I had planned to see if I could come up with an image that would still be detected even with significant distortion, and then print it on a t-shirt... The idea being you couldn't open a photograph of me in PhotoShop! :)
Question: without modifying my acrual license plates, can i paint my car in a way that would confuse license plate readers? False plates elsewhere on the car? Lines to confuse pattern recognition into rejecting the true plate?
I remember there was some successful SQL injection string printed on a "license plate" that took down a national system somewhere, so you can try with some additional license plate-like bars.
False plates will also confuse a human and will be against the rules, likely will get you fined just like driving with consealed ones or without plates at all.
I had the same thought. I made a T-shirt with the EURion constellation on it. It did work, kind of, but not as well as I liked - distance and angle mattered a lot.
My original goal was to wear it for official documentation, but that went less well. It was cut off in my drivers license photo, and I forget why, but I never ended up wearing it for passport photos.
US passports are clear that only your face should be in the photograph. I can't think of any passport, drivers license, or even employee ID that didn't crop the photo at most below the collarbone.
Just because Photoshop has this burden of counterfeit deterence doesn't mean other photo manipulation software suffers the same problem. So, since this is a bullshit feature that prevents work from occuring use other software. Now that other software is being used, use something with an AI underpinning to do things like blur people's faces or their shirts or the whatever your AI has been trained to do.
What? The point is to make a t-shirt that triggers CDS in Photoshop. Without Photoshop the whole point is lost. This is not about protecting anyone, privacy or anything useful at all. It's a gimmick and a fun hack.
What AI and how is it relevant to this discussion? The point is that you shouldn't be able to open the file in Photoshop, not that a random AI shouldn't be able to view it.
Years ago I had an Austrian 5000 Schilling note in absolute mint condition. It was a beautiful note with an image of Mozart on it but it was too expensive for me to keep just to admire (~$500 USD) so I cashed it in for local currency. (Also, it had to be converted as the Schilling was being made obsolete by the Euro.)
However before I did I wanted to keep a permanent record of it so I scanned it in the highest resolution I had available (2400dpi) and processed it in an early version of Photoshop.
There were some herringbone issues which I resolved and I ended up with a truly stunning TIF image of approximately 900MB.
I never attempted to print it out as my printer was pretty mediocre and I was aware that it, like all modern printers, had anti-counterfeiting measures.
I don't know whether I was just lucky with that combination of scanner and Photoshop version. Anyway, as I mentioned the results were spectacular. Here's a low resolution image of said note (click on image for a larger size):
As EURion was introduced in 1996, it looks like only the S500 and S1,000 from 1997 got the treatment[0] so you should be good to print it (in relation to EURion, other policies/laws might still apply)
Yeah. I'm not sure if I still have that 900MB tif but this has spurred me on to look for it. If I find it I'll take another careful look to see if it's embedded or not.
I read that pre-decimilisation it was common to find coins with different monarchs depicted on them, presumably because they last a bit longer than notes.
My understanding is that they are in no great rush to remove ER II notes/coins from circulation, but that all newly minted currency will bear Charles III.
There's also a great joke doing the rounds that most notes already have Charlie on them anyway.
In case my previous post wasn't clear, old banknotes are continually withdrawn from service and are automatically replenished with new ones. This happens when they're deemed to scruffy to use (i.e. won't be recognised in automatic note/pay machines, etc.). Thus, every country has a deemed service life for notes which can range from some months to several years, moreover high denomination notes are less used so their estimated service life is longer.
Given the change of monarch, the Elizabeth II/Turing note would be expected to remain in service and follow its normal life cycle (whatever the UK deems that to be) but come replenishment time it will automatically be replaced with a new Charles III note.
Essentially, if the UK follows normal precedent then no more Elizabeth II/Turing £50s (with the possible exception of uncirculated stock) will enter service. That is, they'll soon become rare, especially so new uncirculated ones.
