Slashdot Mirror
IDs in Color Copies
Slashdot received a lot of submissions of this Privacy Forum article about ID numbers being "watermarked" (just like digital watermarks) into copies made by any color copy machine. Go ahead and read it; the rest of this story assumes that you've read the link.
This not a secret; I remember a case a few years ago where a Columbia University copier was being used to create counterfeit currency, and the imprinted copies were traced straight back to the machine used to create them (amazingly, Altavista turned up an article about this case). Basically, when color copiers first started getting good, the Treasury started leaning on manufacturers to make their products less useful for counterfeiting. AFAIK, there's no law in effect saying that manufacturers MUST include an anti-counterfeiting features in their devices; but on the other hand, there aren't very many equipment manufacturers, so they're easy to lean on.
So today, any copy you make with any color copier will include a unique serial number. Make sure you don't copy anything that someone might want to trace back to you on a color copier. Maybe this isn't that big a deal; color copiers aren't home appliances.
But now home scanners and inkjets make up a nice copying system for as little $200-300. The Treasury Department has a big program devoted to preventing digital copying, and it looks like one of their main concerns is consumer-grade equipment. The Bureau of Printing and Engraving is even soliciting proposals from vendors which have a system suitable for embedding these watermarks in all output produced by color inkjet printers.
Fighting counterfeiting is fine with me. Thus the systems which "recognize" currency and refuse to scan or print it don't seem like too much of an infringement. But embedding serial numbers in all printer output? Maybe I just have a cynical mind, but I can think of about a hundred reasons this is a bad idea.
As far as copiers go, it would be interesting to watch the black market of "bootleg copiers" sprout up of copiers that have been built without or have had the watermarkings removed.
:-)g
-- My Weblog.
So now I can't even print my own money any more!? Jeese what is this world coming to!
But seriously, Things like this make me really like my epson action printer 5000. It's old, it's loud it's clunky and it's slow but no one is tracing my paper back to it.
It's log, it's log, it's big it's heavy it's wood.
Fish! LipHo
We just disable this part of the printer/copier/scanner. Time and time again we learn the collegtive intelligence of people who believe in freedom and "fair use" is much higher than the companies trying to stop us.
Perhaps someday, someone other than ourselves will realize this.
Finkployd
..just crop the watermark out..
..it would be interesting to watch the black market..
This is encoded in 'background noise' in the image, and is not visable. The algorithm for decoding the watermark is known only to the manufacturers and a few government agencies.
Wrong. This has been around for at least five years. It is not a new thing. It's been an open secret for years, many people even assuming it was an urban legend, and the media ignoring it.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Canon color lasers (800, 1000, 2400, ect.) all have a board that recognizes things like money and postage stamps. If you try and copy any of these it will spit out all black copies, and will continue to do so until a Canon tech is called. (They usualy call the Secret Service)
Does anyone know how this works without altering the image? I mean, if the copy is not "perfect", many people would choose not to use that product for their copying purposes. According to the first link (Privacy Forum) in the article, the watermark is "invisible". So.. how is it detected?
Paper and print is a whole different story. I would be wary of buying anything that watermarked everything I printed. I use a (granddaddy) AppleWriter II laser printer, and am reluctant to upgrade to a new printer if I am aware of this sort of thing. My big concern is who can read these watermarks, and why would they ever want to. (Other than for legal reasons, but I can't see myself printing threats off my printer.)
I can see newer laser printers being able to do this sort of thing, but I cannot see why a printer company would risk the public relations disaster that would ensue after someone found it producing a watermark, and any possible corporate backlash from including such a "feature".
I really don't think that much about my privacy, I'd like to think I'm pretty good to get along with in that way, but I (personally -- someone will hopefully point out valid reasons, but I guess valid reasons depend on who can read the watermark ...) can't see any justifiable reason for said watermarks except for perhaps malicious purposes.
Are there any effort going on at reverse-engineering/removing this 'feature'? I assume that since it's been known for years, and simply not publicized, that somebody has been working on this.
So much for spreading my new copier virus, at least not without getting my butt in a sling.
Again, food for thought.
-"S"HM
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
maybe i'm just cynical, but the world is becoming less and less human and more and more robotized. we are no longer treated as human beings, but as criminals, or as children. we need to be watched over by the wise and caring eye of the "big brother", we are too foolish for own good and thus we must not be given any freedom. 1984... all those novels which people shrug off as being a waste of their time. we are LIVING it already! god damn...
why can't we all just get along? and live in peace and harmony? and why can't they just leave us alone? all i want is just some peace and quiet... before i die.
because you can translate the file to bmp or xpm, remove the watermarking, and then resave it as a jpeg.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
From the article:
While there is currently no U.S. legislative requirement that manufacturers of copier technology include IDs on color copies, it is also the case that these manufacturers have the clear impression that if they do not include such IDs, legislation to require them would be immediately forthcoming.
Hmmm. OK. So cooperation is used to forestall regulation. What with the proliferation and strange application of various laws, I'm actually more comfortable with manufacturer cooperation than regulation.
From Michael:
But embedding serial numbers in all printer output? Maybe I just have a cynical mind, but I can think of about a hundred reasons this is a bad idea.
The only threat I'm able to think of at the moment is to anonymous free speech. So if someone prints a newsletter with ideas someone doesn't like, the newslettter is branded "subversive", and can be tracked back to the printer. But then what? Can they really be shut down? And how many such "subversisves" really are anonymous anyway?
Tweet, tweet.
Is this really serial numbers? Or is it just detection of the 'flaws'. My understanding was that all photo copiers have scratches on their glass or elsewhere that make them identifiable. Similar to how guns are scratched and therefore identifiable. Or typewritters. I would imagine that anything that has mechanical parts and outputs physical media would have some identifiable marks. Merely by the scartchs marks etc on any mechanical device.
-cpd
Okay, I found the article a little silly. At least for now this whole serial number business would be ludicrous, but it made me think.
What if you only went a few steps further and included not only serial numbers and water marks from scanners, and photo copiers and the like, but could also have all these devices 'communicate' with one another between say monetary transactions.
Then you could build a pretty strong case against somebody for distributing or creating pr0n sites and the like.
Just what we need though, another boogeyman...
This space for sale
Color xerox machines are the sole means of
reproduction for the preternatural pink worms.
The technology for them was developed by the worms
as part of an agreement with the undetectable
aliens, who are the true technological innovators.
This whole serial number deal must be the work
of the robotic snakes! You think registration of
_gun_ is bad, think what will happen if the
robotic snakes know where any given preternatural
pink worm originated?
We must fight this, brothers and sisters. We
must let the truth be known, before it is too
late!
I was under the impression that higher-end Xerox copiers already had this functionality.
The article says that we may see this sort of thing implemented in ink jets soon; I'm hanging onto mine.
Ink jets have come a long way in the last few years, and they've reached the stage where, with the right paper, they can print photographic-quality pictures.
What does this mean? Well, everyone who's planning on doing something nasty-and-traceable will do it on an older printer. Some stupid people won't, and they'll get caught, justifying in the minds of the Man and the public that such watermarking is worthwhile. But, like drug smuggling, the vast majority will slip by unnoticed.
Freedoms will be curtailed, money will be wasted, and it'll all be for nothing. Have a nice day.
That's what the article said. Kindly read them before commenting on them.
In order to use a Kinko's copier, they could require you sign up for a card needed to activate the copier. Under the guise of convenience (the card could work like a debit card) they could identify who was making the copies and insert a watermark into the copy that identified the card. Of course, you could give false information when getting the card, and I doubt Kinkos is going to start demanding picture ID to get a copier card, but still...
Blar.
On a news segment, it showed one brand of copiers that messed up a dollar bill being copied on the printout. THEN they showed you how to circumvent it(gotta love those news people). You also put on a color photo when you're copying the dollar bill, and boom, instant copy defeat.
Watermarking can be _very_ subtle. If HP a watermarking algorithm into their printers, (a good one) how would we know that it was there? On one hand, if I can't tell that it is there, it doesn't bother me too much (at least from the perspective of quality of output), however from a privacy standpoint it bothers me to the core. Law enforcement would be happy to be able to trace everything through each and every pair of hands hat touched it, I'm sure. I am not so sure that this would be safe- Laws are not always enforced.. and just about everyone is breaking a few laws they never knew about every dy. The sad fact is that there are so many laws (and conflicting laws! There is no ammendment saying that conflicting laws must be stricken! How does the average citizen deal with them?!), that noone can obey all of them, even if it is their intention. The law does not govern intention (except to classify degrees of murder, and a few more), but only comes into effect based on actions, inactions or behaviours. This is one more thing that makes it easier for law enforcement to trace each and every action that you do.. and to possibly nail you on each and every day that you live.. Ignorance is no excuse... So anyon who is all gung-ho for watermarking (effectively, tracibility), keep in mind the dangers- YOU are breaking the law pretty much just by living... Do you want everyone to know it?
Okay this is funny but Drew is pretty butt compared Nat.
Maybe you should try to think of a different #2 girl.
but they all look so pathetic in comparison
If I use my color printer to print counterfeit money, and the printer embeds some kind of serial number in the printout, how do they know it's *my* printer? I mean, I don't have to register the software or anything. And even if, I probably wouldn't give them the printer's serial number (or my real name, for that matter) if I was planning to use it to counterfeit money.
On a separate note, watermarking software has proven to be useless, since just loading and saving a jpg gets rid of it (and if that is not enough, just change the brightness slightly, or apply a "weak" filter). I don't know if any method exists yet, that really survives printing out and rescanning (I can't imagine that's possible. It's hard enough to get even close to the original colors with most current scanners and printers).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
This is ridiculous. Not that I support counterfeiting, but embedding a unique in all scanned/printed images to track who they came from? Ridiculous. Any company who agreed to implement this idiocy would see its sales hurt. Hopefully, that is. It seems that too many people would probably either not understand or not care. Half the problem with privacy issues today is that not enough people care enough to make a statment so that something will be done.
