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..."

Comments

Well...

[trickofperspective]

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

Screws up circuit board prototyping

[Tiroth]

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.

Re:My Rights Online

[way2trivial]

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

Re:Stupid. Really stupid.

[flogger]

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.

Interfering with fair uses

[tepples]

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.

Re:My Rights Online

[b0r0din]

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....

What I don't understand is...

[el-spectre]

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.

Re:What I don't understand is...

[stvangel]

US currency isn't printed on polyester, it's a 75% cotton, 25% linen mix. The paper comes from one particular company that keeps the process a closely guarded secret. Almost all the paper you buy in the store is wood-based. This is how those cheap counterfeit detector pens work. All they are is an iodine solution that changes color if it detects the starch in the wood-based paper.

There are lots of ways the counterfeiters get around this issue. Wash the ink off real notes ( like 1$ bills ) and print fake 20's on them. Use parchment type paper and "mess it up". Put it in the dryer for a while. Dirty it up. Fresh paper is easy to tell, but dirty is a lot harder. Most money starts lookin pretty crappy after it's been in circulation for a while.

Most cashiers don't have the time or inclination to examine every bill they're given. If you hand somebody 5 $20's at Best Buy to buy a couple of videogames, do you think the cashier is actually gonna scrutinize each bill one-by-one? When they have a line of 5 people backed up? Make the top and bottom $20s real ones, and put one or two fake ones in the middle, and 95% of the time they won't notice.

It's the stupid and/or greedy counterfeiters that get caught. If you understand how people think, you can do a lot to get away with it. Do one or two bills mixed in with real ones. Don't do a lot to the same people. Use smaller bills like 10's or 5's. Who even thinks about counterfeit versions of those? Learn what places use to detect counterfeits and tailor your bills to them. If a place uses the counterfeit detector pens, print your bills on non wood-based paper and your bills are automatically real because the counterfeit detector pens say they are. You know how easy it is to defeat them, but the average person has no idea and accepts their results on blind faith.

It's just another example of social engineering. You can get people do to or believe ridiculous things depending on how you present things.

"Inserting flaws"?

[Dlugar]

At first I thought this nonsense about "inserting flaws" was just the usual Slashdot ridiculosity in story summaries--I figured HP would probably just give some error when trying to print money, or at worst fiddle with the color green (which they do) ... but then I saw this:

Two-sided documents - This technique takes advantage of the front-to-back registration accuracy of HP printers by changing the position of objects an infinitesimal amount, too little to be seen by most people, but enough so that a machine can detect it.

So it seems that they are deliberately introducing flaws in their two-sided document printing ... do they honestly think, if "one-sided bills and even black and white bills" are passed with little problems, that a change of position "too little to be seen by most people" will do anything but annoy people who are trying to print two-sided documents with exactness?

Absolutely ridiculous.

Dlugar

Re:My Rights Online

[H1r0Pr0tag0n1st]

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.

why not make bills harder to counterfeit

[bhny]

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

Re:pattern merging

[terraformer]

Heaven forbid that a company has a motive to do anything but market demand.
Like ethics and corporate responsiblity.

Coming from the coprporation whose CEO recently defended outsourcing jobs by stating "Workers do not have a God given right to a job", I am not sure their ethics are particularly aligned with the little guy...

Re:My Rights Online

[hehman]

How is counterfeiting currency part of My Rights, again? So you can make, um, backups in case your original bills are lost or stolen?

Can I play too?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:we pay for crippled printers?

[rtkluttz]

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.

.