Photoshop Fails At Counterfeit Prevention 712
JediDan writes "Wired reports that the 'Anti-counterfeiting provisions in the latest version of Adobe Systems' flagship product have proven little more than a speed bump, but company representatives insist that including them was the right thing to do.' Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for professional digital imaging said, 'As a market leader and a good corporate citizen, this just seems like the right thing to do.' Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable."
Re:YRO? (Score:4, Interesting)
from the 'nice try' dept. (Score:4, Interesting)
Took about a minute to foil them...
I wanted to buy Photoshop, but the price! (Score:1, Interesting)
It's over $800 Cdn!
No frickin way am I paying that much. $300 would be more reasonable.
I'm just going to get Paint Shop Pro instead. What is Adobe thinking? I want to buy Photoshop, but I'm not stupid.
Re:GIMP plugin? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Considered they might have been pushed? (Score:5, Interesting)
How comfortable would you be using a "counterfeit deterrence system" that you had no idea how it works. Makes you wonder if it also has the capability to "phone home" when someone tries to make anything remotely resembling a banknote, or whether there are back doors.
Re:CYA? (Score:2, Interesting)
Adobe doesn't need to integrate 100% effective technology to prevent the duplication of currency. What they were trying to do was put in a nice little token positive to throw around if they ever got caught in a legal battle with Uncle Sam, if he ever said Adobe made it too easy to copy the currency effectively.
It's amazing what sort of stakeholder gain you get from adding in just a nice little tidbit feature like this. It looks good to Joe user, and since obviously it's being covered in the news, you get free advertisement for how "friendly and responsible" the software is. Marketing and Social genius, if you ask me.
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not sure how much info on this code they got but negelecting to run clipboard content through the black box before pasting seems like a large oversight. Then again, one of their concerns performance and having this code run every time there is a paste operation would probably be a significant processing overhead.
Re:"Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and mo (Score:3, Interesting)
Laws+ Interpretation= Confusion (Score:3, Interesting)
"...U.S. law, which allows color reproductions of U.S. bank notes so long as the reproductions are smaller than 75 percent or larger than 150 percent of actual size. The reproduction must be one-sided, and all materials, including graphic files that were used to make the reproduction, must be destroyed afterward. "
I used to work on Television Commercials and the Ad Agencies would all go nuts over those rules anytime we did a commercial that showed ANY US Currency (think Lottery Commercials...)
Fairly Realistic "Fake" Money Exists that can be used for showing huge piles of Cash and it's handy when you do need to have the appearance of money blowing around all over the place.
But sometimes the job entailed filming a SINGLE US banknote and the Ad Agency would insist we use "Fake" money because they did not want to get in trouble with the Treasury dept. Never mind that the image was going to appear on a TV screen, it existed on 35mm film before going to videotape.
What really pissed me off one day was when -on set- the Art Director was complaining that the "Fake"Money we were using did not look "real" enough. *sigh*
The "fake" money we were using was as real as the US Treasury allowed. There is a printing company in California that comes up with this stuff for the Film Biz and they had been through many generations of "fake" styles. Each generation looked better than the previous one.
Apparently one of their "styles" of "fake" bills went too far and the US Treasury confiscated the printed bills AND the plates used to print them.
I've made a bunch of "REAL" money over the years in overtime and other things thanks to the Ad Agencies confusion over the interpretation of this law.
Why Adobe should remove this check (Score:4, Interesting)
Taken to extremes, will Adobe build in Child Pornography checking? Or scan your hard drives for incriminating pictures or files? Where does it end? And why is something I buy for editing images checking and deciding what I can do with the files I create?
At least, this could open Adobe up to legal problems - if their checks fail and someone is 'allowed' to do what should have been 'prevented'.
All in all, it sucks. If I wanted a counterfeit currency checker, I'd buy a 4.95 felt tip pen.
Re:not like we haven't seen this before (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe not 99%, but I can see a need for graphic artists to use currency (or pieces of currency) in graphics projects. Heck, how is the treasury department supposed to advertise their new peach-colored bills if their graphic artists can't load the images into Photoshop to create the ads in the first place? It's not like people have much choice about which graphics program to use - GIMP is getting better, but it's still nowhere near as powerful as Photoshop.
coming soon...the DRM helmet (Score:2, Interesting)
These helmets would be organic, and grow as a human grows. They would be locked on the human head at birth, and use a digital rights infrastructure to determine whether the human has the right to breath, view the sky, drink water, eat food, etc.