My $0.02
to identify "original" impressions? I'm thinking of the case of digital cameras/camcorders where you need to use the results as evidence in say a court and you wish to verify that any resulting image is the true and faithful record rather than a digital marked up version. The abuse of technology to fake evidence, influence a constitutent or pervert the course of justice, either deliberately or by chance) can be a danger to a society which increasingly requires a informed evaluation of rather complex issues. Already artists think nothingabout touching up their works. Given the increasingly use of synthetic imagery, how much further will it go before we trust anything we see or hear? Perhaps this will follow the case of rubies where the artificial ones are so perfect, the real collectors items are those with natural flaws which are difficult to fake. But with digital media which is infinitely malleable, how can one tell the difference between reality and augmented? Think of the increasing use of artificial substitutes for money (book tokens, phone cards, gift vouchers, etc) .... how easily can these be faked, especially in digital form? As a fiat money, the dollar bill represents nothing except a promise backed by the trust and faith of the people for a future claim on some resource, good or service. Laws and technology may be fine, but they are no substitute for personal trust and eyeballing the system to make sure there are no hidden gotchas.
LL
Privacy concerns aside, the only thing about placing an identification number on a color print that would bother me would be if I could see it. If the ID was scattered about the page as "noise", and unobservable by me, it wouldn't bother me much.
As for the privacy issue... wouldn't such a encoding method be proprietary to the manufacturer? So what happens if I first copy the color image on a Xerox machine, and then take the copy over to a different machine, and copy that. Assuming the quality was not lost, the hidden ID code would not be decipherable by any (one) decryption algorythm.
Mike Eckardt meckardt@spam.yahoo.com
Please tell me how to remove your copier virus from my xerox!!!! It caused my copier to crash. I am sure that it got it from that ream of pre-formated paper I got from the discount house.
The US bills are notorius for being old obsolete crap, among the easiest in the world to copy. Other countries update their currency (and sometimes redesign it), Denmark for instance has watermarks in the bills, holograms, fine colour hues and ultra thin strips of metal in the bills. Looks and handles quite normal, but are difficult as hell to duplicate - american bills? Just point us at the nearest photocopier...
I'm gonna patent this anti watermarking technique.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The United States constitution does not specically grant a right to privacy. However, the supreme court has on many occasions upheld this as a basic American right. Many states constitutions specifically include such a right. California is one example.
/. nick. =(
Technology that identifies copies and printer output infringes this right. If every print out and every copy identifies the machine from which it came, private communications from these media are impossible.
Your employer will have to begin a policy where documents that are not lawyer approved will have to be shredded, lest something you printed in jest make it into the 'wrong hands' and the person or company sueing for libel gets a court order to identify the documents origin.
Aside from possible government abuse of this technology it is also possible that the 'propriety algorithms' used to ID machines could be broken or stolen. Given the history of these types of secrets, I would say it is inevitable.
The worst harm I see here is more fuel for the fire of tort cases. With everyone sueing everyone else I can see this technology adding fuel to the fire.
I can not think of any specific scenarios where the average law abiding citizen would be harmed by this unless the government were to abuse thier power to identify documents. However the less power the Government has to infringe, the less they will be tempted.
-AC cause I can't remember my
ISTR reading that in the old Soviet Union, anyone who bought a typewriter was required to register a sample of their type with the state. (For you young pups out there, old mechanical typewriters used to have enough variations in the print heads that you could supposedly identify a typewriter from a print sample. I doubt that survived the invention of replacable daisy wheels, IBM "ball" print heads, etc. Modern manufacturing techniques may well have started producing identical print heads well before that.) The CCCP supposdly wanted to be able to identify the source of any subversive propaganda. I suspect this may have been an urband legend; it has a sort of "too good to be true" feel.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
That's not how watermarks work. They are sort of like a hologram. They are made out of invisible distortions distributed throughout the picture. Cut the picture in half, and each half will have a half-strength watermark, just like a hologram. Compress the picture, and the watermark will be reduced in strength according to the compression factor (75%? 90%?) but it will still be there. Watermarks are additive, so if you add a new watermark overtop an old one, they will add together and both will be visible. Watermark something too many times, enough to jumble up the original mark, and the distortions finally become noticeable.
But if you know the math behind the watermark, and you can extract it, you can erase it by watermarking with the complement of the original watermark. Naturally, this will be illegal.
Seeing as the watermark is encoded as 'background noise' maybe after scanning the user could run a blur or something on the picture.
It would affect the quality of course, but it should mess up the picture enough to destroy the watermark
That is so old of news infact a complete rip off of Mondo 2000 magazine. That is from before '94.
The US needs to make its money more secure by embedding microchips into each bill. This will prevent counterfeiting and also allow the immediate global positoning of any bill. Each bill should cost at least as much as its denomination to manufacture it. Otherwise it's worthless. Remember when a dollar coin was ctually made from a dollar worth of silver? Nowadays money is just paper, nothing backs it up.
My understanding is that it's microscopic - the arrangement of the dots on the paper. To the naked eye, the copy is perfect, but under a microscope things are very different (same with plain B&W photocopiers.. ever looked at copies vs. originals under a microscope?)
What good is a serial number that's not registered? None at all. It doesn't make sense in any context EXCEPT that we will be forced in the future to register our serial numbers. Creeping incrementalism at its finest.
There are techniques for hiding information into pictures. For example, some pgp 2.6.1 rpm's distribution comes with some stuff for this. If this was done, I don't know how you could remove it. Perhaps changing the image format a few times would remove it (and picture quality) from the conversions.
Then it'd be a lot easier to catch me at making personal copies at work. Have we no freedoms left?
Of course, it would also be easier to catch those people from other cost units who keep using our color printer. That would show them. Curse those thieves.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
A story in a local paper today -online at: http://www.copleynewspapers.com/heraldnews/top/j08 money.htm I doubt that any serialization/watermarks would keep this sort of thing from happening. Someone who prints money that can't even pass at a high school concession stand isn't likely to care about a few odd marks in his copy.
the fact is NO! color copier can produce a "perfect" copy
What is the most effective way to fight this? I suppose we need to let the printer companies know that we have no intrest in purchasing watermarking printers.
Also, the whenever a printer company releases a new printer someone needs to find out if they have included watermarking.. and post it to slashdot if they have.. one would hope that we could make enough commotion regarding the printer to cost the company money.
Do any printers corrently on the market support these features? It seems to me we need to send a message to the companies that going allong with the Gov. will cost them money.
It is also a good idea to get out information on how to preform the hardware modifications to change the serial number as quickly as possible. It seems to me giving the script-kiddies the ability to get someone falsly convicted of counter fitting just by examining a page the someone printed out will go a long way towards killing these things.. and will force people to only purchase printers which do not use watermarks.
Any more suggestions?
Jeff
BTW> Actually, the false convictions thing is an excellent way to fight many of the `ID the public' government programs.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This all sounds kind of suspect to me. AFAIK, there is a certain amount of noise involved in any existing method of digitally scanning an analog image. (In fact, SGI's LavaRand random-number system is based on this principle.) I find it hard to believe that any "watermark" as well hidden within the image as the article suggests wouldn't be lost in the process of scanning it back into digital form.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I saw some earlier concerns about the tracability of a particular printer... The watermark contains the serial number of the printer. Previous techniques of forensic science already allow us to identify printer makes and models, so the change in watermarking will not assist law enforcment at all (aside from possibly knowing which store the device was sold at), as long as you just don't fill out that product registration card...
Which no counterfeiter would do anyways.
So why bother at all? It will make printers more expensive, and the government thinks that they get a tool to assist them in enforcing the law, but doesn't really - other coroberative evidence will have to be collected to get near enough to the printer with the watermark to check, and then traditional forensic science techniques could be used.
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
I can demonstrate exactly how it work. Next payday, grab your paycheck and try to photocopy it. See the Void image printed out? it's almost hidden on the real check, but shows up when copied. with color copies it's simular: They scan the document back into a copier with a unique formatter board. It picks up the original 'watermark' hidden in the document, and produces a print with the watermark clearly visible.
I really don't understand the point of getting excited about this. The police can probably already match paper and ink, and minute impressions in the paper from handling to identify a specific printer.
All this would do is make the job slightly easier.
Dead tree copies aren't the big thing copyright holders would be afraid of, either. They are lossy copies.
The only major reason I could see this being worth anything would be to catch people printing kiddie porn or money.
...for some reason, like a record of who it was sent too. Then your fscked up.
There was a story in the Washington Post a few years ago about Metro (the DC-area subway system) losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because their Farecard machines would accept ordinary B&W photocopies of dollar bills. I understand they've closed the loophole now.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
There will be a thousand ways to circumvent such technology. The image, remember, has to eventually make it to paper.
So, then, let's assume that the watermark is inserted into the document at the hardware level; i.e., you can't send the printer any specific data to disable said watermark.
The first issue is old printers. I have an HP DeskJet 812C on my machine. Very nice resolution-- in fact, I could probably do counterfeit with it quite easily (if I had the patience to watch my printer run for hours on end). Strike one against the gov't-- it's too late to stop the old printers; criminals can just buy 'em second-hand.
The second issue is how fine a resolution the watermark will use. Will we wind up with watermarks on documents at 150 dpi? It'd be pretty pointless-- a counterfeit bill printed at that resolution would be pretty easily detected. But what if I can get a *very* precisely aligned printer that runs at 150 dpi, and print the same image (or layers of the same image, as it were) on the exact same location? It'd take some doing, but it could be done. If this proposal is to stop a "casual" counterfeit, then it may be useful, but I really doubt it-- it's going to be too easy to find out how to beat the watermarks.
Now, though, let's get to the real meat of the issue-- what if I have bad print heads? No, seriously! If I let the heads on my printer get clogged or whatever, it can result in a noticable reduction in print quality. So, if I can do it just right, I can print out my counterfeit bill at twice the needed resolution (i.e., the resolution needed to make it look real). Because the ink is running and bleeding and such, any watermark would most likely be destroyed. But the dollar bill might not look all that bad-- especially after I run it through the washing machine in my pants pocket once or twice (which many counterfeiters do, partially to make the dinginess seem more like regular wear and tear, and partially to give the bill a better texture).
I really doubt this proposal will go far. Even if it does, there will be ways around it. Don't worry yourself too much-- I know I won't...
If you enlarge or reduce it by 20% (IIRC). Lets say a photocopier rejects a currency copy if it is only enlarged +/- 20%. So, instead, I copy a $100 bill at 20% enlargement. That is legal. Then I can copy that large $100 and reduce it by 20%. Can the copier detect an enlarged bill? Will it know how much larger it is? Seems like you could defeat the copy protection.
