Slashdot Mirror
27 Central Banks Push Anti-Counterfeit Software
securitas writes "GlobeTechnology reports that the 27-member Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group is behind the anti-counterfeit software in Adobe Photoshop CS, Ulead PhotoImpact, Jasc Paint Shop Pro and others. Consortium members of the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group include the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, Australia and many more. Law enforcement agencies and banknote-issuing authorities say that it is a response to the rapid growth of digital counterfeiting. The software is distributed free of charge to hardware and software manufacturers and is voluntary to use. But the European Union is drafting legislation to force manufacturers to include anti-counterfeit measures in all systems, scanners or printers sold in Europe. Counterfeiting and anti-counterfeiting with Adobe Photoshop and other products like inkjet printers have been the subject of recent discussion on Slashdot."
WANTED TO BUY:
1x Adobe Photoshop version
up to but not including CS.
1x High quality inkjet printer,
2002-2003 vintage
Will pay cash.
Trolling is a art,
There goes my replacement Monopoly money.
"In post 9-11 soviet russia, only beowulf clusters of welcomed overlords are belong to old grit-eating Koreans!" aendeur
Homer: Hey Herman, I had to come out here to see what's so funny. [gasps] A counterfeit jeans ring operating out of my car hole! I'm going to tell everyone. Wait here.
wouldn't an EU mandate make open source scanners and image manipulation illegal in the EU? it's not like their providing the source. And if they did, the couterfeiters would just strip it out.
I'm guessing that this is just like most other bank note security systems, some of the clearer details are made public, but others are kept secret since we don't particularly want "Free as in Linux" money out there.
Therefore, I wonder how the central banks of the world are going to implement this in OSS image editors. Afterall, something commented as "//This is where we put the part that stops people trying to open images of money." is gonna be rather easy bypass, and would also require them to define all of the tricks they're using to identify bills in other software too or let some of those checks slide.
Iam glad criminals dont use "The GIMP".
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This is a nice smoke screen to get people to accept gov't mandated tech. After this kind of thing gets through, the next thing will mandated DRM. Old equipment will be banned fron the 'net. "Upgrade" now or go to jail.
What?
Counterfeiting and anti-counterfeiting with Adobe Photoshop and other products like inkjet printers have been the subject of recent discussion on Slashdot."
Heh, not that the Photoshop effort was effective--all you need to do is search the applications section of suprnova.org to find "banknote patch Photoshop CS."
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
There are many anti-counterfeiting measures already implemented on paper money. (cotton-based(IIRC) paper, color-changing inks, watermarks, and metallic threads. Instead of changing US currency again, why not train cashiers and other handlers of money to utilize the features that are already in place?
- it's not really designed to. Sure, the big organised crime gangs will get around it with no problems at all. But it will stop the casual counterfeiter. This is what it is designed to do.
The problem of course is that _sometimes_ it gets in the way of legitimate uses of digital technology. This is an example of one idiot ruining it for everyone. Life's like that. I pay high car insurance premiums because other people are stupid/lazy/drunk/asleep, even though I'm not.
Yeah, it's annoying, but that's life. It would just be nice if the companies would be more up-front about it. Good on Adobe for coming clean; but they needn't have denied it in the first place!
-- Your mother uses Emacs.
They should make this a user option in the Gimp's preferences dialogue!
Read, L
It's a never ending game. As E. E. Smith said, what physical science can devise, physical science can analyse and reproduce. We just have to keep moving the bar higher than the counterfeiters can easily reach. If the typical US bank note is too easily copied by technology available to the home user, then it's time for the typical US bank note to be updated. Not for the technology to be crippled...
What is the point, if anyone really wants to conterfiet software, they'll find a copy of older versions around. It will work just as well. Heck, why not use paint, with some skill that could work. This won't deter those who truely want to counterfiet. Maybe it will save a few $100 a year from those who are lightly considering it, but mainly it will kunut people who want crystal clear images which the software determines to look like money. This hurts, not helpes IMO
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Honestly, I don't see why people would be too up in arms about this.
Constantly checking for counterfeits steals processing power that I should be able to use for things I want my PC to do.
The software is never going to be perfect, either. What recourse do I have if I'm designing something that looks enough like currency to trigger it, but actually has a legitimate purpose (e.g. a prop for a film)?
Finally, it's just another symptom of the nanny-state mentality that is pervading modern society. I shouldn't have automated systems watching over my every move to make sure I'm not doing anything unfavourable.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The heart of the problem is that the legal tender is easily replicable. Coins are harder to reproduce and the payoff is much lower than paper money. Paper money, because it must be printed is susceptible to counterfeiting.
