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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..."
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.
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
"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!!!
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.
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?
...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.
***
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.
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.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
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?"
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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
"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.
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'
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. ;)
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!!!!
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.
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.
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 was pissed that my new hp printer couldn't make me a grilled cheese sandwich either. I know a printer isn't supposed to be able to make me a sandwich (just like it's not supposed to be able to make counterfeit money). But how dare they not give me that capability. Damn them.
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