That is what he is trying to tell us. So we will be handsomely rewarded with his absence again. Maybe we should all write them about it.
(Anyway, Segfault should at least have the decency to come back. I can't access it since Sunday).
Well, when I last bought an HP 612C (a printer that's a few years old model), the store recorded the serial number off the box on the receipt (and in their computer system).
I don't think it is feasible to put this into el-cheapo scanners and printers nowadays, it is too compute-intensive and hence too expensive. The host computer OTOH has a lot of cycles to burn, so if I had to design such a system I'd put it in the drivers. This has the additional benefit that I can throw in a few other ids for good measure (Windows serial no / Ethernet HW-address / Pentium III id or whatever).
Check the newer designs. They've been in use for several years now, but because of the way the Treasury decided to do it they haven't made their way into the smaller bills yet. So far $20 bills and higher have been converted; $10 is due in 2000 (with $5 in 2001, and finally $1 in 2002). Security threads, watermarks, moire-inducing patterns, and my personal favorite, the color-shifting ink. This, along with the red and blue fibers, hidden pictures (like the spider on the current $1 bill), the paper itself (yes, the paper itself is considered a security feature; many counterfieters have been caught when cashiers realized that the paper didn't feel right), and the other stuff from the current bills.
I don't like the look of the new bills as much (except for the aforementioned color-shifting ink, which is simply too damn cool for words). But they should work a lot better for this sort of thing.
Yeah, the US bills were certainly due for an update (no changes at all since the mid-70's, and no major changes since the 1920's). But they're getting it, finally. I think it would have been cooler to print the whole bill with the color-shifting ink, though.
It sounds like something that cold be used to pervent or stop crimes like counterfiting, copyright infringement, ect.
But embedding serial numbers in all printer output? Maybe I just have a cynical mind, but I can think of about a hundred reasons this is a bad idea.
So why didn't you list a few then? Seems like a sign of bad journalism, or whatever you want to call this.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I've seen this first hand. Feds have long been able to detect watermarks from colour laser printers.
I wonder how this effects those 'digital document centers' that they advertise on TV. I mean it is a copier among other things, if it puts a unique code on all of what you print, and stores the files can they then trace it back to the person who wrote it. Could courts supeona those records like they do backups of office email?
SilverFate
Who are the brain police? - Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
Redundant? How can post number TWO be redundant? It's not a "me too" or a "first post"... it's a sincere question posted at the TOP of the comments... if comment number 2 isn't redundant to comment number 1, it's the first time this question/information has been posted and that is NOT redundant.
But, if you aren't doing anything wrong...
Currentl;y you can not be prosecuted for engaging in free speech (in US).
If you have done something foul enought to tempt someone to go throught the hassle of tracking down your scanner, then, you should probably be held liable for it. Be made to state your case.
If it is something you have to say, but don't want anyone to know you are a Nazi, or a Homosexual, or some other group you don't want to be publicly assiciated with, you either don't believe in it enough, and should probably consider your desire to say it, or it probably shouldn't be said.
the only way one of these watermarks will be used against you is if you distribute the end result. Once you have done that, presumably to someone who doesn't know who you are (because people who know you wouldn't need a water mark to trace you), you have forfeited all your rights to privacy by entering the public arena. You entered the arena, no one forced you to.
The courts and police have to use the rule of thumb of "reasonable expectation of privacy". Once you post a handbill, or distribute a flier, or sell a bootleg copy of a picture, you can't have that expectation. And if you are posting a handbill about a GBLF meeting, then stand up for what you believe in, cause they are gonna see you at the meeting anyway.
Just sign me anonymous...
If the "duplication device" is deliberately modifying the output without any control by the operator - then the machine is not a "copier", and the producers should be liable under whatever "accurate advertising" legislation is prevalent in their markets.
Yeah, like that would actually happen...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
This is a gross privacy violation. However, it's not too difficult to circumvent.
:)
Consider: the serial numbers can only be traced back to the printer, not the printer's owner (at least, not without records). Also, consider that the serial number has to be stored someplace where it can be modified easily, so that the printers can still be mass-produced. This means that it's still theoretically possible to modify the serial number.
Hehehe... my guess is that they'll use letters in serial numbers too, to allow for a greater number of numbers. This means that, once we figure out how to hack these, it'll be possible to put little messages into the watermarks.
I can see it now... Big Brother tries to read the watermark, all they get is strings of swear words
I work for Xerox as a support for the colour copiers, and there is a pattern geterated on the entire sheet as fine yellow dots (almost invisible to the naked eye). If you do a white to blue conversion on a sheet that has already been thru the colour copier, you will see the pattern. (in the once white areas) Each copier has its own pattern, and the feds use this to determine who dunnit. This system has been around for years, all colour copiers to my knowledge do it. face it, try and copy currentcy, and if the copier anti-counterfeit doesn't stop you, someone else will if you try and pass any bills.
Sounds like a great way to make the lives of the people at Kinkos a living hell. Find a print sample that sets off the board and incorporate it into your letter head... Then just lurk in at odd times and leave a trail of black-copying color copiers in your wake...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How about getting rid of them?
I mean seriously...they would be great for
heating your home in a wood burning stove...
but way to small to use as toilet paper without
getting shit all over your hands.
kinda useless if ya ask me
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Hmm. So could a create simple test images of things like black crosshairs on a white background and scan it to obtain a simple water mark? And while I'm at it couldn't the algorithm be weakened further by printing out the scan and scanning it again? The equipment has to depend on a ROM. We don't need to be able to algoritmically remove the watermark from scans. We just need to be able to locate the algorithm in the firmware and NOP the hell out of it.
Canada recently (well, 10 years ago) changed it's paper money so that bills over $10 have a foil "hologram" on them..
And about 5 years before that, they changed it from looking like American money, to looking like Monopoly money...
It was interesting that when the new money was introduced, there were a few reports of couterfeiting, by (and I'm being serious here) photocopying the bills onto consruction paper and coloring it in with a wax crayon. (They showed some of the bills on the evening news - they were so bad that a child should have known - the coloring didn't even stay inside the lines!).. I guess it's amazing what a convenience store worker will believe..
A second alternative is based on the premise that such an image is necessarily going to be faint, to prevent it obscuring what you're printing. If this is to scale with your print-out, then simply print your image much fainter (making the watermark effectively invisible), before reprinting the image upside-down on the same page, with the paper also inverted. This'll put a second copy on the paper, making it normal-strength, but the watermarks will only overlap in places (one being 180' to the other), so rendering most of it invisible.
Finally, switch back to a daisy-wheel. I don't care =HOW= good a manufacturer is, they can't make a daisy-wheel print watermarks, come hell or high water. Besides, daisy-wheels are great for listing print-outs. That is, if you want to turn the recipient into a gibbering idiot. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is always a knee-jerk reaction to things like this, but think about it. All this allows is for somebody, (presumably) in authority, to find out what machine printed/photocopied a page which they already have in their possesion. It is not sending copies to bigbrother@everygovernment.com.
What kind of intrusions may be present here?
Let's see...
More importantly, they can track counterfeiters, blackmailers, child-pornographers, stalkers, and abusers of copyright, among other things.
Remember: Before any tracing can begin, the page be in the tracers possesion. And at this point, they have already served a warrant, or invaded your privacy. Next thing they'll start uniquely identifying the car I drive...
More interestingly, how difficult is it to forge these anyway? Can I register a personal 'Pretty Good Paper' signature based on the
watermark my printer produces?
Do they include timestamps? If so, I'm buying the best there is next time I want to copyright something...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
So one of my co-workers attempted to copy a dollar bill off the photocopier. It really did start printing out all black sheets of paper so he clocked and went home. (He had used a supervisors ID to use the machine).
Bemused I watched as the next day (showing off to his friends) he brought in some bleached single dollar bills and managed to scan in a twenty dollar bill. He conned our graphics guru into performing the necessary touch-ups (removing the seethrough portions for instance) and divided the image into the front and back.
Next he removed the little metal strips from 10 5'ers (he later just passed them out for change and no one noticed the missing strips). Somehow he managed to drag the strips through the 10 bleached dollar bills in the appropo spots.
After printing off 10 of them he promptly went to the bank to attempt to get larger bills. Which he successfully did.
Unfortunately for his stupid ass the bank later performed full tests on them, and reported the counterfeits to the FBI and National treasury. (The latter who confiscated the bills to go into counterfeit research). The FBI actually managed to lift an ID from the bills, and tracked the machine to the office.
I noticed we had a new employee outside our normal hiring schedule one day, and promptly had my friends evacuate the area and dissavow all knowledge. To make a long story short, he's in the pen, and I have a new cubicle =).
If anyone has ever encountered a digital watermark of the Digimarc kind, (Photoshop users know what I'm talking about) there's an easy way to remove it. Resize your image to 95% of the size then resize back to 100% - minimal loss of quality (especially at high resolutions) and no watermark.
This is just an example but Digimarc underlines two serious problems with watermarks:
a) No watermark is invisible. No matter what anyone tells you adding watermark is a lossy process. The harder the watermark is to remove the more visible it is.
b) Watermarks will always be removable. If you have physical access to the machine creating the watermark (scanner, printer, whatever) you'll be able to edit/disable the watermark. Unless you embed the watermark in the paper fiber or something (but then you're tracking the media, not the data) it'll probably be enough to cut off part of the image or something similar to disable the watermark.
jay
As far as I know, all digital watermark techniques that depend on imbedded frequencies (even the ones that stand up to JPEG) fail under (iterative) fractal compression. Anyone have any info on that? If this is true, we just need to adopt a fractal compression standard, and make sure we do the compression, not the scanner.
So, could anybody with a color copier do the following:
1) Copy a color image
2) Scan in into Photoshop
3) Do a color distribution analysis (this is a build-in function that does some sort of fast-fourier analysis of the color distribution)
The watermark will now show as pipes sticking out of otherwise smooth "mountain shape". Of course you won't know what is says, only that it is there.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The only threat I'm able to think of at the moment is to anonymous free speech. So if someone prints a newsletter with ideas someone doesn't like, the newslettter is
branded "subversive", and can be tracked back to the printer. But then what? Can they really be shut down? And how many such "subversisves" really are
anonymous anyway?