For the period from birth into the early teens, a human would be allowed substantial freedoms, such as drinking water, eating food, viewing the sky...all for little or no cost.
The parents of a child could pay into a corporate account to allow their child access to better food or water, or travel to pristine "corporate reservations" where magnificent views and vistas are sold to the wealthy. This provides an incentive to parents to support and enhance the corporate model--keeping your manager happy would result in an improved existence for your children. For example, parents looked upon favorably by the corporate oligarchy might be allowed into a lottery, the winners of which would have their children's viewing rights upgraded to higher quality textbooks and their access improved such that they can use higher quality software and tutorials.
After a human reaches their teens, the rights to quality food and water would be erroded...unless they find a way to increase the wealth of the corporate entities. Increasing the wealth of shareholders or board executives substantially would allow the human access to higher quality food and water, and the right to (for example) go to a museum and view artwork, or attend a concert and hear undistorted music.
The top tier of humans contributing to corporate wealth, say the top 1% of the population, could actually enter a lottery in which their family could travel to a national park and be released from their helmets entirely for the span of a week or so.
This plan would greatly improve the living wages of corporate board members and shareholders. It would also insure that only those persons who have earned the right to see the sky, or eat quality food, and view historical or IP restricted items of interest are allowed to do so.
Another bonus is population control and criminal punishment. The lowest economic performers could be denied access to reproductive rights--for example, a "DRM Chastity Belt". This would prevent them from spreading the "laziness gene". The belt could also have a mechanism to apply electrical shocks to the wearer--this would allow punishment for minor offenses, such as offending a corporate shareholder.
Major offenders, such as those who critisize or or satirize the corporate oligarchy, would have their access to food/water/air cut off for a period, at least until their life signs dwindled to some extent. Repeat offenders could have their access cut off permanently. Such a model relieves the oligarchy from having to provide for prisons, gas chambers and other useless expenses.
This type of infrastructure would slowly but surely improve the lives of the upper tier oligarchy, while culling the poorest economic performers in the population. Over time, one would expect the highest tier to have their quality of life enhanced at a near exponential rate, while lowest economic performers (and their descendants) would be removed from the gene pool entirely.
Prices (Score:5, Interesting)
Software (and to a lesser extent, hardware) prices are based on percieved value. When Microsoft charges $400 for Office, do you really believe that R&D cost them $350 for every copy? The upfront cost was in the tens of millions, but the cost to print the CD, box and manual is right around $5. Does that mean that we should be paying $10 for office? After all, a 50% profit margin is pretty good, right?
Adobe doesn't charge $650 for PS-CS because their costs are high. They charge that much because that's what the market will bear. That's what it seems to be worth.
-- Hamster
Re:Price (Score:2, Interesting)
What you say may very well be true for you. I want to like the GIMP, I don't like paying $600 when I don't have to. But, month after month, I keep on finding that for my business Photoshop is worth every penny.
Re:YRO? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you think Adobe really cares? You download Photoshop at home and learn how to use it. You go in to work, and your company gets some new task which requires image editing. What are you going to tell your boss to buy?
Also, for the most part, an illegal copy of Photoshop usually does not mean one less copy of Photoshop sold, but rather one less copy sold of Paint Shop or something else in that price range. That helps Adobe's market share figures.
What's with the "CS"? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5 (And actually started paying for it by version 4. Those present who seem to feel 600 dollars is a reasonable price for software need their head examined. It doesn't matter if it makes economic sense to the company...it makes no sense to the end user. It used to be that a graphic designer needed a ruler, an exacto knife and some whiteout to make a living. Now he needs several thousand dollars worth of equipment and software. That's not progress, that's larceny. But I digress... ) and I must say that PS CS is the most disappointing upgrade I have seen. All your money buys you is a bunch of DRM stuff and one or two token tweaks. PC users even have to deal with remote activation. Skip this upgrade if you can.
While I am ranting about PS upgrades, WTF is up with the line tool? It used to be to draw a line was a one step process. After several upgrades worth of improvements, it is now a three or four step process.
If ever-evolving file formats and OS's weren't such an issue, I think I would still be perfectly happy with Photoshop 4.
BTW, bonus points to anyone who knows what company originally wrote Photoshop...
