Anti-Piracy now reaches to your Printer....

[hech54]

....careful of those DVD covers folks.


WASHINGTON--Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.


According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.


Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.


"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.


The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.

Crime Fighting vs. Privacy

Laser-printing technology makes it incredibly easy to counterfeit money and documents, and Crean says the dots, in use in some printers for decades, allow law enforcement to identify and track down counterfeiters.


However, they could also be employed to track a document back to any person or business that printed it. Although the technology has existed for a long time, printer companies have not been required to notify customers of the feature.


Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the U.S. Secret Service, stresses that the government uses the embedded serial numbers only when alerted to a forgery. "The only time any information is gained from these documents is purely in [the case of] a criminal act," she says.


John Morris, a lawyer for The Center for Democracy and Technology, says, "That type of assurance doesn't really assure me at all, unless there's some type of statute." He adds, "At a bare minimum, there needs to be a notice to consumers."


If the practice disturbs you, don't bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism--you'll probably just break your printer.


Crean describes the device as a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.


"Standard mischief won't get you around it," Crean adds.


Neither Crean nor Pagano has an estimate of how many laser printers, copiers, and multifunction devices track documents, but they say that the practice is commonplace among major printer companies.


"The industry absolutely has been extraordinarily helpful [to law enforcement]," Pagano says.


According to Pagano, counterfeiting cases are brought to the Secret Service, which checks the documents, determines the brand and serial number of the printer, and contacts the company. Some, like Xerox, have a customer database, and they share the information with the government.


Crean says Xerox and the government have a good relationship. "The U.S. government had been on board all along--they would actually come out to our labs," Crean says.

History

Unlike ink jet printers, laser printers, fax machines, and copiers fire a laser through a mirror and series of lenses to embed the document or image on a page. Such devices range from a little over $100 to more than $1000, and are designed for both home and office.

Crean says Xerox pioneered this technology about 20 years ago, to assuage fears that their color copiers could easily be used to counterfeit bills.

"We developed the first (encoding mechanism) in house because several countries had expressed concern about allowing us to sell the printers in their country," Crean says.

Since then, he says, many other companies have adopted the practice.

The United States is not the only country teaming with private industry to fight counterfeiters. A recent article points to the Dutch government as using similar anticounterfeiting methods, and cites Canon as a company with encoding technology. Canon USA declined to comment.

[zzyzzx]

So the moral of the story is to not register your new color laser printer?

[Matt D]

This is great for law enforcement I guess as long as they know who you are. Go buy a printer with cash, don't give any info, don't send in the warranty or do anything else to connect you to it and the technology becomes worthless.
Sure they can check the numbers, run the numbers and find out that it was sold by, say Best Buy, but after that it's a dead end. They'd have to catch you some other way and then once they did that they could test the printer to see if it was the one used in a crime.
BTW the new Adobe Photoshops also have anti-counterfeiting tech in them. Try to open any image that contains a currency note to see it in action.

[housepig]

hmmm... cash to the next Hamfest, pick up something nice and used from some second-hand table... and start printing $20's.....

[lordsmurf]

BTW the new Adobe Photoshops also have anti-counterfeiting tech in them. Try to open any image that contains a currency note to see it in action.

Where?
I scanned some bills today. What am I looking for?

[Matt D]

I do not counterfeit, but I have read a few articles pertaining to Photoshop that mention this. Apparently Adobe has allowed the Secret Service themselves to insert their own code into PS that will refuse to open any file that contains a currency note.
Older versions do not have this "feature" but the newest ones do. If this turns out to be false let me know.

[edsmith77]

Hmmmmm.
Last time I knew those that worked in VERY classified work environments also use laser printers to print documents and not all were or are classified. I find it a bit difficult to think that the laser printer companies are pulling a fast one here. That would be a very dangerous NO, NO for the government workers those very unique fields.
This sounds like a fairy tale to me.

[gooberguy]

So ok someone makes a counterfiet bill

Now the government is going to find all millions of printers that are exactly the same to see how did it?

[hech54]

Has anyone ever thought that this just might be a form of reverse psychology? Meaning that there really isn't anything like this in 95% of the printers made and they want you to think there is.....hmm.
Maybe Colin Powell have a vial of little yellow printer dots too....

[pacmania_2001]

From reading Frank Abagnales book I think any small time counterfeiters would be better off ounterfeiting other things like cheques and reciepts.

[Faustus]

I do not counterfeit, but I have read a few articles pertaining to Photoshop that mention this. Apparently Adobe has allowed the Secret Service themselves to insert their own code into PS that will refuse to open any file that contains a currency note.
Older versions do not have this "feature" but the newest ones do. If this turns out to be false let me know.

The code is indeed there, another forum I'm on tested it.

[Conquest10]

Yes it is in there. The problem is that the only way I got to find out was with a file someone sent me that I tried to open and got some message about it being an image of money and it couldn't be opened. I got a scanned bill that I did myself and can open the file just fine.