And if it were traced back, is there any possible way they could find out who brought that document in to be printed/copied and possibly arrest them/keep them under tabs/check up on them? This is probably way off-league here, or perhaps just paranoia, but I don't like the idea of the IDs anyway, and know that I finally know that such things exist, I have no desire for them to be used against me/anyone else. As I've mentioned in other posts about topics of privacy, if you have something "that bad," you ought not to be placing it in a publicly accessible arena, but, should anyone who, for some reason, have to print/copy it on such a machine, and try to spread their views/opinions (should they be contrary to the gov't), they could likely, if the power of this technology is exercised, be candidate for investigation, inquiry, surveilance, and/or arrest. I don't like that possibility. I'm sure there are others out there who don't. As the article mentioned, it mostly smacks of first amendment rights violation, if any rights violation at all.
just my little $20/1000 cents worth.
Insert mind here.
But will they work if you put a transparency with a black line on it in front of the stamp so that the black line crosses a corner of the stamp? USPS uses this "cancellation" to display stamp designs in advertising. Can we do that too and have the copier work?
well, if you want to look at wierd money, check out australian money. the aussie gov. hated counterfeiters so much that now we all have plastic money, no, not credit cards, I mean *plastic* money, chock full of holographs, hidden pictures, everything. and if you fold the 5 dollar note in a special way it looks like the queen is giving someone a blowjob. heh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ross Anderson and a team of other researchers wrote a white paper entitled "On The Limits of Steganography" published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications Special Issue on Copyright & Privacy Protection, vol. 16 no. 4, pp 474-481, May 1998 (it's available online at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/ ) that deals with the issue of robustness of watermarks and other forms of information hiding. The overall conclusions are that:
-Robustness decreases proportionally with the square of the information contained
-Watermarks can almost always be either distorted beyond recognition (if the information content is high) or removed (if the information content is lwo) using a simple sequence of transformations, ranging from smearing spectral power peaks to scaling the image
-It's almost always possible to determine that watermarks or steganography was used because the entropy of the bits affected is most probably higher than that of the surrounding message.
--
Flames? Think I'm a karma whore?
... governments trying to shirk their responsibility on counterfeit. And by that, I mean that if they were really serious about anti-counterfeit measures, they would change their currency to make it harder to be duplicated using *any* method.
Consider Australian "paper" currency, it's actually printed on plastic film, with an embossed transparent window, and the opaque part is printed in both "flat" and raised(intaglio) inks. Try to reproduce one of those with a scanner and a colour printer!
I don't believe anyone was saying it was, but this is not simply about currency counterfeiting, because it does not address the methods used by "professional" counterfeiters (who, it's reasonable to assume do not use a $2000 setup). This is quite obviously more about "The Man" knowing more of what you are doing more of the time.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Can you say "Urban Legend"
"Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing one"
... and this is something we've known about for years. Most color copiers do embed a serial number and many--particularly canons--will shutdown if you try to copy currency.
While the owner of the copier may not be officially required to register with the manufacturer, most non-consumer grade equipment needs to be serviced at least once a month. For example, each color copy generates a small amount of excess toner which is scraped off into a waste toner bottle; Xerox decided not to make this a user serviceable part on the Docucolor 40's (which are in almost every Kinko's in the world).
Kinko's, however, is generally more interested in making money and avoiding lawsuits than invading anyone's privacy. Every Kinko's Co-Worker is trained in the copy guidelines generated by our pack or ravenous lawyers about what we can copy and how. For example, the kid in the article should of been told that we can copy his driver's license but only in black and white and only at 129 percent.
Anyhow, for your extra dose of paranoia today consider this: even most of the new black and white copiers (from the Docutech to the Xerox 265) actually digitize and and store the images rather than flashing them to an analog transfer belt. All these copiers are equiped with a modem.
In Indiana it is illegal to make a monkey smoke a cigarette.
I'm not liking the sounds of this plan. And initially I was thinking that hey, as long as I have my current printer that does fine, no worries. However, all it would seem to take is a driver upgrade, and zap, your currently private printer is now id'ing you.
Jason
Users of Photoshop will notice that there's a watermark recognition system already available. You're not forced to use it, fortunatley. It introduces a humanly unnoticable bit of repeated digital information that resembles random noise. Messing with color curves and levels don't do much to affect the re-reading of this endcoded copyright date and information, but blurring and resizing seem to shift it out of recognition. I also doubt it would survive high JPG/GIF/PNG compression.
Think about it for a sec . . . most people are so deeply stupid and lazy that they cannot adequately care for themselves!
That's why we "need" the government to take care of us. Every time the gov't tries to back off from something, we get various religious, social, and political groups screaming bloody murder:
"But what about the children?"
Sigh.
Over the past few decades, we've seen ourselves construct a government that MUST be paternalistic. Each new gov't must be MORE paternalistic than the preceding gov't in order to get elected. Why? Because people are fundamentally lazy. I dunno, it's like it's genetic or something -- given the choice between two alternatives, one difficult and one easy, the VAST majority of people will choose the easy route.
. . . even if that means they have to sacrifice some "peripheral" element of their lives.
The only thing we can hope for is that some day the gov't will give us the choice between being cared for and being responsible for our own fate. Which, of course, means that it's all hopeless.
since most toner is tagged with microscopic identifiers, not unlike the ones they use in explosive materials.
Couldn't you capture the watermark by scanning a grey sheet of paper? Then calculate the negative image that would need to be "added" to the original scan in order to restore the scan to an un-watermarked image?
I can see it now; criminals throwing their scanners and printers in the river after counterfeiting. Gives "watermarks" a whole new meaning...
Free music from Jack Merlot.
they were using them in the cafeteria and also one of the kids was replacing real bills with his fake ones in the till where he worked.
Do you have any details on this? IP numbers, host names, browser names etc. Would be handy to special case them in a .htaccess file
How the hell can the 2nd post and the 1st response to the 3rd post be redundant!? Does somebody not know what redundant means?
A quick search of IBM's patent database has uncovered the following:
Anti-counterfeit pattern detector and method
Digital watermarking using conjugate halftone screens
Methods and means for embedding machine readable digital data in halftone images
For most consumer level inkjets, it seems most imagine processing (print description language processing, rasterization, etc.) is actually done on the host computer with the printer just basically being told put a dot here with this much color.
Thus, it could be possible for this tracing technology to be retrofitted to an existing printer via a driver upgrade. (Oh you're having print problems? May we suggest the new driver...)
If the serial number were still tied to the printer it would require some bi-directional communication. But that already exists in most printers host based UI functions.
But then if you think about it, this type of computer based processing opens up all sorts of other serial number sources. How about Pentium III serial numbers, ethernet MAC addresses, etc? (And haven't we seen these things already happen before, but only with digital documents?)
Thankfully, if somebody would probably do a software hack if this really happened.
How's that for paranoia? =)
I think the white border around the stamp is part of the answer. I believe the border is reactive to ultra-violet or similar light. Why? Because a friend once sent me a letter, with a sticker on the outside of the envelope. The sticker had a glow-in-the-dark white border around it. The sticker got postmarked, while the stamp was untouched.
There's a nasty gotcha there. More and more, with copyright enforcement devices, watermarks, click-flow processing, credit rating, direct marketing, etc, etc, the only way to have privacy is to avoid any form of interaction with the society. And that is not privacy !
Having privacy means that you can live in an organized society, do whatever you want, deal with other people, make business, and so fore, as long there's no evidence of criminal activity. Enforcing privacy in a society is not to ask everybody to be kind and a good pal and mind their own business, but to make sure that nobody can peek a nose in your life without your well-informed ad-hoc consent.
And IMHO, it implies to regulate very strictly what people can do with what they know about someone else. The basic rule should be "nothing".
you can get my patented (by someone I'm sure) 3-sheet CopyCleen tool!
Disclaimer: CopyCleen comes on photosensitive media - user must turn off all light sources and follow EZRead directions to activate one-time virus purge. Shred and dispose of all copier output from cleaning procedure without viewing. Half of test subjects viewing said material flew into hypnotic rage, other half vomited upon seeing graphic images of Presidential escapades.
Read here: Attacks on Copyright marking systems
A paper available from:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/ papers/ih98-attacks/ Courtesy of Fabien A. P. Petitcolas, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
Basically the idea of using watermarks is flawed and the watermark can be easily removed or destroyed using simple tools available today. Note - watermarking can be also done to sound files... something else to remember!
Aaron Helleman
The examples of the evils of the Soviet government were videocameras monitoring citizens on street corners, government encouraging children to rat out their parents, all typewriters and copy machines needed to be properly registered, etc...
It seems after the Cold War was over, the U.S. government decided that totalitarianism was no longer useful as a boogeyman, and, in fact, that it was quite a practical way to get things done.
Now, you might not have a problem with totalitarianism, but that's exactly what you have if it is made essentially impossible to dissent without the government not only knowing exactly who you are and where you currently are, but the brand of cheese on the ham 'n cheese sandwhich you happen to be snacking on.
Fortunately, we aren't quite there yet. If you buy a printer second-hand and pay cash, it will be hard to trace back to you. Also, if you do your copies at Kinkos and pay in cash, that will require a stakeout of the kinkos to catch you.
If the Secret Service thinks you've counterfeited something, they can try and obtain a warrant to get your printer's serial number. If it matches the watermark, they have another piece of evidence.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
So what if everyone agrees that this is a good thing and every copier has an ID and we all think it's good and dandy that we all know who is doing what?
Well, what if someone decides that they don't like your company, comes in one day, makes a colour copy, goes home, find out what kind of mark is printed and then reproduces it with illegal caopy material and send it to the cops?
You'll have a hell of a hard time explaining that one to the feds.
something to think about, non?
I think he is referring to a web server and if you post it they HAVE a right to crawl it.
I've completely forgotten the name of the company, but there exists a company which makes microscopic items with unique identifiers. These little microscopic bits can placed into, well, just about anything. Like, say, ink, fertilizer, precursors to various drugs or whatever. A law enforcement officer (well, a lab tech) can just look up the number and find out where the item was distributed to, sold, or whatever, which gives valueable information, especially if you were stupid enough to pay for said item with a credit card.
