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..."
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/
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!!!
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.
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.
your ability to use your printer for free speech?
wanna make a joke trillion dollar bill to represent the deficit with a disingenious picture of GWB as a protest?
you can't -- first amendment issue
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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
It's not.
But your $4000 printer ruining your prints, because an algorithm thinks it's a bank note is kinda crummy, y'know..
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.
wanna make a joke trillion dollar bill to represent the deficit with a disingenious picture of GWB as a protest?
You'd need seven of them...No, wait 8....9....
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.
Even with HP doing this you still have the ability to do so. Just not with their products.
So how is this a first amendment issue?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
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?
For what it's worth...
IANAL. But my best friend is. He is also a secret service agent.
According to him, scanning currency into your computer is not against the law. Nor is printing it out.
Violation of federal counterfeiting laws does not actually occur until you try to pass off the fake currency as real. In other words it is not the act of creating the bill that is against the law but the intent to defraud with it.
Americans could not be more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -Dennis Miller
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
[
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.
How is counterfeiting currency part of My Rights, again? So you can make, um, backups in case your original bills are lost or stolen?
"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.
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'
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. ;)
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.
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.--
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