[pacmania_2001]

I was reading about this in a book that you scan the top of a US$5 dollar note and put it through one of the older change machines that it will work because the scanners used in them can't differentiate between a proper note and a laser printed note.

[vitualis]

How exactly is this going to be a problem for anyone not engaged in nefarious activities like counterfeiting?

I suppose that you'll just have to print out your anti-government propaganda on an ink-jet printer...

Regards.

[sacajaweeda]

I would imagine an inkjet is good enough to print copies of money? Especially if you're smart and pass them off in dimly lit places like nightclubs and bars. Given the right conditions I suspect you could even pass off a cheap black and white Xerox copy that's nice and crinkled up.

My $.02
(sometimes not worth even a penny)

[hech54]

How exactly is this going to be a problem for anyone not engaged in nefarious activities like counterfeiting?

I suppose that you'll just have to print out your anti-government propaganda on an ink-jet printer...
Regards.

When they finally get down to gathering up all of the evidence on the guy from THIS post...I'm sure what type and brand of printer he used will be VERY important....

[northcat_8]

I do not counterfeit, but I have read a few articles pertaining to Photoshop that mention this. Apparently Adobe has allowed the Secret Service themselves to insert their own code into PS that will refuse to open any file that contains a currency note.
Older versions do not have this "feature" but the newest ones do. If this turns out to be false let me know.

I don't see how photoshop would ever know the difference. A tiff is a tiff, a jpeg is a jpeg.

Besides, why counterfiet money, when you can just pirate DVDs so easily and get legal tender.

[lordsmurf]

I was reading about this in a book that you scan the top of a US$5 dollar note and put it through one of the older change machines that it will work because the scanners used in them can't differentiate between a proper note and a laser printed note.

False. Machines are weight and thickness sensitive. I used to work with equipment that did just this. Seems complex to some, but it's all mechanical, quite old tech, and works very well.

So far, this whole issue seems like bonafide bullshit. Nothing special about money files. TIFF or JPEG. Image is an image. Yellow dots on my printer? Not a one. In fact, I paid for perfect prints, why I dumped a junk inkjet for real printing power. There had better the hell not be some kind of yellow shit all over it.

I scanned in a bunch of the new dollars to see the detail. I've always admired that art style, and it's better to see it on a 19" screen rather than a shadow-casted and aberrated view from a magnifying glass.

[jimmalenko]

Besides, why counterfiet money, when you can just pirate DVDs so easily and get legal tender.

Mods, please yellow card Captain Sunshine for advocating piracy.








******

[northcat_8]

<northcat posting from Detoit jail cell>

advocating?? ADVOCATING??? Try charged with

I don't even backup DVDs anymore let alone pirate them
<damn and that was a good side business for me too>

[mikesbytes]

I would imagine an inkjet is good enough to print copies of money? Especially if you're smart and pass them off in dimly lit places like nightclubs and bars.

If you printed with genuine ink in Australia, the notes would cost you more than their face value.

[pacmania_2001]

I work in retail and I've seen quite a few fake $50 Australian bills come through the registers.

The main technique, very shoddy, is to print the image using a high quality copier or printer onto some clear transparencies.

[vitualis]

Australian plastic notes are very difficult to counterfeit well but it is possible. My dad used to work for a while as a government inspector/regulator for the Sydney Harbour Casino and (not surprisingly) there would be quite a lot of counterfeit cash. Some were crap (B&W photocopied $100 bills - old notes) but some were VERY good.

Regards.

[handyguy]

"So the moral of the story is to not register your new color laser printer?"

It might violate copyright to print stuff, but then again, its a violation of intellectual copyright to post a full artcle you don't own on a website.

[Matt D]

Australian plastic notes are very difficult to counterfeit well but it is possible. My dad used to work for a while as a government inspector/regulator for the Sydney Harbour Casino and (not surprisingly) there would be quite a lot of counterfeit cash. Some were crap (B&W photocopied $100 bills - old notes) but some were VERY good.

Regards.

At least those people tried to counterfeit real money. We had a lady here last year that went to Wal-Mart and tried to pay for a few hundred dollars in items with a $1,000,000 bill. Ha ha, the cashier said, but unfortunately this lady was serious and wanted CHANGE. After the security guards took her into custody and called the police they found 3 more $1,000,000 bills in her purse. Apparently she had a lot more shopping planned.

[vitualis]

Regards.

[thecoalman]

I do not counterfeit, but I have read a few articles pertaining to Photoshop that mention this. Apparently Adobe has allowed the Secret Service themselves to insert their own code into PS that will refuse to open any file that contains a currency note.
Older versions do not have this "feature" but the newest ones do. If this turns out to be false let me know.

The code is indeed there, another forum I'm on tested it.

I've heard of scanners not working for money, never software. If this was the case I'm sure you could get around it, I can think of a few possible ways......