Ever since we started using currency (as opposed to just barter), people have been trying to counterfeit currency. Every time governments came out with a new currency, counterfeiters would find a new way to copy it. And every time counterfeiters found a way to copy the currency, governments came out with a new currency. But recently it's gotten to the point where counterfeiters can keep up with the government too easily. This is because todays technology allows us to create things that _look_ like whatever we want, and up until now the only way to tell if a bill is fake is to notice that it looks wrong. The answer is clearly to switch away from a paper based currency. It has been fairly well demonstrated that (until quantum computers are a reality) we can use public key cryptosystems to create an unforgeable currency. If the government wants to keep people from counterfeiting money they should do a better job with the currency rather than creating a temptation and then trying to watch everyone who might be a potential counterfeiter.
Now interestingly, I had a roommate who was a former drug dealer and he would pull the magnetic strips out of 20 dollar bills because he believed that the government used them to identify people bringing large amounts of currency into and out of the country (and therefore likely to be associated with illegal activity). He believed the government could tell exactly how much you had on you - while I don't believe that, I can see how a lot of those strips could set off a metal detector...
As far as copying goes, I can't see how a watermark is going to stop someone from going into a Best Buy and paying for a printer and scanner with cash (no record of who you are that way). Even with the watermark, you'd have to find the scanner and printer first (meaning you know who did it anyway). The only use for watermarks would be for prosecution. Even then, if you're not caught red handed, you could just say you recently bought the printer used for cash...
Just another shining example of /. moderation at it BEST.
Second, consider this problem from the point of view of the imaging equipment manufacturers. They clearly do not want to have some ill-conceived legislation rammed down their throats, that mandates some expensive technology be put into every device built. Even worse would be if every nation they sold too had different regulation that needed to be complied with.
So, the manufacturers with foresight are cooperating with the government to try to come up with inexpensive solutions that make the government happy.
Now, keep in mind that anticounterfeiting is distinct from encoding distinct marks into documents. I'm going to talk about the former first, and will come back to the latter.
As the original article pointed out, there are already both anti-counterfeiting and source indentification features built into current color copiers. However, these solutions are not necessarily extendable to consumer imaging, because they take place in a closed architecture as opposed to an open one.
Consider the path that a counterfeit note would take in a consumer based imaging system. It would travel from a scanner, to some image processing software, to the printer. At any point along the way it could be stored, manipulated, or transmitted via the internet. Each step may or may not be carried out by the same individuals. Becasue of this, the most logical place to put counterfeit prevention is in the printing step. The reason for this is that if the protection in the scanning or processing step is broken by any individual, then a print-ready file could be distributed to many others. However, putting the prevention within the printer makes it both less accessable to crackers, and requires that each potential counterfeiter break the protection again.
Let us focus then on the problem of the printing of counterfeit currency. Three ways of helping to solve this problem quickly present themselves.
1: Add currency-detecting logic to printers.
2: Add features to currency that printers cannot reproduce.
3: Add printer-specific watermarking to printers.
The trend in ink-jet printers is to make them cheaper and cheaper. Given this trend, it is not feasible to add much computational power to the printer without increasing their cost. For this reason, attempting to do general-purpose detection within the printer is not feasible at this time. This does not preclude, however, doing some quick and dirty detection that is computationally very simple. (For example, is the document being printed approximately 6" by 2.5").
The design of US currency is unsophisticated, especially when compared to that of other nations. Personally, I appreciate the simplicity and history of our design, but from an anti-counterfeiting point of view it is a nightmare. The latest iteration of our currency was a stopgap effort to try to make it somewhat more difficult to be digitally copied, but most of the new features (except perhaps for the watermark) are not well understood by the public at large.
>>Well, actually, they did kill Patrick Henry. Actually, they didn't. He went on to become governor of Virginia, and proceeded to do his very best to dispose of the the liberty of the inhabitants of that state. (and was cordially hated for it by Madison, Jefferson, et al)
This thing smells a lot like the P3 serial number thing, and I don't like it. Damn it, I don't wanna live in a world where everything is traceable. There would be no more Sherlock Holmes types of mysteries anymore.
The investigative trio would walk into any crime scene and within moments Holmes would know the true identity of the killer...
"Watson, the butler did it."
"Dear god, Holmes, how can you tell?"
"Well, I traced this counterfit suicide note to the printer in the Servant's quarters."
"But Holmes, how do you know the Butler was the one that printed it?"
"Elementary, my dear Watson. I checked the printer logs which stated the Pentium 3 processor that sent the print commands belonged to the Butler!"
Sheesh. From now on, I'm having a monkey on a type-writer copy all my stuff.
I have CD-ROMs much older than that, and they are pristine. CD-ROMs are optical; nothing touches the media. Therefore, if taken care of, they will last longer than you. -^o.o^
Nothing. I'd just copy stuff digitally with `cp' on my free software platform where I could remove any ludicrous watermarks. And who'd stop me?
Does anyone know if CDR drives contain logic to apply "watermarks" to burned discs (thus associating the disc with a particular drive)? Does anyone know if there are any plans to introduce such a "feature"? (And what kind of programmer would agree to write such software?)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I hope this helps anyone who likes reading research.
Stephen
We in New Zealand are currently replacing our paper money. Going plastic, same as Australia. The old paper notes are still in circulation but are removed as they become rough and tatty. Our Reserve bank has also said they are keeping a lot of the paper money in case there is a run on physical money in the days before 1/1/00.
Our old paper notes had the the watermark/metallic strips etc but still got copied (easy to pass of in dim bars). The plastic ones will be much harder to copy although it will occur just not by the average person with a colour copier.
The new plastic notes also stay 'fresher' longer. Much better.
Cheers,
Adam.
Seems like this only helps track honest people. Any self-respecting terrorist, kidnapper, or counterfeiter would just steal the copying machine from the neighborhood Kinkos, this dispose of it afterwards.
Second, consider this problem from the point of view of the imaging equipment manufacturers. They clearly do not want to have some ill-conceived legislation rammed down their throats, that mandates some expensive technology be put into every device built. Even worse would be if every nation they sold too had different regulation that needed to be complied with.
So, the manufacturers with foresight are cooperating with the government to try to come up with inexpensive solutions that make the government happy.
Now, keep in mind that anticounterfeiting is distinct from encoding distinct marks into documents. I'm going to talk about the former first, and will come back to the latter.
As the original article pointed out, there are already both anti-counterfeiting and source indentification features built into current color copiers. However, these solutions are not necessarily extendable to consumer imaging, because they take place in a closed architecture as opposed to an open one.
Consider the path that a counterfeit note would take in a consumer based imaging system. It would travel from a scanner, to some image processing software, to the printer. At any point along the way it could be stored, manipulated, or transmitted via the internet. Each step may or may not be carried out by the same individuals. Becasue of this, the most logical place to put counterfeit prevention is in the printing step. The reason for this is that if the protection in the scanning or processing step is broken by any individual, then a print-ready file could be distributed to many others. However, putting the prevention within the printer makes it both less accessable to crackers, and requires that each potential counterfeiter break the protection again.
Let us focus then on the problem of the printing of counterfeit currency. Three ways of helping to solve this problem quickly present themselves.
1: Add currency-detecting logic to printers.
2: Add features to currency that printers cannot reproduce.
3: Add printer-specific watermarking to printers.
The trend in ink-jet printers is to make them cheaper and cheaper. Given this trend, it is not feasible to add much computational power to the printer without increasing their cost. For this reason, attempting to do general-purpose detection within the printer is not feasible at this time. This does not preclude, however, doing some quick and dirty detection that is computationally very simple. (For example, is the document being printed approximately 6" by 2.5").
The design of US currency is unsophisticated, especially when compared to that of other nations. Personally, I appreciate the simplicity and history of our design, but from an anti-counterfeiting point of view it is a nightmare. The latest iteration of our currency was a stopgap effort to try to make it somewhat more difficult to be digitally copied, but most of the new features (except perhaps for the watermark) are not well understood by the public at large.
Some simple features that could be implemented, easily recognized by the public, and impossible to duplicate on a consumer printer could include:
1: Printing on a transparant substrate.
2: (1) with areas that require perfect front-to-back registration.
3: Printing with reflective (foil)inks.
But as long as we are creating a new currency, we could consider hybrid solutions. That is, embedding some special patterns in the currency that are trivial for a scanner/printer to recognize, yet do not occur in other document types. This could be some specific geometric pattern, or a specific use of colors.
So, finally, we come to embedding a watermark in all images printed by an consumer printer. First, be aware that some office printers already do this, mostly color laser printers. But beyond that fact, this is really a separate issue from anticounterfeiting. Printer manufacturers are not going to volunteer to do this unless they are compelled to do so by governments.
But if a manufacturer were forced to implement this, the most obvious place to do so would be in the driver. This is because (as mentioned earlier) the ink-jet printer itself has little computational resources. The driver has the full resources of the system CPU and is traditionally where the dithering takes place. As far as making the patterns unique, one could either query the printer for a serial number, or simply use the Pentium III serial number, or perhaps the MAC address from the LAN card.
One closing lesson here, if you were feeling cocky by saying "no problem, I'll hang onto my old printer", then make sure you never upgrade the driver, as that is where this would most likely be implemented.
Well, in closing, I would love to sign this with my account name. I can't however, so just call me...
Anonymous Coward
NT
Consider: the serial numbers can only be traced back to the printer, not the printer's owner (at least, not without records). Also, consider that the serial number has to be stored someplace where it can be modified easily, so that the printers can still be mass-produced. This means that it's still theoretically possible to modify the serial number.
Just be something can be written to once easily doesn't mean it can be changed easily. The serial number is probably stored on a PROM. You'd have to purchase that exact chip, read the information from the old PROM, change the serial number, write the new PROM, desolder the old chip, and solder in the new chip.
From my experience of US bills, being all the
same size and colour, and printed on paper,
I'd guess it'd be easy to fool a well chosen
victim in dim lighting with a photocopy.
However, here in New Zealand (and Australia),
apart from be coming in various sizes and colours
our notes are plastic with transparent windows
and fancy textured patches. I've also seen
European notes with similar features.
Perhaps making the currency less susceptible to
copying would be more palatable (to some).
Of course this only addresses of the targets of
digital watermarking.
So every image that comes out a color laser printer, copier and soon ink jet will have this watermark.. As soon as someone breaks the "secret and proprietary algorithm" we'll be able to figure out what gear was used for every image anywhere; be it in web site or in a magazine... It would be like a whois database for color images..