Again, if the UK follows tradition then the 'components' of the new note will have likely been in the design phase for quite some time. I'd bet that various designs of the new King's bust already exist and are now awaiting the King's final approval.
Thus, if I wanted a mint condition £50 or for that matter any note of current issue then I'd be on the immediate hunt right now.
Coins are totally different, they remain in circulation indefinitely. The exception of course was when the currency changed with decimalisation, old coins no longer represented useable values of currency so countries such as NZ, UK and Australia were forced to remove all LSD coins and notes from circulation with the change of currency.
Those of us who were around in the pre-decimal era were used to seeing coins with every† monarch on them back to Victorian times. It's why I've still got boxes of pennies and halfpennies with Victoria's bust on them.
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† Of course, Edward VIII excepted, although some uncirculated coins with his bust on them do exist (and they're now extremely value). The fact that they do is evidence for what I said above about the preparation of new currency being well in hand well before the actual event.
No. There is no precedent. When Elizabeth became queen, banknotes did not picture the monarch, and continued to be printed with the same design.
Over the next 70 years, the designs were changed to include Elizabeth -- although only in 1981 for the £50 note.
> come replenishment time it will automatically be replaced with a new Charles III note
Yes, almost certainly.
> no more Elizabeth II/Turing £50s (with the possible exception of uncirculated stock) will enter service
No, it's not a given that more notes of Series G won't be printed. Changing banknotes is much more disruptive than changing one side of the coins, and there will not yet have been enough £50 notes printed to keep good-quality notes in circulation for 10-20 years.
My guess is the BoE will continue to print the existing £50 for at least 5 more years, probably 10, and possibly 20 more years (given the high denomination). We might see a £5 note with Charles in 2025-2027 or so.
Yes, very definitely so but I was a little short of funds at the time having moved from Vienna Austria to Australia (the move cost me over $10,000 USD).
Nevertheless I'd managed to keep the note for the better part two years before I exchanged it at a Commonwealth Bank in Australia for which I recall I received around $730 AUD (roughly $500 USD).
Whilst the note has no monetary value today (having been superseded by the Euro), a keen notaphilist would pay about $3,300 AUD for a note in the same excellent condition as mine. That's roughly 4.5 times the amount I exchanged it for some 20 years ago.
Incidentally, I obtained the note in exchange for five 1,000† schilling notes at a Creditanstalt Bank in Vienna. At the time I'd seen the 5000 schilling banknote but never possessed one but after seeing a teller unwrap a brand new bundle of them I asked him to exchange one for me.
It's worth noting that at the time I'd never been so close to so much money in my whole life - nor have I ever been since.
The bank notes were clearly visible, they were stored immediately behind the teller so that he had immediate access to them whenever he turned around to face them. They were tightly stacked horizontally on top of each other in a row of vertical U-shaped storage channels arranged by ascending denomination (e.g.: 10, 50 ...5000) with their narrow side facing outwards.
I cannot recall the exact height of the channels but likely each was 30 to 50cm tall. In effect, the teller had wall of money behind him. How much money there was I'd hardly even be able to guess. The largest denomination was 5000 schillings - you figure it out, how much money would there be in a stack of tightly-packed, freshly-minted 5000 schilling notes some 30/50 cm heigh? A damn lot, more money than I'll ever own.
I found the whole scene sureal, especially the casual way the teller would turn around and grab notes from the stacks with one hand whenever he wanted them whilst simultaneously holding a cigarette in the other.
The Viennese are a trusting lot, I could never imagine a situation like that ever existing from where I come from.
My interest in possessing the banknote was multifold, the note was beautiful and I wanted to examine it closely, that was heightened by the fact that on its obverse side it had a bust of one of the greatest composers who ever lived and whose music I love - Mozart; and finally, printed notes use the finest printing technology available anywhere and examining then carefully gives one an insight into how such high quality printing is done. I also find it fascinating to compare the different approaches and technologies that various countries use in the printing of their currencies.
