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U.S. Offers $50 Download
chill writes "CNN is reporting that the U.S. Government is offering low-quality images of its new $50 bill for artists, students and others who discover that their computers, scanners or printers won't allow them to view or copy pictures of the new currency, due to mostly-secret anti-counterfeiting measures built-in. This anti-copying technology has been discussed on Slashdot before. Now to go and test my new Epson scanner and printer to see if they're affected!"
I wonder how many stupid kids with color pritners are gonna try printing these up anyway, trying them out in change machines, and do other stupid things with them?
Strangely, the image links on this site show the $50 but the PDFs contain the $20.
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
It's wierd that the Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing has the web site moneyfactory.com. The web site itself is even wierder. Uncut currency? Framed bills? Custom serial numbers? 5lb bags of shredded currency? It's like the Franklin Mint, only cheezier.
I've been all over the treasury dept's web site, and I can't find anywhere that they offer images for artists, students and others who discover that their computers, scanners or printers won't allow them to view or copy pictures of the new currency.
They've got images up, as MankyD has pointed out, but the whole point seems to be educating people on how to recognize the bills, and how to find the anti-counterfeit gadgets. How did CNN come up with this spin?
--
Free gmail invites
Most of the complaints about the anti-copying technology were about using them in art projects, making parodies, etc. Now that people can download copies, in addition to being able to use the graphics in their projects, they can skip having to scan them.
I did a project in high school a while back on counterfeiting, and anti-counterfeiting techniques. One of the experts in a Nova video said that as computer printers get better, the concern won't be the large scale counterfeiters, since they're easier to track down due to the large volume and equipment needed. It would be people on their home computers scanning money and reprinting it. This was 10-12 years ago, when inexpensive printers didn't have the capability to print that well yet. Not sure if that prediction came true (don't have the SS/Treasury numbers onhand), but it's an interesting historical account.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
"Now to go and test my new Epson scanner and printer to see if they're affected!"
Screw that, I want to test my new microwave oven to see if Grant's eyes explode!
If you download the PDF and save it as a JPG or GIF and try to load it in Photoshop you will get the following text:
"This application does not support the unauthorized processing of banknote images
For more information, select the information button below for Internet-Based information for restrictions on copying or distributing banknote images or go to www.rulesforuse.org"
However, Apple's image preview software opens it fine, as does it's PDF viewer (same software, called "Preview")
Very disturbing to play with and see how your use of your computer has been taken over by government secret methods that large corporations have agreed to.
Very 1984... you don't know your software has been compromised until it's already too late.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
What's to stop you from scanning 1/4 of a bill at a time and reassembling it? What about all of those drivers and software pre-anti-counterfitting? What about analog copying?
The whole "you can't scan this bill" program seems like a complete waste of taxpayer money and puts an unnecessary burden on software makers. Why didn't they take that money and invest it in making the bills themselves more secure like many European and Asian bills?
These latest revisions are a step but it's still pretty easy to print up counterfits and pull a fast one on some unsuspecting shop owner.
^nA! Creatures in my Head
Opening up the PDF in xpdf for Linux causes the bill to be rendered and a few seconds later, the red colored "SPECIMEN" text is written ontop of the bill. It should not be hard to remove this top layer, resulting in a government provided digital copy of a $50 bill. Lovely.
Didn't the government acidentally make this mistake with CIA documents that had people's names blacked out with a separate top layer, that was easily removed?
I think the hologram on british pounds and the euros might give the game away. You can't scan a hologram.
Now, the image I can scan at one time isn't very large, maybe an area about the size of a pencil eraser at lowest magnification, but I would scan. step, repeat, and tile the resultant images.
I am sure that given proper incentive, I could modify the microscope's stage to automate the step and repeat function, as for now its still simple XY drive screws that position the sample under the lens.
Yes, it would take quite some time to do it right. It wouldn't surprise me if it took all night to do it.
But then, I don't know of any technology to defeat such a thing.
You see, I don't just do RGB, I can use any colors, including non-visible, on this setup. The camera itself is wideband mono. I flood the sample with whatever color of light I choose. Normal color photos involves a still sample and three captures, one each of red, green, and blue, which are subsequently overlaid as colors.
I routinely may look at things in infrared or ultraviolet. I can't see it but the camera can. Doing this, I can make "false color" images for things like failure analyses. Things that aren't visible in our eye's sensitive area of the light spectrum often are visible somewhere else in the spectrum.
About using credit cards... uhhh,,, that's the tinfoil hat nightmare. Cash is just about the only anonymous way to transfer wealth left. Just about anything else is traceable, hence, taxable. Unless, of course, you wanna go buy them something on your account and give them the something you bought for them.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
if you live in Florida... don't make a Florida Fake-ID. Same principle for making fake money?
