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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.
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
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
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
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.