__
† BTW, the 1000 schilling notes I used to obtain the 5000 schilling note is also of considerable interest, not only is it also a beautiful note but on its obverse side it has a bust of the famous quantum physicist Erwin
Schrödinger - of Schrödinger's equation fame along with his infamous cat!
I still possess several of these notes in mint condition along with others including the excellent 50 schilling note that's magenta in color which has a bust of Sigmund Freud on it.
In my opinion this series of Austrian banknotes is one of the best ever designed (by that I mean from an artistic perspective - not its technology).
About a year ago, I purchased an Adobe Stock photo of a banded stack of crisp $100 bills for use in a print ad. Then I discovered I couldn't open it in Photoshop. I was, however, able to open it, "place" it, in Adobe Illustrator and was able to finish the ad—minus a couple of small raster-image edits and masks I had wanted to make in Photoshop.
I went back to Adobe Stock and read the user comments on that particular image. There were a lot of irritated comments, mostly asking why Adobe doesn't warn people that the shot can't be used in Photoshop.
I meant to mention that the photo of the cash was at a somewhat oblique angle to the camera and, I think, can reasonably be assumed that it is of little use to a counterfeit effort. I was surprised when PS refused to open it.
What legitimate use case can you think of where the benefit of faithfully reproducing currency is not outweighed by the need to prevent the proliferation of counterfeit currency?
You cannot make counterfeit currency with Photoshop. Paper money has security features that won't even convert to pixels in the first place, like holograms, transparencies and fibers embedded in the paper and such, never mind reproduce by conventional printing.
This whole deterrence system is idiotic.
People who accept an obviously fake printed copy of a banknote basically deserve it; it goes with their collection of wooden nickels.
> People who accept an obviously fake printed copy of a banknote basically deserve it; it goes with their collection of wooden nickels.
Define "obviously". Black and white on copy paper? Sure. But color ink, on paper of the right color and feel? That's different. Forget the fibers and the holograms--we're not worried about people printing $20s and $100s to buy a high-end TV. It's singles and fives for groceries and household essentials that are the real pull. If a cashier is handed three fives and seven ones and has to spend two seconds scrutinizing each bill because one in ten people are trying to pass counterfeits they printed at home, that's going to slow things down.
Yes, the feel of the paper in particular is impossible to casually replicate. However, what makes you think a particular minimum wage employee can actually feel the paper? People get injuries that affect their senses in weird ways. It’s still not fair to say that they “deserve it.”
That said, I agree that Photoshop should not have this code. It’s on the Photoshop user to not be an asshole. That shouldn’t be Adobe’s problem.
With COVID it seems that more cashiers are wearing rubber gloves. Do rubber gloves substantially diminished the tactile advantage of real currency? Hopefully not as it would be easy to pick these softer targets from a safe distance.
If Adobe doesn’t want to facilitate counterfeiting, that’s their prerogative, regardless of their ineffectiveness in stopping crime that is beyond their ability to control. Adobe can only control what they control, and this is that.
> Adobe voluntarily chose to work with international banks to help solve the problem, said Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for professional digital imaging.
This is already easily done. Just exclude the security features that prevent opening or printing. If they're in that much of a hurry then they're not looking anyways. The only time the visual detection would be used is in conjunction with the other physical methods that cannot be printed.
Overwhelmingly transactions are digital, and for bigger stores self checkouts are used. If the problem was significant then cash registers can easily handle the bills and automatically scan them as self checkouts do. I would presume the level of fraud isn't even high enough to the cost of that hardware.
This is what law is for. Getting caught, even for the smallest unit, should far outweigh the benefit. One in ten people aren't going to take that risk. There's no reason a random group of bankers should be expecting the entire world to partake in their anti-counterfeiting measures by putting closed source software in their products. It will never prevent someone who has decided to become a counterfeiter from accomplishing their goal unless the entire world is on board and no one ever figures out how to work around it. It's just more security theater, paid for with taxpayer money, a global scam that's far more disgusting to me than any counterfeiting crime I've heard of.
