Slashdot Mirror
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!"
There is, of course, a problem with this. The guy I bulk order my Tin Foil Hats from won't accept them. Maybe this guy will take them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Poor Grant, even after death, has become quiet the specimen. Poor guy. Can't we let him RIP?
:-)
Although I think it's great that we are creating bills that we believe will curb counterfeiting shouldn't we also be working to make them look good? The new colors and everything are nice but definitely overused. It makes the bills look crowded and tacky. Reminds me of a hairdresser with too much makeup. The little yellow 20s and what appear to be 50s on the back of the new color bills are horrid. I looks like I dropped the bills in honey and couldn't clean it all off.
If I'm gonna pay $50 for a piece of paper it should at least be clean
I mis-read the title. I thought Uncle Sam was going to give me $50 for downloading stuff. If it was pr0n, I'd be set for life.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Not sure if these are exactly what are being referred to, but here are pdf images of the $50 and $20:
$50 front
$50 back
$20 front
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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?
Are they open-sourcing the $50 bill? Can we fork it?
Simpy
Couterfiting occurs because people are careless, yes the technology helps prevent it somewhat, but after working as a cashier in my midteens I was amased to how my fellow coworks would get fake bills and accept it... some of them looked so fake it was unbelivable.... also when i worked as a cahsier i noticed that these pens ( our only tool we where told to use to prevent counterfits) could easily able to give the wrong results on conterfits by just simply coating the paper with a fake plastic not enough to really feel it because of this it never alowed the ink to change color idefenying counterfit...
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Here are the new Canadian 20$ bills.
the site has some info on the new security features on this bill- there are also new 100$ bills, the only thing missing is new $50 bills.
Our money is so gay!
-Brazilian kidnappers.
Laugh. It's funny.
We are just a step away from Monopoly Money becoming the the Official US Currency.
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.
Precisely how the technology works is a mystery.
The Article really makes me want find a way around this technology. I don't want to produce fake money, but more to the point of computer road-blocks are just not cool.
Some ideas that don't leave me with a less-usable computer:
Why not have a bar-code on every dollar bill that can validate each bill. 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.
Why not continue the push for less paper money. Paper is nice, but it is expensive due to the short length of usage. Usually, the coined money is easily worth its value so producing a fake penny/quarter is not very worth while.
Stop using money altogether. Credit cards!
It just bothers me that the government is solving problems by disabling technology instead of leveraging it.
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
What are they going to do next? Put kids playing baseball on the five dollar bill???
-Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
"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!
Because .com is what web sites are. I mean, you've never heard of http://something.org have you? Sheesh. Web sites are in .com. *rolls eyes*
There are a series of 5 circles in a specific pattern... in the case of the new $50 it's the zeros in all the little "50"'s on the back.
Here's more info.
George W. Bush is on the fake $200 bill, which was passed around as recently as last month.
For more information, click here.
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.
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 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?
There are countless graphics packages out there, that can be used instead of the major players.
There are indefinate supplies of older scanners that are not protected, not to mention digital cameras.
I am pretty sure that the major players who counterfit, will just get cracked versions of software or use alternatives, meaning all this is doing is bloating legitimate users software for no real reason.
The software is provided free, which means it would be relatively easy for a skilled but crooked developer to disable the checks, specially as you would know what you are looking for!
Is it also pushing the price of hardware up, if they have to include extra memory to hold this software, or is it in the scanner software - computer side?
I really dont see this stopping anyone other than a total amatuer from scanning banknotes (and may even cause more problems, as if an amateur cant do a bad copy themselves they may look into more professional means of forging. I would rather they did a bad home copy, tried to use it and got caught - meaning one less idiot on the streets forging money).
Perhaps they would have been better off keeping the whole thing secret, so no one knows about it, and then have the software log all scans of banknotes into a central database, so the police could keep an eye on who is scanning notes. If forgeries appear in the area, they would know who was to blame......
ken
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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
Holy shit, we're slashdotting the US Treasury! We've come a long way from Fort Knox to "MoneyFactory".com. Spend these $50s, fake or not, while they're still worth something!
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make install -not war
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?
One man decided to counterfeit some money on his computer, so he printed off some high quality images of $20 bills. They looked good, but the new $20's have a hologram on them. So he got a roll of twenty dollar bills and cut out the holograms to past onto his counterfeits.
There you have it... All this anti-counterfeiting technology is working.
p.s. To my knowledge, this story is true.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
This isn't going to make that much difference as long as vendors keep accepting the old bills that can be copied. Sure, the banks will be instructed to turn in the old ones to be shredded and replaced with the new ones, so in the long term any old bills may be treated with suspicion, but how long will that take?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
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 ?
The difference is that the "Eurion" pattern, as it's called, is done TASTEFULLY on other country's notes.
On the US notes it looks like an afterthought, stamped-on in a rush.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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.
Money is money because people believe it is money.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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
Anti-Copy Technology.
Doesn't that just make you want to try?
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!