Why not make Thai Currency and then just do a currency exchange on it? Problem solved and I end up with super read, super secure American money.
Here's my little test: 1. Opened pdf 2. hit print scrn button (screen shot) 3. opened ms paint, I'm at work, no linux :(
4. pasted screen shot
5. printed screen shot
6. have fake $50
Boy was that tough.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
So, can I use that too to copy-protect my own documents, just by including those circle-patterns in my logo, for example ?
If a serial comes up in the same place more than once, then it is fake and disabled. This would be a global database, but not unrealistic.
No, that would be very unrealistic. Here's just a few reasons why:
1. If two bills have the same serial number, one of them (the non-counterfeit) is still legal tender.
2. You'd basically have to require every location that accepts cash transactions, from your bank to the hotdog cart on the corner, to be jacked into a secure financial network. Where's the infrastructure for it?
3. Even if flea market vendors and busboys get online, how quickly can we expect updates to be propagated? Think routing tables times a billion. If a store can only send out a log of what bills it received and gave out once a week, that means counterfeits may only be identified once a week, even if other stores sent out updates twice an hour. By then, the bill-passers have gotten away cleanly and some poor sucker is left holding the bag.
4. Security concerns. If the government knows which bills were involved in transactions where, and at what time, how easy would it be to take the next step and force banks to tie those transactions to specific people? The beauty of cash in this climate of debit and credit cards is anonymity.
If you want to think that architecting a global tracking database of a logistical complexity that has never been attempted in history is preferable to a specific software vendor implementing a feature at the government's request, I can't stop you. But some relative context would be good.
Actually, living overseas in central Asia (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) I actually experienced something a little different than this. The very day that the new U.S. bills were introduced (several years ago), none of the money changers in the local bazaars would accept the bills anymore. It was a really weird.
On a similar note, I was thinking about the nature of paper money vs. coins, considering whether it's easier to carry around dollar coins vs. dollar bills, and had to ask myself - if one or the other is generally more convenient, then why are we using both?
coins - compact, very durable. Harder to fake in some ways, easier in others (slugs in vending machines). A quarter weighs 5.7 grams, a dime 2.3 grams (everything below that is pretty much useless these days, and really we should be using 20 and 50 cent pieces for various reasons)
bills - lighter weight, more sophisticated anti-counterfeit measures, but the features hardest to fake are the ones generally ignored. Large flat size means they need to be protected by something, and folded to fit into pocket. Uses a relatively durable paper, and plastic notes are available that are even more durable, but not nearly as durable as coins. Why aren't they using bar codes for serial numbers? Can be rolled into a very compact tube. Weighs 1.0 gram.
but what about...
cards - sophisticated anti-counterfeit (including electronic, physical, and visual) options available. Lightweight but durable and compact. Plastic credit card weighs 4.7 grams. Paper business card weighs 1.0 grams.
If we used cards instead of bills, our money would be easier to carry around, quite durable, and could incorporate sophisticated electronic anti-counterfeit schemes like RSA authentication, embedded RFID, and so forth. Vending machines wouldn't eat or reject your money just because it's old. It could be the same weight. It allows the same hardware to read or use both "bills", credit cards, debit cards, and even cash cards - and if you used cards instead of coins, you wouldn't need anything else. This could allow people to never having to use cash at all, because there cards work everywhere. About the only downside is you wouldn't have the same thick stack of bills to shuffle through.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
All joking aside, they're not looking to "stop" all copying with this measure at this time. They're looking at it statistically: if 50% of the population is too stupid to change their default screensaver, that same 50% won't be aware that there's an alternative to commercial photo editing software. That means they are probably hoping for a 50% reduction in 'casual' counterfeiting.
It's also been theorized that recognition of the so-called "Eurion" constellation will be built into a new generation of scanners. So, if you own one of these scanners, you won't have the opportunity to download the raw image anyway -- you'll be stopped by the firmware in the scanner. Xerox was also testing printer technology that would refuse to emit a printout that contained the Eurion constellation.
It actually makes a lot of sense from the governments' point of view. If you're Joe Sixpack and decide to "print your own lunch money" and get busted for it, you get to spend up to 20 years in a Federal prison for counterfeiting. That's the exact same sentence they'd hand out to a Mafioso who may have set up an intaglio printing press and was printing hundreds of thousands per week.
If someone is so stupid as to try printing counterfeit money, then maybe a simple, stupid technological speed-bump is all it will take to keep him out of prison. And from their point of view, that's worth it.
John
There are a lot of people out there who will not see the potential ramifications of their actions, and think that it is a fun test. "Can I make somebody take a fake $20?"
/former/ college buddies.