This. There are relatively few visual cues for laypeople to detect counterfeit older (and even moderately recent) US dollar bills. There are no UV sensitive areas, the watermark line is rather faint and there's no special stuff like holographic images, transparent inserts or metal foils etc.
The only way I've really seen people check medium denomination ($10s, $20s, $50s) bills is via an iodine pen test which would react to starch in regular paper but is un-reactive on real bills which are actually printed on a fabric-based material. For large denominations ($100s) many places just don't accept them...
Who benefits from this? I do not believe it is anything other than deliberate.
For decades the US money has been substandard compared to what other developed countries use.
By comparison US dollars are like cheapskate Monopoly money, given the colours of the notes are the same.
Cheques and hand written signatures for credit card purchases have survived far too long in the US, the French had PIN in shops in the 1980's with nobody complaining about the lack of bounced cheques with forged signatures.
Please fill me on the cultural differences I am missing. Why does the US have a currency that seems practically designed for forgery and smuggling?
> The effectiveness of the pens may be affected by external methods. Simply having a banknote pass through laundry, depending on the soaps and bleaches used, can cause a bill to fail the test when it is otherwise accepted.
The interesting thing is that the US has one of the oldest currency systems. due to the US policy of not invalidating old currency, an old 1920's silver dollar is still legal tender, of course at a market value of several hundred dollars you would be mad to spend it as legal tender.
A counter example is the uk pound, when the uk moved to the decimal pound all the shilling pound notes became invalid. so the us dollar system is older than the current uk pound.
People get the cops called on them for trying to use $2 bills. If someone's trying to quietly pass off fake money, using funny looking bills as a template is a real bad choice. I got a crisp $20 from 1988 out of my banks ATM last week and anyone that even glanced at it noticed it was weird.
> People who accept an obviously fake printed copy of a banknote basically deserve it
This is easy to say from a position of privilege, but the people trying to pass fake banknotes will just find weak targets. In hurried situations, in the dark, to the elderly, disabled, preoccupied, etc.
Safety vs freedom. If we continue to conjure hypotheticals and remove responsibility from the individual then you will be the cause of the issue, not the solution.
The overwhelming majority of transactions are not even cash anymore. I would not throw around the word "privledged" like a triangle that fits in every hole. Or else it loses it's intended meaning.
This outcome is freedom. Adobe chose to voluntarily add CDS to photoshop. Their software, their choice.
Nothing here is hypothetical. Scams exist precisely because they do fool people. To say that people “deserve” to be scammed is either a statement made from a malice or from a disconnect of the reality of who falls victim to scams.
If someone has never even considered that someone’s disability (as one example) would make a person a target for a scam, then yes, I am very comfortable calling them privileged.
Sloppy counterfeiters aren’t passing off fake bills to rich educated bankers, they’re handing them off to people they think will fall for it. They’re looking for people who look like they’ll make easy victims. These people don’t deserve to be cheated.
What I was referring to was something like people being scammed by someone who just scanned some paper money, did some image manipulation on it with their PC, then printed it on some 8.5x11 paper from Staples and cut it up.
That's what Adobe is trying to prevent. A sophisticated counterfeiter won't be deterred by some "ethics theatre" in Adobe Photoshop.
Most counterfeits are shitty counterfeits. The common scheme isn't to print it on copy paper, though. The common scheme is to bleach low value notes and then print on that paper with a desktop printer.
> In the last fiscal year, nearly 60 percent of the $88.7 million in counterfeit currency recovered in the U.S. was created using inkjet or laser printers, the Secret Service says.
Of course, Adobe is well aware that other image editing software exists. They did this not because they think they're going to save the world, they did it because:
> "As a market leader and a good corporate citizen, this just seems like the right thing to do,"
> This is not something that is ever going to be an ironclad thing that prevents all usage.