The entertainment value from porn alone, oh my..
It doesn't matter that some previous bills will continue to remain in circulation. As older bills become less common, simply having a large quantity of older bills will be enough to arouse suspicion--and I'll bet most forgeries pass only because the receiver never bothered to take a second look. You might still be able to pass off a few hundred or even thousand here and there, but does that really justify the enormous risk and work of creating a really good forgery?
But, seeing as how everyones getting in a snit over this, I doubt you would goto Kinkos in the first place...also, keep in mind you don't know exactly what the billing softare on their computers monitors
The fundamental problem is that US currency is so easy to copy. I have easily enough stuff lying around my office to produce reasonably realistic copies.
Software aimed at specifically recognising currency and stamps is foolish: it will only recognise certain kinds of currency and stamps; it won't reconise foreign stamps; and it won't recognise other paper instruments which we would rather not see forged (certificates, etc.)
Software aimed at making forgeries trackable is more thoughtful; but it has obvious privacy implications, and is potentially technically defeatable (as many readers have mentioned).
The fundamental solution is to make currency harder to forge. Australian currency notes, for example, are printed on a thin papery plastic instead of on paper; they have a piece of artwork partly printed on each side, so it is obvious if the artwork on the two sides is misaligned; and they have a transparent section, so it is obvious if it is printed on the wrong "paper". In a similar vein, the new US $20 note has a "color change" section that looks different when viewed from different angles.
Trying to fix the problem by limiting the technology in a thousand different scanners, printers and copiers is a bad approach: it's analogous to trying to cover for your lousy encryption by crippling everybody else's computer. The Right Thing is improve the technology in the money itself.
For awhile, Photoshop 4 came with a demo of a watermarking program that introduced an invisible watermark that included a copyright line. It claimed that you could mess the picture up all you wanted, and it could still be read. So I tested it.
1. Original image: 640x480x24bit photo from a digital camera.
2. Added invisible watermark in photoshop, saved in tiff.
3. Opened in Paint Shop Pro (which has no knowledge of the watermark) saved in maximum compression JPEG. (VERY lossy, and ugly)
4. Printed on 300dpi HP DeskJet 560C, color
5. Scanned in on Umax 300dpi 24bit scanner
6. Saved in max lossy JPEG.
7. Opened up in Photoshop, tried to read watermark... It found it just fine.
If it could survive that ordeal, it can survive anything.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
As a former Kinkos employee, what the Kinkos co-worker said about the legallity of making color copies of official photo id is true. They make you go through several courses in order to teach you stuff about copyright and such. They also don't take chances on stuff, a lot of what can be disputed as "fair use" is not left up to the employee. This is mostly done for Kinkos' finacial safety. This was implimented shortly after Kinkos lost a lot of money from a law suit about how Kinkos made copies of and sold college text books.
The machines that Kinkos use for color copies are, usually, either Cannon or Xerox. Apparently from the article it is confirmed that the Xerox machines use this serial number id trick, as for Cannon, I have never heard of anything like that from any of the techs that sold and maintained the copiers for us. I do know that Ricoh color copiers only use yellow toner if the item being copied is detected to be money, food stamps, postage, ss cards, passports, etc. I never was able to try it on the Xerox or the Cannon but I'm sure that they have simular features. I was also told, but had it confirmed to be untrue later, that the Ricoh shut down if it thought is was making a copy of one of the later items. The FBI would then have to come in and investigate why it shut down, and once they were done enter a special code to unlock the machine. Like I said this was confirmed to be UNTRUE.
All of those restricted items that color copiers look for have some sort of clause that allows some sort copy. Money has to be done one sided, B&W and either at 75% of normal size or 25% larger. Most of the others only have to be one sided and B&W. For the gentleman's photo id in the article, a B&W copier would have done fine, I have had to many of them for people using them for things like id for phone companys and such. Never had any problems except from the customer that refused to belive that what he originally asked was illegal.
The problem with this system of ids on color copies is not a problem for most people. With all the paper flying around the world, no agency or company with an unlimited supply of cash and resources would be able to check the ids on color or b&w copies and keep track of what everyone in a nation, let alone the world, is up to. That right there get rid of the big brother worries that everyone gets when they see the a story about tracking systems. The only people that should have a problem with this system are those who want to and/or do illegal things with digital color and b&w output. Besides the only time Xerox gets requests for id translation would be for something a judge would find worth it, such as counterfiting, fraud, or as a last resort in a difficult investigation. I would like counterfiters to be caught, they only help to raise prices and inflation. Really, there is no other outcome for us do to counterfiters doing their stuff. People who commit fraud only hurt us and some crimminal investigation need all the help they can get and they usually benifit us. I also think that they should get legislation on this soon, that way we can make sure this system is only used for good, like now, and can't evolve to some thing evil. If you are scared, don't be. If you are mad, stop commiting illegal acts. Pretty simple.
Well thats what I think, it was a long post and it is possibly badly worded/spelled, I apologize for that but I hope you found it informative.
maybe it is just the "open-source, why-doesn't-everyone-just-get-along" attitude in me, but i think we are going about things in the wrong way.
the securites never work properly, and like some other poster said, it will only create black markets for copiers.
black market copiers mean we won't catch the criminals, we will just make their life a little more difficult, while punishing all the law abiding citizens with poorer documents.
---
on another note, i am tired off all the "they are tracking me" debate. i say we either go headlong and track EVERYTHING (i don't have much to hide anyway) or track nothing.
if we track everything all the time, morale will be down, but it will be fair to all. i mean watch us from space if you have to, but i don't want a single second of human evolution un-recorded.
otherwise, tracking is of no use! criminals are the only ones who actually take the time to get around the tracking (making it therefore pointless) and if they don't avoid the track, then they weren't very good criminals anyway, and i seriously doubt they were going to do much harm.
(i mean, why don't we fill up our jails with all the literers, and leave the murderes to run free, right?)
ok, that last statement was a huge exageration, but these new "features" DON'T get the REAL criminals it was intended to catch.
Sometimes the police are lucky, and a bullet is recovered that was only lightly deformed (it went into a piece of furniture or such).
On the other hand the spent shell casings are also scratched by the chamber, extractor, ejector, and firing pin of the firearm. These can by matched to the firearm with a high degree of accuracy.
The moral of the story is to pick up all your brass when you are done.
I think that as an artist, one thing that would be cool to see is a printer with the capability of imprinting a watermark of my design, if I wanted it to. That way, I could print something with a digital signature on it.
This would only be really good, of course, if I registered that signature with some public group, like a PGP signature. And it isn't so terribly important because I can just sign the silly thing with my pen.
And, of course, if I had such a printer, I couldn't really trust it to not put the watermark there unless I could see the result. It would have to be visible like a real signature.
And then there is the Free Art philosophy, where the imagery and signature is free, but the art shows, the instruction workshops, and the artist's action figures cost money (as outlined by the Free Music Philosophy, posted on freemusic.com). This being the only way that digital art will really be distributed and work, the watermark printer will become not only pointless but inethical, artisticly speaking.
Yeah, right.I'm only being a little fascetious here. It's something to think about.
-- "So far, I have not found the science" -Soul Coughing
The new wave of recordable DVD devices, such as home units and camcorders, has this "feature" built in as well, not to mention some sort of encryption on recording.
According to one of my "Publication design" textbooks (the exact title escapes me), US Currency can be copied legally if it's black-and-white and reduced to smaller than 75% or enlarged to more than 125% of its actual size.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
This will do nothing to stop sophisticated counterfieters. People will just hack the s/w drivers and roms to either show no watermark at all or a fake one.
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
It would be interesting to see what kind of fiber they use. Some sort of multilayered plastic? Stainless steel, a.k.a. kevlar? Whatever it is, just throw it in with the paper pulp and out the rollers your paper is to be etched with the laser.
The point is, that there will always be paper crimes and as always, the law will be there to lock them up. More people to rot in the prisons and catch wierd diseases from excessive greed.
Thats such a good point. So if you're out in the open, say doing stuff with your friends, the FBI has a right to have a tail on you at all times just because they think you might commit a crime sometime in your life?
Very good point...
Also, each denomination is slightly longer than the next to assist visually impaired people in sorting out which note is which. And if you accidently leave them in your pocket when you wash your clothes nothing bad happens to them.
American currency sucks, it's all green, it's all paper, and pennies? Who uses pennies? What use is one cent? I suppose the problem is that would be a nearly impossible task to change the currency, since there is so much of it not just in America but all over the world.
I had the same problem. My web site has several hundred pictures (all mine) and it was common to have Digimarc transfer serveral hundred meg over the course of a week. Since I pay for bandwidth, this was a Bad Thing. I contacted Digimarc and was pleased with their answer. As with all good search engines, they respect the Robot Exclusion Standard. If you tell them not to index your site, they won't. Of course, that's good for me. If I was paying for the Digimarc service, however, I'd be very upset. The logical end would be that if I had was stealing graphics, I'd simply ask the Digimarc robot not to visit. I'm not sure if Digimarc's customers have every thought about that. I'm sure Digimarc has but, of course, they aren't going to say it too loudly. Even if Digimarc didn't respect robots.txt, you could always block them at the http or tcp/ip level.
InitZero
2nd: Watermarking is a benefit to individuals and freeware/copyleft/whatever. A number of free graphics (backgrounds, icons, etc.), including mine are deliberately watermarked. (In my case by hand). Almost every graphic has a small area that is a single color. For these areas, make a unique id in a different unused color and then change that color to have the same rgb as the surrounding areas. This way, if someone is using your work in a method you don't permit (aka, selling a quake mod using your graphics) you have a method of proving what was done. The same technique can be used with multiple colors if necessary. (The 1st 16 colors are only used in a "glider" [from the old game of life] pattern. (16 colors allows you to repeat the pattern a LOT)
There are ways to completely bollux the watermark. A simple soultion should be to laminate the copies. I doubt that the watermark could be properly read through the lamination and removing the lamination should ruin the copy effectively enough.