The counterfeiters who are truly making a dent in the money supply don't use Photoshop, though. For the most part, they have real drum printers and very sophisticated printing plates. They are printing money onto real fiber paper. They certainly aren't printing bills out on their Epson Deskjet onto White Shark recycled office paper.
At the extremely low level of low-cost counterfeiting which these software controls attempt to prevent, there simply isn't enough money being produced to worry about. The guy in his basement printing maybe a hundred thousand dollars a day out of his inkjet printer can only use so much of that before getting red flagged by some clerk who notices that his $100 bill isn't quite right (usually because the paper is different).
These software controls don't do anything to attack the real problem of counterfeiters who are doing the real damage printing millions of dollars which are indistinguishable from real money.
I have been pwned because my
This is a genuine question : how is it a bad thing ?
:
For me, that means two things
1) if you want to do some parody bill, well, you'll still can, you'll just have to make sure that even from far it looks like parody.
2) 15 years old kids that get drunk for the first time and think that it is a good idea to make some cheap bill to get that coke free won't go 15 years in jail.
This thing just means that if you want to make false money, you'll have to dig a little bit. And if you do, it's clear that you wanted to counterfeit, and you'll go to jail. On the other hand, some kid won't be able to pool a cheap prank that can get him in serious troubles. Good chances are that he'll think "hey, if i've got to go to www.falsemoney.ze, maybe the police/secret service/whatever will notice, so maybe I shouldn't".
Remember, this thing is not, has never been, and will never be to deter mafias from counterfeiting. It's just to make it hard enough for Joe Schmoe that he has to think about his actions, and then decide that it would be stupid to risk 15 years for a prank.
"Officials with the RCMP and the Bank of Canada refuse to identify or discuss the technology because they don't want to tip off would-be counterfeiters about ways of thwarting the system."
This won't prevent professional criminals from counterfeiting. At least they stated it correctly by saying "would-be counterfeiters". Still, someone with enough ambition and the resources and/or knowledge will still find a way. I'm simply stating the obvious here though.
I am curious though as to how the software prevents counterfeiting. I thought maybe one possibility was comparing a picture with data of an actual bill, but that would mean having data in the software that contained information of the real bill which presents a problem. If anyone has any ideas or information, please share.
Personally, I see major shifts in this area within the next few decades. Improved bills? Increase in amount of counterfeiting equipment? Some sort of digital verification system? Just some ideas.
Also, what about open source software?
Question everything.
Does anybody else think it's a BAD idea to try to legislate software features? Am I the only one who thinks that could cause a lot of problems? - Eric
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
Just wait until they start mandating what DRM, anti-counterfeiting, etc. software must be included in your operating system. Help Debian or your favorite Free Software OS get a foothold. Click the link in my .sig for more. Click my homepage for too much information.
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
the number of GIMP users will balloon as all the counterfeiters switch from photoshop!
We may even resort to scanning change if need be.
and someone will create a better idiot."
668.5
News broadcast: a man was caught trying to pass off counterfeit $20 bills at the candy store. The store owner got suspicious when he noticed none of the colours stayed within the lines. When questioned, he responded: "I guess I feathered my alpha mask too much."
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
I tried creating very small (~16x16?) GIF icons 4 years ago using Paint Shop Pro (the 30-day trial version) and I noticed that whenever I saved an image, it kept adding some sort of watermark to the image, shifting the color of a handful of non-adjacent pixels within what had previously been a solid band of color to a slightly different color in a way that was barely noticeable to the eye, but very noticable to me when trying to hand-edit the GIFs while zoomed in.
I kept trying to change the pixels back and re-save the image, and whenever I saved the image, the mysterious watermark pixels would re-appear.
I think I switched to something more primitive like MS Paint (eep) to workaround the problem.
--LP
Now, I'm sure this post is going to be flooded with tons of people saying "what's the problem? I don't want to counterfit money." Neither do I, but I'm still worried about this. It sets a precedent for software being crippled to suit the government. This is no different in principle from having an email program that alerts the department of homeland security when you send emails that advocate terrorism. It's our right to have all of the finest tools for breaking every law imaginable so long as we do not exercise them. That means owning guns, copies of the anarchist's cookbook, whatever. That's what the second amendment is all about...the founding fathers did not trust the government to disarm us, and rightly so. I have the right to be able to counterfit money...it's only once I actually counterfit money that the Government has a right to tell me what I can and cannot do.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
So, the question is - don't you all think it will come down to point where the Government issues cash cards?