Bars tend to be dimly lit. This makes detecting counterfeits extremely difficult.
Many retail locations in the US hire young people to be cashiers. These people do not have the experience handling cash that older people have. They get almost zero training on what banknotes are supposed to look like. Despite it being illegal in most states to do so, when those cashiers accept a counterfeit bill, the store managers try to take the money out of the pay of those cashiers.
My dad had macular degeneration. Towards the end of his life, he had to depend on the large numbers on banknotes. By the time he died, he could no longer read them and had to use credit cards exclusively.
If you were in charge of collecting money for school lunches, and a kid happened to try to pay for lunch with fake money, would you object? If you could feign ignorance and say you just didn’t know it was fake, would you let it slide, or would you tell the kid they won’t be eating today? Maybe they’re just messing with you, or maybe they don’t actually have the money.
It’s possible the lunch lady didn’t know, it’s possible she didn’t care, or it’s possible she knew exactly what she was doing.
>People who accept an obviously fake printed copy of a banknote basically deserve it
Absolutely they don't. I get the point that one needs to look out for themselves, but if you say "people", you include the elderly and people with various impairments, and neither deserve to be treated like this.
If you sell currency as a collectible, people are going to want a high-quality scan on the product page to confirm that the note is as described; a few folds can subtract hundreds of dollars from the sales price.
There's a couple firms who maintain reference catalogs for this sort of thing. At least one of them regularly asks for 300-dpi scans of new issues so they can keep the book (which is now basically a PDF released as a subscription) up to date.
I look at this differently. I see an intrusive restriction on the private use of a general purpose tool, and ask: is this intrusion necessary?
Do restrictions like this even serve as a road bump for real counterfeiting operations? Or do they exist to create a sense of ubiquitous surveillance? To lower the general public’s baseline expectations for autonomy and privacy? To drop another anchor that can be used to justify unrelated intrusions in the future?
Several artists who work on stock photography had a huge problem with this came out and they couldn’t make images of money, which are very popular for financial websites and periodicals. Go browse through Getty Images and see how many photos there are of money!
It doesn't matter whether or not the use case is "legitimate". The software must obey the user. If I tell the software to process the image of a bank note, that's exactly what it should do. Without complaining, warnings or refusal.
Photoshop does not copy banknotes. Neither does Tetris. Software authors are free to limit the scope of their functionality. Use another bitmap editor for banknote images, you have plenty of choice. If you use Free Software you can inspect and change the source if it doesn't do what you want.
> What legitimate use case can you think of where the benefit of faithfully reproducing currency is not outweighed by the need to prevent the proliferation of counterfeit currency?
There's a joke about a famous prophet in there somewhere.
And I jest, but there's a point in my quip too:
Annoyingly getting in the way of creative workflows probably does very little to prevent actual counterfeiting in comparison to what it does to enhance the piety surrounding our increasingly digital origami deity.
I used to ask the clerks at the bank for $2 notes. Then I would go spend them at stores. I found it to be lots of fun. Some cashiers didn't know where to put them. Some turned around and gave them as change to the next person (this happens a lot at Ren Fests and usually makes the "next person" real excited). One caused lots of laughter in the store when they asked over the intercom "do we take $2 bills?". The most annoying was at a toll booth where the attendant handed it back and said "we don't take Canadian money" (I also had this with $1 coins).
Nah she was busy as anything so didn't really have time to look. She might have caught on eventually but my parents did first, they saw me with a few of them and figured out we'd been pocketing our lunch money while scamming free lunches. Made us pay back all the money plus extra then work off anything we couldn't pay which is pretty fair tbh.
We used to basically destroy the paper so it felt 'used.' The first couple times sure just old as hell money. But i'm sure that lady had to have known when all the money looked like that!
They probably just want kids to have fun & get snacks.
But also I hate that we charge kids for meals in the first place.
The food should be free for all and much healthier and better quality.