Re:They didn't spend R&D time or money (Score:5, Interesting)
I see where you're coming from, but in my experience, development doesn't work like that. Nobody just drops some mystery code into their product and releases it (can you imagine this code breaking some other feature and Adobe tells their customers "well, the Fed. told us this code would work...sorry 'bout that"?). Features like this are typically worked into design specs and engineering specs. It also needs to be integrated into their codebase (even if they were just a bunch of precompiled methods) -- it needs to interface with their software somehow, no? Code like this also has to be tested, which can be a pretty major undertaking. Furthermore, for every change that's made to any part of the code, features like this (and all others) are usually tested in regression.
While Adobe may not have spent time developing the code itself, I'm fairly certain that this code adds to the bottom line of development costs...which also adds to the bottom line of the product cost to the end user (unless they tack that expenditure onto some other product).
In the end, we all pay for a "feature" that we don't want...even though we do pay for it, we'll never notice (unless we're counterfitters, in which case, we'll either use a different product, or find a way to easily circumvent the "feature"). It's downright lame and it's not their job to enforce the law. Besides, what's illegal about scanning in a $20 bill? I can think of 10 legitimate reasons to do just that right now.
What's next, anti kiddie-porn protection? At least the code will actually prevent a law from being broken (unless you're taking baby pictures and your kids like to be nude...it happens).
Re:YRO? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GIMP plugin? (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally have zero respect for companies that go out of their way to cripple their product in one way or another. Software has enough unintentional bugs without the developers deciding to break it on purpose.
yes They can (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What R&D money? (Score:2, Interesting)
Right on the money :)
Considering that the TSA won't allow me to carry a miniscule pocket knife keychain along with me while traversing my country for the purpose of visiting relatives, I'd agree that yes, it is a bit like banning knives because they could be dangerous.
Heck, I've even just discovered that *lighters* are dangerous weapons, either that, or the anti-smoking lobby couldn't pass up the Richard Reid angle on keeping evil smokers from lighting up between flights
But hey, we're just a bunch of hunter-gatherers functioning in a completely alien environment, trying to protect ourselves from the non-linear behavior that results. Our solutions often appear as non-linear as the problems they attempt to solve, which is fairly unsurprising.
Sigh, humanity.
Re:Mismanaged resources (Score:2, Interesting)
2) Pass them in dimly lit stores, change machines, anywhere where they won't be suspected.
3) Counterfit old style bills and pass them with real, new style bills
I've been saying for a long time that the metallic strip has been a non-measure for a long time. Too easily removed, too cumbersome to check each time.
You don't want to be a master counterfitter, you just want to be able to pass some bills quickly and fool most people. You don't want to make your money being an artist, you want to do it by selling lithographs of good artists work.
Re:not like we haven't seen this before (Score:2, Interesting)
However . . . some people discovered that it would pass as a $5 in change machines. The treasury department wasn't very pleased about it, took Mad's plates and made them promise not to do it again.
Why it was done. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not like we haven't seen this before (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not like we haven't seen this before (Score:1, Interesting)
actually getting the paper is the EASIEST part...open your wallet and grab all the one dollar bills...Viola! tons of paper...now all you need to do is wash out the ink.... and print a 20$ image on your paper
actually the security features such as the strip embedded in the paper, the small print, watermarks and the actual ink which are tougher to duplicate.
Re:not like we haven't seen this before (Score:3, Interesting)
The real issue (Score:3, Interesting)
I can certainly see many legitimate reasons. I've made novelty money before. They certainly wouldn't fool anyone (by design).
The problem with any technology with this is that it removes law from the realm of human decision and instead slavishly enforces a limited and unmovable interpretation of the law. The result is that a number of perfectly legal and ethical actions are rendered impossible. It is only defects in the software that allows it to be bypassed at all.
For every prohibition out there, there probably exists some unforseen exception. When those happen, we need to apply human judgement, not simple rulesets.
For most of us, this particular case won't be a serious problem. However, the more accepted this sort of thing becomes, the more likely each of us is to come across one or more cases where something like this turns the simple and legal into the impossible.
Even worse, eventually we will see this sort of thing used to end-run the constitution. With the DMCA, it can be argued that we have already seen a case of that.
Re:Economics (Score:1, Interesting)
"Maybe if people stopped paying for it and turned to alternatives it would be more affordable."
There aren't many alternatives. At least, not at a certain level of requirements. The real alternatives to Photoshop for professional graphic artists are scarce, and they tend to be more expensive.
The Gimp is great if your output is, well, what the typical The Gimp user needs.
A photo artist once took the time to set me straight on this count, and *showed* me why he needed PS, why The Gimp was good, but not sufficient for his work. I agreed with his assessment.