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..."
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
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.
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.
... 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).
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.
Talk about getting off topic. I don't know how to stop it directly, but the 4000 series ones I work with (4000/4100) have a setting that allows you to supress error printouts. That squelches the wasted paper.
Are you printing through Novell? I think on our network that's where the problem crops up.
Ask your friend again.
From: http://www.pgca.org/pages/topics/currency.htm
Printed reproductions, including photographs of paper currency, checks, bonds, postage stamps, revenue stamps, and securities of the United States and foreign governments (except under the conditions previously listed) are violations of Title 18, Section 474 of the United States Code. Violations are punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to 15 years, or both.
And the conditions talk about destroying masters and size limits.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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'
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
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.
That's not to say these requirements aren't in need of updating. But they're the reason you don't see a lot of "cutting edge" stuff on U.S. currency.
Those conditions that you neglected to mention make all the difference. From the page referenced above:
So it's entirely legal for me to print out a one-sided 11"x17" picture of a $100 bill if I destroy the scan after use. If I use an HP product, though, I'll be stopped.--
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.
Counterfeiting isn't just the concern of Hollywood movies. Anytime you increase the number of bills in circulation, you put inflationary forces on the economy. Plus we spend a lot of tax dollars having the Secret Service and the Dept. of Treasury track down counterfeiters. So there may not be a direct cost to small business, but its certainly a cost to everyone.
-G
"Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery."
Breakfast served all day!
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
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
Ok, but you are overlooking old bills, and upgrade costs to older machines.
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.
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.
Offset doesn't matter to me at all. I don't print my PCB masks double sided. I print each on a seprate sheet with registration marks which are aligned when I produce the negatives. I certanly don't load the printer with double sided printed circuit stock and directly try to print properly registered pattern on the board. The negatives are registered and contact printed to the circuit board.
The truth shall set you free!