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Mandatory Banknote Detection Code?
metamatic writes "The European Union is planning to introduce legislation to make it mandatory for software developers to add black-box banknote detection code to their graphics software.How will this apply to open source software? Is it time to get writing to your Euro-MP?"
next time on CSI: man rendered invisible to the magic zoom-in photo software by wearing suit made of dollar bills
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
Link here
got sig?
...will software developers be required to keep up with new note faces? If old software blocks all note faces as of 2004, will developers face penalties for not updating their software in 2008 when the currency is redesigned?
I don't like the idea of being legally required to update old software. Will this happen?
Yes - it's been in the media over here in Europe. In Germany apparently a good number of forgeries were even re-distributed through ATMs of some banks, who - for the sake of saving a couple of Euros - reloaded the ATM cartridges themselves, instead of carting of the money to the German National Bank who would check the banknotes and fill the ATM cartridges with absolutely authentic banknotes. The issue behind this is that normal merchant banks and people on the street do not know EVERY security detail of the Euro banknotes. Seven details have been published, the others are being kept secret by the national banks so that forgers will not get to hear about them.
In an Open Source app, it can stop someone who don't know C from doing something, but if you know C you can simply remove the added code...
Or use a solution that is available now:
Australia and New Zealand have adopted "plastic" notes for a while... I believe it is a big barrier for the cottage counterfeiting groups.
The term for faking currency is "forgery" with fake currency being "counterfeit". "Piracy" has nothing to do with it.
Why not?
Wrong question.
Whenever restrictions are proposed, it is those who are for it who must answer the question, "Why?" It is not necessary for those who oppose a restriction to answer the question "Why not?"
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Well, Euro banknotes already have unique codes printed on them. E.g. I've got here one starting with X0688...
But of course, the unique codes only help partially: If you get two banknotes with the same code, you know one has to be wrong. But if you get only one banknote with a given code, how do you know if it's the original one or a copy? Also, when replicating per printer, it probably would't be too hard to give every one a different number.
But Euro banknotes have some security measures which I can't see how to replicate with a printer (like a metallic surface strip).
They don't have RFID, though (and I hope they'll not have them in the future - I wouldn't feel too well if any potential thief could just use an RFID reader to find out in advance if stealing my wallet would be worthwhile).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Dear European Union,
I am an open source software developer. Could you please send me samples of all EU notes, so that I can include image protection in my software. 10-20 copies of each should be enough to complete the work needed.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
*laughs*
OK. The last time this came up, it consumed about twelve straight hours of hackery. You can go ahead and play with some of the black boxed code using the demo version of Paint Shop Pro (or the latest Photoshops). Let me tell you: This has nothing to do with the circles. I was actually quite saddened by this fact, as I was planning to print up a "secure t-shirt" that would be unphotographable and unprintable by modern image manipulators. (It'd be a great excuse to talk at Black Hat wearing a T-Shirt *laughs*).
Alas, such adventures were not to be had. Experimenting with copy/paste between an unprotected app and the demo PSP, it quickly became clear that while some old copiers might indeed trigger on the inter-circle distances, counterfeiters now had a vastly more difficult system to fight. What there seems to be is some sort of size and position invariant image fingerprint function, probably wavelet based, that receives the full image after every large scale image transform, executes a fingerprint matching vs. a confidence value, and returns true or false depending on what the confidence threshold is set to. It's not perfect -- Stirmark does seem to cause the algorithm to occasionally stumble, though not consistently (see this gallery for details) -- but it's very good work nonetheless.
Certainly, it does not appear possible to manipulate the watermarking system to create new and unique images that appear, computationally, to still be money. That's a very good thing. And while it's somewhat problematic to have code refusing to obey its controller, the integrity of the financial system really is an important thing. Remember the privacy case for cash -- if paper money becomes something we all distrust, what exactly are we left with? The fault with the RFID approach is that it forces us to carry a reader to validate funds. If we cannot self-validate, we cannot trust (notably, the biggest weakness with the metal strip approach is that we cannot quickly notice that the metal strip has been removed -- the wealth is actually thus represented not by the bill but by an invisible strip of iron and plastic!).
I do not think that image manipulation software is the right place to put this code, specifically because it's too easy to write an image editor from scratch (what are you going to do, ban compilers?). Scanners and printers are however sufficiently single sourced that they're far superior places to trust that anti-counterfeiting logic will be in place. But then, that's just IMHO.
--Dan
Austrailia has done a good job with thwarting forgery in more than just the media that the bills are printed on. Really good counterfeiting operations in the United States take a batch of one dollar bills and bleach them to remove all the stuff from the one, except they protect the serial number, then they reprint a higher bill's value onto it. That won't work in Austrailia, because every bill has braille and the larger the note's value, the larger the note. A one and a five arn't the same size.
Learn something new.
I thought this was already taken care of with the price of ink cartridges?
sure you can print your own money. but there isn't a US currency denomination large enough for you to get a return on your investment.
bite my glorious golden ass.