It saves them money (vs printing money) AND It (should) be harder to conterfeit than paper money (e.g. cryptologically secure).
It will piss off the credit card companies, but wouldn't it be a solution?
Along these lines - would coins be any harder to fake? I wouldn't mind carrying more change, if, say $20 coins were the size of dimes...
It goes without saying, that I wouldn't buy such a card if it weren't anonymous...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
For example, with a printer, something along the lines of a microcontroller (running embedded linux) which connects to the print head, print head drive circuits and paper drive circuits. The existing printer is used only toprovide a mechanical chassis.
It might even make financial sense. Buy that entry level printer, which uses similar mechanical components to that high end printer, and end up with an 'open source' solution that exceeds the capabilities of the high end printer but costs less. Alternatively, don't throw out that obsolete printer but reuse the chassis and convert it into a state-of-the-art printer.
This is only gonna prevent some guy at home from making a funny counterfeit bill on his little inkjet to show off to his friends. I know, i've done it before. I'm like hey check out this...Then i tore it in two and they were like "WHY ARE YOU THROWING AWAY A PERFECTLY GOOD DOLLAR BILL?"...When i tossed the 2nd one, they went to grab it..then I told them to look closely. Oh by the way, that isn't illegal either! And neither is scanning a bill in and printing it out, then printing some propaganda on the other side, and leaving it places, so people will pick it up thinking its a real bill. Or making funny alterations (such as the sex dollar bill)...There's reasons to scan in money that don't involve counterfeiting. I know, I've scanned in money before for the above reasons. I would have been very annoyed if the software wouldn't let me scan it in. But know what, that wouldn't have stopped me, I woulda just scanned it into some crappy software then imported it into photoshop or psp.
.01% of all the counterfeiting going on is done on some little inkjet by some guy using photoshop. This isn't going to stop *anything important*. This is just some feel-good measure, and THATS ALL IT IS.
Face it, maybe
Now, the scary thing is, what do you wanna be that these "image recognition" techniques are being patented, marketed, and sold. Imagine not being able to scan in somethign from a magazine or book because it has a code on it marking it as copyrighted. After all, if you were going to scan it in, you were *obviously* going to do something bad, like make an illegal copy! That's where I see this going: sort of a drm thats built into scanners, printers, and image software!
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Didn't anyone tell you, the whole innocent until proven guilty ideal has disappeared.
We are all subversives until proven otherwise...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
They already do. However, there are many, many issues of US currency out there. Part of the problem is that all US currency is legal tender. If you can conterfeit a 1980 note, that's as good as a 2004. Could you tell a counterfeit 1980 $5 or $10 note with a line of people at your register? Would you sit there dutifully checking every bill under a UV light to make sure the paper is good? Nah, you just hope to god it's good and leave it to the bank to sort out, who most of the time don't check anything but the pH of $20 or larger notes anyway. You'll get more scrutiny with $50s and $100s, but hardly ever, if ever, $1-10 notes. Also, what of vending machines (read also: Slot Machines)? If you think that Vegas and Atlantic City haven't sent a few lobbyists out on this one, think again.
Finally, it's just another symptom of the nanny-state mentality that is pervading modern society.
... or how Calvinist Geneva was practically a police state ... or how Sparta was literally a police state ... or how most of Roman history is characterized by subordination of the individual to the state ... for that matter, consider that most of human history is characterized by the institution of slavery.
The nanny-state mentality (nice phrase) isn't peculiar to modern society -- it's common throughout history.
Check out, for example, the history of sumptuary laws
On the balance, the nanny state has been the historical norm; widespread respect for individual initiative is a relatively recent phenomenon.
-kgj
-kgj
Because devices (hardware and software) that I buy and pay for should be working for me, not the government. My computer's CPU cycles should not be utilized against my will to ensure that I am complying with the law. Let the Secret Service buy computers to do their work, and let me use my computers to do my work.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
"Constantly checking for counterfeits steals processing power that I should be able to use for things I want my PC to do."
Especially if they 'enhance' the current method.
As I understand it, there is a pattern of circles on the currency, and the software checks for this.
If the bill is scanned or printed slightly offset from straight up and down (I've heard that just 1 degree can do the trick) then the pattern matching doesn't work and the bill is scanned/printed.
For them to fix this, they would need to check each increment of rotation for those circles.
I can see that taking quite some time...
(Better luck next time, guys!)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Benjamin Franklin was a remarkable man, and a remarkable inventor, but paper money was not among his inventions. He would have been familiar with it since childhood. By the time of his birth it was more common than hard cash.
Indeed, the main anger at the Stamp Act in the American colonies was because it required payment in hard coinage, and most people didn't have hard currency, not so much as a penny.