Here's my question to slashdot: Do we find it offensive when companies copy the works of individuals and do we want methods to prevent this (for example Sun's actions with Blackdown's code)? If so, do we believe that corporations have the same rights to try to protect their works from individuals (recent articles on MP3 and DVD)? I almost wonder if we believe that the rights of "us" are more important than the rights of "them". - bonsai -
No Zen is good zen
I'm thinking your roommate shouldn't have sampled so much of his own product... :>
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
What is to keep PhotoShop from reading the initial water mark and then re-imprinting it back on the new image? It could even do this without your knowledge.
Hmm, I take it you must think private investigators should be illegal. Hey, maybe photo-journalism should be outlawed too. Oh and certainly those cops in the Rodney King case should have been offended at the violation of their rights caused by a person videotaping their public actions.
Give me a break.
If you put something out in public, you implicitly give people the right to look at it.
It wouldn't do to have some smartass cop yelling, "Hey, what are you doing?!?!" as you are throwing that Scanjet and Stylewriter into drink. Just yank the boards out of the devices and make sure all the ICs and that serial tag get a good blowtorching. After that it doesn't matter if they see you disposing of the remains or not.
Your method assumes the watermark is a static entity that is added to the image. But what if the watermark is affected by the content of any given image? If this is the case, your process wouldn't work. The inverse watermark will itself become part of the input to the watermark engine. If we are dealing with an engine rather than some sort of preset image then we need to find a way disable the engine in firmware without disabling the device.
Cheap consumer printers (currently color inkjets) are unlikely to include the watermarking in their firmware in the next few years as they more or less expect the computer to send them a bitmap for super cheap simplicity.
Adding computing power to make an "invisible" watermark appear on an arbitrary bitmapped page costs more.
Worse than that, unless you're only using the copier for "nefarious" purposes you'd probably have to solder in a socket instead so that you could alternate between the original chip (or a copy of it) and your hacked chip. After all, at some point there's a chance that an identifiable document from that machine will be scanned and the numbers correlated; if that happens at most company locations, when they ask "Well, who might know how to do this?" everyone will immediately think of one person. Even worse, some of these copiers may have a connector that techs use during maintenance to pull information - things like the ID, number of copies, error logs, all sorts of interesting* stats.
So, the old chip has to be removed and read, a socket has to be mounted (using surface-mount tools that most people don't have available), new chips have to be burned, and it all has to be done without attracting attention by having the copier down for a significant amount of time so nobody calls in the techs. Oh, and that socket? Best make sure that board isn't something that gets looked at when the service guys are in, they might just notice something odd...
Overall while it's probably possible to remove the serial number or corrupt it into unusability, it's probably not feasible to do so.
* Well, to some people.
fencepost
just a little off
stupid moderators.
If there were no photocopy machines, the Soviet Union would still be in operation. Same is true if all photocopies included traceable watermarks.
Any sort of watermark embedded in a scan would be easy to defeat, unless the authors of programs like Photoshop or the Gimp (and thankfully, this would never happen with the Gimp) made it impossible to edit out watermarks. First off, impossible-to-see watermarks would not stand up to jpeg compression. Second, they might not stand up to print output. Finally, if the nature of the watermark was known, it'd be trivial to edit out.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
I seem to recall a documentary which said that American paper money is engraved in such a way to cause distortion when copied. I don't recall all my optics, but couldn't one cause destructive interference of light by manipulating how closely together lines are on the bill?
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
I have just found water marks on my toilet paper, should I be concerned?
Do not wright in this space.
Or send them corrupted image files instead -- maybe their detection routines can be buffer overflowed with bad image files.
This will make it MUCH easier for totalitarian governments to silence those annoying political dissidents!
>Thats such a good point. So if you're out in
>the open, say doing stuff with your friends,
>the FBI has a right to have a tail on you at
>all times just because they think you might
>commit a crime sometime in your life?
If you're out in the open with your friends the FBI certainly has the right to glance at you. It's not like Digimark puts a server on your subnet and logs every packet -- They're just periodically looking at graphics all over the place. On public websites. If you want to hide your graphics, don't put them on a website.
The trick for the VOID on the check is simply to write the "VOID" with a line screen that is at 90 degrees of the background.
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
IANALOKILW* - this might be sort of obvious, but I believe it's also legal to copy US currency if it's to be used in a finished graphic/etc. and not with enough resolution to successfully copied.
I of course could be wrong, but we use images of currency fairly often for on-air use in a graphic and we have never been approached by law enforcement.
* - I Am Not A Lawyer Or Knowledgeable In Law Whatever
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/23/blueprint/ Help us fight the Meme Wars. The internet is our 21st centurty printing-press.
And even if they do last longer, who's to say you'll be able to get a CD reader in 40 years, any more easily than you can get a good LP needle, or a paper tape reader, now? DVD is jockeying to push out CDs, you know...
(I admit it's a hell of a lot easier to build a paper tape reader than a CD reader... :-)
Why is it ok to have such descriptive and tricky IDs for paper but not for GUNS? Kind of strange if you think about it. Must mean that governments consider the pen much mighter than the sword!
The watermark is placed on the OUTPUT of the copier. It won't degrade. Even if you make a copy of a copy,etc, each new copy will get a fresh watermark on it.
Blar.
You posts are just not interesting enough to get moderated up.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that a 1776 dollar bill is still legal tender in the US. It's probably not difficult to match 1776 technology with today's consumer electronics.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Unfortunately, even with all these cool features, Australia still has a problem with counterfieted money. There is an extremely large number of very high quality $100 notes in circulation. I work in the cash office of a supermarket in West. Aust. and we pick up a counterfeit *polymer* $100 about once a month. The quality of these fakes is amazing. About the only way to pick them out is a slightly misaligned print and a slightly different serial number font. Even then, we still wait for confirmation from the Australian Federal Police before turning them over as evidence.
:)
And if anyone's interested in what our notes look like, I have a page up at http://www.theducks.org/old/notes/ with scans of all of them except the old paper $100. Enjoy
People don't look at magnetic ink patterns or whip out magnifying glasses (not everyone has 20/20 vision) to examine every note for microfeatures. Invisible features and microfeatures are really meant for the SS's own use in identifying bogus notes; invisible to the eye magnetic patterns to make bill acceptor machines easier to design. And anything less than a $50 doesn't get a second glance by the average schmuck.
BTW, put a new $100 bill under a UV light. The embedded strip that says "USA 100 USA 100..." should glow yellow.
Joan of Ark and Anne Boilynn were killed by the US government??? what???
This would also explain why you have to use special labels with a flourescent-orange border when printing Stamps.com/EStamps "Internet Postage" and putting it on envelopes. If I get the oppertunity, I'll try to look at the labels under UV sometime...
--
sharkyfour.com
Abcde Federal Division produced a machine which identified each and every document cross referenced to the user/copier/machine 20 years ago. What they are able to supply now is probably much more advanced. As 'information hiding' is the flavour of the moment among crypto geeks this will nodoubt enter the equasion.
Don't forget good old black and white lazers. The drum on every such printer (be it colour or black and white) produces markes on the paper every time paper spins through it and slightly impacts on it. Since every drum has fairly unique features, so called "drum prints" have been used as evidence in courts for various trials. You might think that this is fairly useless because this will only prove that a particular suspect did it - it won't help you find out who the suspect is. However, the electronic watermarks are only so useful. I'm all against such technology (I have never bought or knowingly used a PIII - except I think cdrom.com now runs on one - I have had my CPU examined to verify that there is no PSN in it, etc.), but IDs are only useful if you know who owns them. Now if they do keep registration lists - then that's another story - they probably keep lists on most printers sice I guess most copiers are rented anyway. If I were to counterfait notes, you could perhpas trace the copier, but you would then have to prove that I actually made the copy (the fact that I may have made the copy at my place of work and that the notes have my fingerprints on would probably not be enough evidence anyway - IANAL). The short answer is that such tracing technology has existed as long as the technology itself:
I can trace a particular typewriter by impact marks, who used a rubber stamp, who used a dot matrix, ink ject or lazer printer, etc. I'm not going to loose any sleep over this since true paranoia freeks would say that the only way to escape big brother is to head for the hills and give up all modern technology (have they worked out a way for tracing who used a toilet seat by impact marks yet?)
http://www.jonmasters.org/
of course, under certain circumstances, this could be useful in the same way finger prints are. Read my previous post to see that I am against this kind of thing in principal, but if it _has_ to be in there, then at least I can prove that I didn't copy things that I am accused of or print threatening documents, or even I can prove that I am the copyright holder becasue my printer can be examined and it can be linked to the original document and then dated by tracing ink ages and wear and tear to the printed incurred since the print.
If copy protection exists in copiers, surely simply removing the appropriate circuit would be reletively easy? from my experience most CP occurs as a result of being sat on and so is added at the last minute (e.g. DVD, etc.) as such it is a "bolton" to the original standard and can be separated from the system.
Jon.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
You can make invisible watermarks on color copies quite easitly. All that Xerox would need to do is to use ultraviolet ink and put the number all over the page. To a human this is absolutely invisible. Use a camera with a short wavelength UV light and the numbers will glow brightly.
You can't scrape off the number or cut around it since the whole image is full of the numbers.
Looking at a pack of Canadian Stamps under a black light the border glows. I assume that the USPS works on the same or simmilar postage system as Canada Post.
I heard the same story about the ability to determine the amount of cash a person has, so I pulled out all of the threads just on general principle.
Check out the followups to the legos Toy of the
Century piece. Now somebody just has to figure
out how to build a lego printer. As provided
there, the link is:
http://www.mop.no/~simen/legoscan.htm
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
In Canada, all currency $20 and above comes with a small square, about 1 cm x 1 cm, that is yellow or greenish-yellow depending on the angle with respect to a light. In the center, a number, i.e. 20, is printed out of the foil (i.e. the foil is missing).
and some Pro-Life nutcase finds out who I am from the digital watermark, it's o.k. that he kills me because otherwise I didn't really believe what I was saying or I should have never said it, right? Your an idiot.
Am I to understand that this whole article is about WHAT IF there were digital fingerprints on color copies/prints. I work for a certian company.. lets call it company X (or company that starts with X. Now company X CURRENTLY and HAS for a LONG TIME put a series of yellow dots (yellow ink is hard to see.. and the dots are VERY small) that corispond to the machines serial number. Now if you know ANYTHING about company X, and have ever called in a machine FROM company X.. as soon as you rattle off the serial number, they know EXACTLY where the machine is.