The guys across the hall from me in college did this. Realized that the optical scanners in vending machines in those days (they'd just started taking dollars) only scanned in black and white and were doing pattern recognition. They copied a bunch of bills and used them all over campus. Morons, though - they used MOST of them in the machines in our OWN dorm.
These causal counterfitters are the hardest ones to catch. Especially the "smart" ones who only do it once or twice. If you keep it up, you will get caught. The Feds are our protection against professional counterfitters, more than the nature of the bill.
Yep - the Secret Service enjoys finding counterfeiters... just ask my
If you keep it up, you will get caught.
I've always thought (note to Secret Service: as thought experiment only, never acted on) that you could keep up small-time counterfeiting for years without a lot of problems.
Where people seem to get in trouble is when they get greedy and want a lot of money fast.
Instead, you'd think you could generate a small amount of cash (say, $200 a week) via change machines and probably spend another $200 or so in other coin/bill operated machines and as direct cash in various high-traffic cash situations (parking garages, bars, food stands, etc) where the volume of transactions eliminates any verification options.
You'd never want to use denominations over $10 (although some isolated change machines or co-ops might take $20s), especially for cash transactions, and probably never more than a single bill at a time.
It basically serves as "walking around" money -- $200-$400 per week in cash that won't show up as assets to the IRS or arouse any suspicion. In a large city with more change machines, you might be able to generate more cash, although to be safe you'd want to minimize your visits to the same change machines.
Anyway, this always occured to me as the "safe" way to counterfeit. The level of money generated stays below everyone's radar screen, the denominations are small enough and involve enough machines that they might not even be found to be counterfeit until they were so far removed from the transaction as to be impossible to trace without a level of effort that wouldn't pay off.
Interesting theory, give it a try and let us know how it worked out when you're released from custody. The problem with this thinking is that enforcement is prioritized according to:
(1) the per-incident economic impact (e.g. a suitcase of $50 bills vs. a single bogus $10 bill)
(2) a discernible pattern to the incidence of counterfeit-bill complaints, particularly if the aggregate impact of the fake bills is significant
(3) the likelihood of an incident investigation leading to a source of counterfeit currency
That said, even if one were to optimize for each of the above, you run the very real risk of coming to the attention of an agent with time to pursue a lower-priority investigation.
Counterfeiting US currency, particularly in these times of heightened security awareness, is about one of the highest-risk paths to ill-gotten gains I can think of. Based on comments made to me by FBI agents with relevant experience, the risk/reward ratio for a single well-planned bank robbery is significantly better than any appreciably lucrative counterfeiting scheme anyone has come up with yet.
Entertainingly enough, most bank robbers are sufficiently deluded by their first success that they try to parlay that into a series of successes. This character weakness is generally how non-violent bank robbers get caught.
-Trevor
Don't count on it.
I cant find any references now, but I remember reading about a counterfeiter who the secret service hunted for many years (decades?). He was never caught, but was finally identified after his death (old age), since they found his printing press. He drove the secret service nuts and was one of the longest sought counterfeiters ever.
The guy only did ones and fives, and only enough to live on. And he never spent too much in a single store.
But even so, they were still looking for him..
Old Czar-era roubles did have exactly that. On a 50-rouble note from 1908 (very impressive looking, with Catherine the Great) the tiny text line within the bar under the picture of the Emperor reads something like "Counterfighting of the bank notes is punished by forced labor and exile in Siberia" (I recently gave the note away to my russian ex-boss so I do not have the text verbatim)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
What's so uncool about that? If everybody uses it as a 'protest' feature it will flood the vendors with complaints.
In some ways, it's similar to a trick I pulled when someone at work started putting their initials on Semiconductor data books. He 'claimed' the manuals that vendors had delivered and wanted nobody else to remove them from his area. He did this by marking the book edge with his initials.
So I quietly put his initials on every databook and manual I could find anywhere in the company. They all then had his initials and the ones he 'claimed' were indistinguisable from any others.
In other ways it's not similar, of course.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
I've been modded informative, so it seems someone is interested.
A quick explanation why this works:
The laser goes though the "blank hologram" (which is a piece of glass with some chemicals on it), then hits the hologram behind. The light from the hologram behind bounces back. Now you have the original incomming light, and the reflected light. The two interfere, and make an interference pattern. The chemicals capture this interference pattern. now when you shine light through it, the light interferes with the interference pattern, and replays the hologram image. (The hologram plate stores the XOR, for you computer scientists)
The really interesting thing about these PDF is that if I open them in Illustrator I can delete the vector text "SPECIMEN" without effecting the the raster image of the bill. Which leaves me with a pretty good, yes a little low res, but good version of the bill to print on my color printer. So, um why won't my scanner scan it again?
||| technological transcendentalist |||