A brief history of paper money
KFG
Paper money was invented by the Chinese, well before Benjamin Franklin, or even the US, existed.
Is only one of the reasons Australian Currency was switched to Polymer (ie Plastic) rather than Paper.
These plastic notes are physically colored and include clear sections, as opposed to being blank paper with colors printed on them.
One of the other reasons was the durability of the notes.
Oddly enough, when they first came out many people tried to IRON them to remove the wrinkles (they take hard creases very easily) - evey seen a shrinky-dink after it's been baked?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I worked for a check printing company that had many scanners, printers, and film output devices that had been stripped of their anti-counterfieting devices. This was a must have since people were routinely designing watermarks, elaborate borders, and color washes that would set off the criminal circuits and freeze he device.
I actually saw these devices as marketshare protection devices. My company and its handful of competitors were rapidly having the marketshare for high quality printing eaten away by good commercial printers. The marketing department may have made all sorts of blather about "finer attention to detail" and "knowing the banking industry" but the process of MICR printing on 2400dpi presses from Macs using Adobe Illustrator could honestly have been done by anyone willing to follow standards.
But it would have been a bit of a problem if this low-end competition were trying to output a check prototype with a watermark, color wash, and elaborate border that continuously set off their anti-counterfieting software. The high end check and document printing business wasn't a monopoly, but I strongly suspect that these were devices strongly desired by every player in the market to keep the sellers from expanding.
Are these measures the same way? They surely sound motivated by similar private market interests.
These are central banks. Not the sort that deals with mutual funds - the sort that issue banknotes.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
The problem is that once these copy protection controls are installed everyone will want to use them. Markus Kuhn of Cambridge University has discovered one of the patterns used for detection of bank notes, known as the EURion Constellation. Sure, it's not that big of a deal when only bank notes have the constellation, but expect to see the constellation start showing up in the darndest places.
Soon everyone and their brother will start printing the Constellation onto whatever they feel needs "copy protection." You'll see it printed on photographs and forms and all kinds of junk. Regular people will have their right to make copies and the ability to use their own equipment usurped by others abusing a mechanism that was only supposed to inconvenience counterfeiters.
this brings up a very good point, though: the only true way to prevent counterfeiting is to have the legitimate currency producer have exclusive and restricted access to the materials required to mint money, those being:
- paper
- ink
if the paper and ink are noticably unique to money and access to those materials is restricted to the minter, counterfeiters are out of luck - no mater what software they have.i should note that in canada the new $100 bill really stresses unique inks as an anti-counterfeit measure - there's translucent printing, a holographic stripe and some funky watermarks. read up on it here.
even my city's municipal currency (a local "barter" currency) uses this crazy plasticized paper that is custom designed for printing money and is only sold to legit minters.
so, go ahead and get that old version of photoshop and yr swank inkjet... it won't do you any good if you want to make canadian $100's or calgary $1's!
2 1337 4 u!
Simple process, photograph the bill, do your color separations in an older version of photoshop, etc; then burn plates from the color seperated negatives. Better yet, bypass photoshop completely and take several photographs of the bill using different filters over the lens to directly produce your color seperated negatives.
The fact of the matter is that the "big boys" in counterfeiting are NOT using a $50.00 scanner and a $19.99 inkjet printer.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Yes, this is the main problem. It seems to be generally agreed that this won't stop anyone who's serious, but when you're using image/pattern recognition to prevent scanning and printing, it's not a big leap to putting copyright enforcement patterns in magazines, books, etc etc. And as much as I can sympathize with wanting to protect your copyright, there are perfectly legitimate and legal reasons for scanning something out of your magazine/book/etc. The question is how long it will be before this kind of protection is implemented, and if we'll be told when it happens. Sorry for sounding paranoid, but it seems warranted.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
If legal copies of Photoshop don't work, criminals will only have pirated copies. Wow, big cultural shift there. Think of the awesome deterrent power of that law. Think of all those would-be counterfeiters who will say, "I'll steal from people I don't know, but I would never steal from Adobe."
I often think that only skilled programmers should be allowed to make laws. Those who are making laws now are so illogical that they would never have run-time bugs because they would never get anything to compile.
If you spend several years writing complex programs and debugging them, you develop respect for your own imperfect logic, and for the need to check your work, 90 or 900 times if needed. You develop respect for logic itself, and for the operation of your brain.
Many people become lawmakers because they are somewhat popular, and got elected, only that. For some of them, if clicking on File/Save causes the program to exit, that's okay. It's better not to spend too much time thinking.