Better off parents will still pay for their kids' meals regardless via taxes.
I discovered this sort of thing a decade or so when I tried to print a promo yard sign for a real estate company with a pic of a $100 bill on it and Photoshop griped at me. That's when I learned about the eurion constellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
I know, but iCloud is not tool for creativity. If we implement political correctness into creative tools, we just put another layer of censorship to self-expression. Publishing on social networks follows.
We just create ultimate dystopian society step by step. Of course because of our safety.
Do anyone actually belive that those "protection implementation" will reduce actual fraud? Criminals will use other tools anyway.
It’s a normal error message telling you Photoshop can’t open the image and a link to a site about counterfeiting, a little weird the first time you see it but nothing like those scary FBI warnings on websites that get taken down or anything.
Late to reply, but yes it was pretty much this. I don't recall exactly what it looked like, but it wasn't anything scary. My reaction was mostly one of amused surprise.
The first x64 patch I ever did was to remove this very protection from Photoshop years ago. It was a single instruction patch, 1-3 bytes changed, I don't remember exactly.
You use your favorite reversing tools. IDA, Ghidra, x64dbg, binary ninja, etc.
For this particular example, Photoshop, an error message is displayed for currency detection. The first thing I would do is load up the executable and look for that particular string. If I'm lucky and there aren't many protections for the executable, I'll be in the right area for figuring out what to patch, or I'll at least know which code paths to start tracing.
Everyone else has mentioned the easy part - replacing the function entry with "return not money"
The hard part is finding where that is. One approach is to start with the error string - find it in the file and put a memory-read breakpoint on it in the debugger. Trigger the error and capture the call stack - start working up the chain until you identify why that text was read, either the failure directly or a message passed to that thread - if it's a message, find what sent it and why.
The single instruction patch mentioned in the parent comment is probably changing a conditional jump (for example JE - jump if equal) into an unconditional jump, or a NOP (no operarion) instruction that does nothing, depending on if the jump leads into code we want to run or not.
Given the detection code is in a separated library, it should be relatively easy (supposing the code is not obfuscated) to find out where it is loaded/called.
"Further investigation showed that the detection performed by software is different from the system used in colour photocopiers, and the Eurion constellation is neither necessary nor sufficent, and in fact it probably is not even a factor."
Besides the EURion constellation, what other indicators do imaging software like this use to detect bills? Have any other indicators been made public yet?
Interesting question. And what happens if you put a lot of EURion constellations on an arbitrary image? Is there any software that will refuse to open the image or any printer that will not copy/scan it?
I downloaded a very hires image that has both sides of a $20 bill (Counterfeit but looks real) from a DNM many years ago. For shits and giggles I would sometimes upload it to random hosting sites to see if anything happens, I first uploaded it to google drive and it's still on that account to this day. Did the same with dropbox and onedrive but I cant check since I don't remember the passwords but nothing happened initially.
It might be a different story if I would have generated a public share link. At least for Google I'm pretty sure they scan for copyrighted content with public links, so I assume they do currency checks.
I always thought it would be interesting if someone were able to create an image that wasn't CSAM, but that would nevertheless be falsely flagged as CSAM by the detection algorithms. That would potentially be a great way to cause someone a lot of headaches by sending seemingly innocent pictures that would inadvertently put them on a watchlist.
This seems much easier to exploit though assuming some devices / applications will notify the FBI with enough suspicious activity. I guess it depends if counterfeiting is taken as seriously as CSAM.
And yes if you are working for a banking company (or any visual about money) you're gonna have a bad time.
My solution was using a placeholder image for money same size. Than change it with gimp after work done on photoshop.
https://twitter.com/taviso/status/902997594460135424
I had planned to see if I could come up with an image that would still be detected even with significant distortion, and then print it on a t-shirt... The idea being you couldn't open a photograph of me in PhotoShop! :)
I got sidetracked, but I should get back to that.