with either.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
HP printers are expensive to buy, and the consumables are at least 3X as expensive as their competitors (at least in Australia anyway).
Not to mention the cartridges that self destruct - if you don't use them in time. Great feature that!
I am responsible for purchasing of printers/comsumables at the company I work for. Would I buy HP? Well no, I wouldn't. This is just another reason not to.
"Jan. 2004 -- Take a look at that dollar, Euro, yen, pound or peso in your wallet. Is it real or counterfeit? How can you be sure?"
:P
Because it's made of plastic, like any sane currency. Try running that through a colour printer
Yes, this is a great idea. We can also use it to find out who wrote the ransom note for the kidnapped child. And, who is distributing those flyers agitating for legalized marijuana. Oh, and how about those people who wrote nasty things about the President. Yes, this is a fantastic idea. Let's make sure that we can find out who printed any document because, after all, innocent people do not have anything to hide.
Mosty likely, HP will implement some form of steganography that will digitally sign every document you print without you knowing it. *insert tinfoil hat jokes here*. The truth is, the more digital technologies permeate everyday live, the easier it is for big businesses to bend you over your wallet and intrude in our lives. Take Microsoft and their pending implementation of DRM in bios hardware... we're looking at the possible death of all non-Microsoft operating systems, and spyware intrusion on a whole new level. "Please insert your official national identification card to complete product activation, after which you cannot return this product.... Thank You, Mr. John Davis Smith. You have agreed to have Microsoft as your primary health provider, banking services, telecom, insurance, and day-care provider. Please respond within five seconds to decline additional offers."
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The simple solution: Stop buying HP and tell them to go fuck themselves! Secret government DRM is insane. What's next, tape recorders that notify the Secret Service if you say "President" or other keywords? The shit people put up with is unbelievable, maybe the masses are just too stupid to see they are being led to slaughter like a bunch of fucking dumb cows. These morons think the only way is to blindly accept everything imposed on them with open arms or a whimper. "Oh well," they say, "I don't have time to complain since my wife, kids and I have to work 5 jobs and we don't have time to care about our rights." Frankly, this attitude pissed me off to no end. Our soldiers fought and died to protect big businesses' tax loop-hole while the working poor (i.e., the downwardly-mobile "middle" class) is being taxed and raped in every conceivable manner? This continous squandering of our freedoms and rights is a bitter rape of our values and ideals. This ought to be called "The Land of the Free*** and the Home (for sale by owner, inquire within) of the Brazen Swindlers and Slick Marketing/Lawyers/Politicians/Confidence Artists." Old-man-owner-says --- "Sorry sonny, I needed my Proposition 13 (one-time tax shelter for angry, misguided, old, home-owners Californians in 1970's) to keep my $1,000,000 value house I paid $15 for in 500 B.C. so I wouldn't have to pay $10,000/yr in taxes to fund your school, but it's too bad you don't have books nor a roof in your school that doesn't leak nor classes with 50 pupils, and schools overloaded to 350% of capacity." In the final analysis, dumb people are reactionary... they only act when something immediately affects them.
"That's right, ignorant masses, by all means, don't watch C-SPAN, and AVOID VOTING, accountability is not needed, it's our money not your taxes. Government isn't exciting, interesting, nor important; you don't need to pay attention to the issues, politics, SIGs/PACs/lobbyists, and overt bribery; your voice will never be heard by any politician. Leave the governing to the 'experts' and don't question anything."
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
it is my god given right too not buy there product. i am going back to dot matrix.(ink is cheaper)
Note designs have been replaced in the UK several times to make them harder to forge; it's not a particularly difficult task, since bank notes suffer regular wear and tear and need replacing from time to time anyway. The infrastructure is already there.
The fact that the ones we no longer use are harder to forge than the ones you still use should tell you something...
Apparently blind people think that's kind of good too.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Don't be touchy.
I didn't assume they were doing nothing, but I believe they are clearly not doing the right things if dollar bills can be simulated with just a fucking printer! The rest of the world is not rushing to HP's door, so I argue that there must be better ways.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Personally I suggest that trying to stop counterfitting by making printers different is fucking stupid: counterfitters will buy either mod chips or printers made in China, and carry straight on.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
This 'functionality' is most assuredly coded in their propriatary drivers for windows and mac. Using open-source drivers to print with, will very likely remove such restrictions.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Counterfeiters get the coolest printers/scanners/image-editing software.
-Rich
It would eliminate all the firmware-introduced problems and limitations, from unwanted image artefact detection to the Lexmark-DMCA cartridge issues.
As added value, such controller board could have many many more various uses, to control everything with sensors and stepper motors.
I was trying to be funny ... not very funny I admit but ... Flamebait? It appears the moderators are consuming psychoactive compounds again.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I didn't assume they were doing nothing, but I believe they are clearly not doing the right things if dollar bills can be simulated with just a fucking printer!
Ooooh, you assumed we were incompetent! That's much better...
We have holograms, watermarks, metal strips, and other techniques that go into our currency. I'm not quite sure why they are concerned about an inkjet being able to adequately copy that. It seems they were also interested in tracking down those who try to pass off fake currency, and that HP could help with that..
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Yes, the article states that they will stop selling "traditional film cameras"
s/assumed/concluded/
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.