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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..."
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.
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.
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>It certainly isn't market demand that's motivating them.
Heaven forbid that a company has a motive to do anything but market demand.
Like ethics and corporate responsiblity.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
You have the right to use the image of the dollar, as long as you do not attempt to pass it off as legal tender.
And if you don't, then you should.
No I'm not trying to make money, just did an empirical test.
...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
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
Instead of making the currency impossible to counterfeit using low-cost printers the government is sponsoring research on how to cripple low-cost printers. This has to be the worst ineffective way to deal with counterfeits.
A better solution is to add security features to all paper currency $10 and above. $20 is not good enough because counterfeiters usually avoid higher amounts; people tend to be more careful with those.
After the new currency is out they can allow a 5-10 year period for all insecure bills to be no longer accepted. Problem solved! The big time counterfeiters will always find a way, but the amateurs will need a lot more than a printer to convince anyone.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
They probably mean things like the five-dot pattern, which was figured out by a couple bored people who did some experimenting. On the new $20, for example, it's formed by the zeros in the little "20"s floating around on the back side. On some euro notes, it's in some half notes printed on a musical staff. Others have it in different places.
i am a soviet space shuttle
The simple fact is that this feature will not stop people from counterfeiting so it is a waste of time, effort, and money, and may prevent you from doing things which are expressedly permitted by law and guaranteed by the constitution.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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
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.
Let's say the boat doesn't come with holes but a machine would perforate them if it reliably detects you are running away from police...would not that be acceptable??
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!
Explain to me exactly how the Bill of Rights, which sets forth limits on the federal gov't (and sometimes the States), applies to HP, a private company?
So, out of the goodness of their hearts, with no motives other than saving humanity from the ravages of counterfeiting crime, the publically and privately held multinational companies including HP and Adobe and Xerox and Konica and Canon all decide one day to work with the US Government? Of course, implementing such technologies would cost money, and would require additional manpower to staff those programs, not to mention the support and maintenance apparatus to ensure that the devices don't completely crap out of their intended functionality. But hey, it's all for a good cause, and you know how much a multinational corporation just loves to throw money around for a good cause.
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Because, very simply, counterfeiting is not the sole or even major reason to do this. This has been argued elsewhere by experts in the field who are far better equipped to banter on the subject, but it's more or less ascertained as a fact.
Not that the currency people will go along with this, of course.
The Swedish Riksbanken, for example, offers special images to photographers, in an attempt to appease people on both sides of the issue.
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!!
Having multiple colours makes things harder for anyone trying to use a printing system where they need to get the many colour right, the prints aligned, etc. etc.
That means it is harder for professional counterfeiters, as well as amateurs.
NB, one change on UK currency in recent years is a copyright notice. That stops people claiming "I didnt know" when they get prosecuted.
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.