I have PERSONALLY testified against 3 people who were doing fraudulant things on high end color machines. Using this series of dots was the thing that caught them. I could give a list of machines that encode the serial number, but I am unsure of what I am supposed to say as outlined by my contract with company X. NEEDLESS to say, if any of you have GONE to Kinkos or resonable faximile, that machine DOES have said encoding. Just thought I would set that straight.
bortbox
--Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield
Ive read that pressed aluminum cd will only last about 15 years because the aluminum layer will begin to corode. ive herd that the silver and gold cdrs can last upto 100 years because they wont corode.
In Australia, we have plastic notes with microscopic text (i.e., cannot be duplicated accurately by a standard scanner). On top of this, a small part of each note is clear, so it can't be photocopied or printed with ordinary (``consumer'') equipment.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to stop the ``serious'' counterfeiters.
Simple. Use a utility (gimp?) that doesn't use Digimark and you're set.
well, being a l33t linux hax0r, i refuse to use any piece of hardware that i havent seen the design specs and circuit diagrams for.
Stricly off the record of course and is only "as afar as I am aware from having worked here": I believe all of our colour products have the embedded watermark feature. It normally shows as yellow dots on white background and while the end-user does not register with us we do keep track of which serial numbers go to which of our distributors. There have been cases where forgereies have been investigated and our factory in the East has had to identify serial numbers from forgeries and we have then had to identify our customer. For the security agency investigating it does not seem a particularly easy method as it involves them doing the actual tracing with the companies involved pointing one finger down the line. I know for a fact that my office has been involved in at least one of these traces in the last few years.
If they put watermarking devices in the Windows driver... then counterfeiters would use ghostscript and write directly to the printer.
No-one would be foolish enough to place watermarking systems into Ghostscript, in plain view for everyone to reverse engineer, erm, see. Or would they?
Presumably if it can be built into photocopiers, the techniques used couldn't be too complex.
Is there any Open-Source software around that create watermarks? How could I find out about how it works?
Even more ironic: They'll call what they're arresting you for 'carrying a concealed weapon'. Apparently, only knives under 3-1/2 inches can't be concealed, at least in my town. Absurd.
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
Of course, copying money wouldn't be a problem if the US actually used some of the methods available this side of the pond. For example, English currency has a distinct feel to the paper it and as well as the usual metal strip and watermark has "raised" ink that rubs off slighly. (Try rubbing the "Bank of England" on the queens head side of a newish note on some light coloured trousers) Higher value notes even have holigrams. The Germans go even further - they have UV ink, perforations in the notes and other features. Even official documents like the V5 (Vechicle Registration Document) have anti-copy features. I recently photocopied mine in case I lost the original (Which I usually carry on me) and was quite surprised to find that the patterned background of the document had "COPY" quite clearly all over it. Close examination revealed thay you can just make out the "COPY" watermark on the original.
Yet another case of attacking the problem from the wrong end - the US are trying to limit the technology instead of staying one step ahead of the game.
To be frank: American dollars are crap. The use only two collors (as far as I can see) and for some larger notes some funny plastic fiber, which noone looks at anyways. Most European countries (look for example at the deutsch marks!) use more sophisticated stuff: holes stamped into the bill, holograms, metal stripes (not plastic) and the such, not to speak about a lot of colors. While the colors prevent the black and white copying and coloring (with crayons!) the metal stripes are not possible to copy.
I bet the Co$ could use this to track those nasty sp's that keep distributing fliers.
You can see some published ones here. The 25 guilder note (about USD 12.50) includes most security features according to these pages, but not all features are published. Also the 10 guilder note (USD 5) includes some additional features, also found in 100 and 1000 guilder notes(!)
Features include :
- Shaded Watermark
- Intaglio printing (tangible raised ink)
- Register gauge (patterns on back and frontside match up)
- 0.3 mm micro lettering (hard to read
:) - Fluoresent fibres (light up under a blacklight)
- 0.2 mm micro lettering (even harder to read or print)
- and finally: Shiny Parts! foil that turns black when copied, and "holographic" planchettes that copiers don't produce.
The Dutch National Bank distributes leaflets at banks whenever a new note is introduced, but also lists these features on its website.Another feature, not yet mentioned, is the type of paper used, which is easily distinguished from photocopier paper. And is washer-resistent ;-) However, unlike old US banknotes, the type of paper and ink aren't the chief anti-counterfeiting measures.
Also note that Intaglio printing also makes it easy for the blind to identify banknotes!
IMNSHO Dutch banknotes are the prettiest and best-designed banknotesy in the world, and I rather lament the fact that they will be replaced by the ugly, bad, Euro, in 2002..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Some years ago I had a cotract in Saudi Arabia. There every single copier had a 2mm high serial number etched in the glass. So every photcopy had at least one serial number on it!
You may also be interested that a friend of mine was working as a forensic scientist at the home office in London. One of his tasks was to identify who was leaking information from Thatchers cabinet office. They tracked the leaker down by analysing defects in the photocopy and getting a history of which copiers were used in which order. Apparently this would have been accepted as evidence in court if it ever came to trial.
She also claimed that given a verified sample from a given computer printer they could establish if another document was printed on that printer. Dot matrix, laser, or inkjet it didn't matter each printer has enough charecteristic defects and inaccuracies to uniquly identify it.
There are no secrets anymore!
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I wonder if the 2 dollar bill is recognized in these machines... hrmmmm
Does this apply for every currency in every country or are you 'better off' copying say French Francs in Japan or Dinar in Djbouti? Obviously though its a rare thief who's going to walk into the neighborhood copyshop with a fresh, wet Ben Franklin and ask for, oh, a thousand copies of it. Or maybe you think they would do the whole thing there - whip out a hundred, ask them to copy it and print a few more - say - 'take one for youself while yer at it!'
And you're going into business for yourself I'm equally sure there is some way to lock yourself in the basement with your printer/copier to disable the tracking mechanism.
All the more reason to do away with paper currency aqnd rely instead on encrypted authenticated electronic transactions.
The high end duplicating systems that I'm thinking of typically need a few service calls a month, but that's to be expected when you're making a million impressions a month.
And you need the aforementioned flatbed truck and winch.
George
The Secret Service *has* to be serious about this.
Someone also asked about why the US doesn't invalidate old bills. It's true. Most countries, when they introduce redesigned currency, set a date in the future when the old currency is no longer valid legal tender (except to collectors of course).
The U.S. would never do this because the world views the dollar as "safe" and face it, there are a lot of people in foreign countries with trunks of hundred dollar bills (the old kind) stored. If they get an inkling that their stash will become worthless or greatly devalued, they'll be converting it to something else in short order.
Yup, subversives and criminals are also important to the US economy. When they lose faith in the dollar, they'll sell dollars and buy currency from some other country leading to a weaker dollar.
The dollar is the currency of the world, and I'm not just saying that because I am a US citizen. I grew up in the UK and generally hate US-centric attitudes, but this one is the truth.
Why would I do that if I could just make a sarcastic backhanded comment as an anonymous coward? ;-)
The idea with the new US paper currency is that it uses a combination of many differnent anti-counterfeiting techniques, so a counterfeiter has to duplicate the paper, the watermark, the embedded plastic strip with the currency value printed on it, the directionally reflective foil, the microprint used around the vignette, and of course several unpublicized hidden features (probably microprint in odd places). While the Treasury knows that any one of these could be reproduced, it would take quite an organization to reproduce all of these things. It's probably easier to just rob a bank.
To return to topic, it's unlikely that the watermarking would stop counterfeiters, just like background checks never stop criminals from buying guns on the black market. The Secret Service has long focused it's anti-counterfeit efforts on the biggest offenders, not amateurs. So introducing digital watermarks on new and especially consumer-grade printers and scanners would only serve one purpose: taking away privacy from individuals. Government will always try to sell encroachments on personal freedom as a "security measure" for our "safety". Let's recognize it for the FUD that it is.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
>Does anyone know how this works without altering
>the image?
The technique is a type of stenography. With things like scanners, the quality of the scan is far beyond what the eye can see. To watermark a scan, you simple encode something into the least significant bits of the image. That is, you make tinny changes to the image "hiding" a watermark. Do a search for "stenography" on the WEB. You will come up with many links with programs one can use to encode messages into images *without* making any noticeable changes.
Watermarking done from a scanner is easy enough to defeat. Basically, because the method encodes it's mark into the lest significant bits of an image, replacing these bits with a random pattern effectively destroys it. Even doing something like resizing the image will probably destroy the watermark-- assuming your graphics program uses some type of interpolation.
>According to the first link (Privacy Forum) in
>the article, the watermark is "invisible".
>So.. how is it detected?
Detection simply is a program that looks at the least significant bits for the watermark pattern. The actual changes make to the image are invisible to the eye.
The new norwgegian 500NKR (about 60 bucks) note that came out about six months ago has a 1cm wide strip of silver colour, or a mirror if you will, running the full heigth of the bill on the rigth hand side of on the front side (if there is such a thing) of the bill. Inside this strip is the number 500 and a small dragon figure repeated 4 or 5 times down the strip. These markings change colour with the angle of view, like a hologram ,only in 2D. These markings are competly impossible to copy, pretty neat huh? (However, the 200NKR bill, wich lacks these markings, is the one that gets copied all the time, go figure!)
That would be great to have a ID card for each body part. Imagine how popular the things would be. People could swap the ID cards much like baseball cards. It would be bigger then Pokemon.
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
You should have a look at the Bank of France site on Bank notes . It has a page on the security features included in the French notes.
You will find :
It does not prevent all copying, but it requires much better equipment to copy these notes than a photocopier or laser printer ! And even with professionnal printing devices, the copies are very crude and easy to spot.
Some of the new dollar bills have some of these features, but are far in the complexity of the design. Moreover, the French notes may looks garish, but these bright colors are much more difficult to counterfeit. If the US Treasury was not so attached to the "green" notes, it could design notes with efficient anti-counterfeiting features, it's better to solve the problem at the source !
All of our notes are still plastic ($5, $10, $20, $50, $100). I didn't hear about them melting on dashboards, but, if true, they probably just changed the particular plastic material.
If they are more likely to implement it in drivers then it is one more reason to make Free Sftware drivers, where they can't put such troyan horses (because this basically is a sort of troyan horse).
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
how about sucking a big fat D