Mandatory Banknote Detection Code? 434
metamatic writes "The European Union is planning to introduce legislation to make it mandatory for software developers to add black-box banknote detection code to their graphics software.How will this apply to open source software? Is it time to get writing to your Euro-MP?"
Duh...? (Score:5, Insightful)
and more counterfeiting money appearing on the market to graphics
software makers...
How do they think, that this will improve the situation? Look at
what TODAY's Gimp, Photoshop, and others can do... All I would need
to do is stick with a current version and not upgrade, if I really
wanted to counterfeit money on my own. And if you would integrate
this into the printers, then I'll just print the banknote in two or
three passes (always just print another part of the banknote so
that the printer will never get to see the whole thing in one go).
Why not integrate this into the FUTURE banknotes (they already have RFIDs in there, don't they? All it would need to take would be to issue unique codes to EACH banknote so that they could verify the identity of the banknote there)
Re:Duh...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Australia and New Zealand have adopted "plastic" notes for a while... I believe it is a big barrier for the cottage counterfeiting groups.
Re:Duh...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Informative)
Same in the UK, but I don't think it's true for the Euro. However, there isn't a great deal of difference in size, and most people would just see the 20 and think, Says 20, not regular paper, magnetic strip, it's a 20.
The braille seems like a good idea, and easy to implement - assuming politicians or whoever else makes these decisions knows about them, why not adopt it? Good for PR (counterfeiters might not like them, but the blind people would - and blind p
Re:Duh...? (Score:4, Informative)
As for braille, the notes do not have any braille codes on them, but the banknotes are printed in relief, using a special printing method known as intaglio. The EUR 200 and EUR 500 banknotes have tactile marks printed in intaglio and positioned along their edges. This should help blind people to recognize the notes.
Re:Duh...? (Score:4, Informative)
Another thing that would make it difficult is the plastic window thingy on the notes.
Each note has a transparent section on it. The transparent section is a different design and shape for different values of the note.
Even if the notes weren't difference sizes and textures, even if it were possible to bleach them some how. The transparent section would still be different for different values of notes.
I must say I like the plastic money over our old paper money, I've saved hundreds of dollars in potentially lost money from the washing machine.
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Informative)
No braille, but the notes have intaglio print (raised ink) so that you can feel the design; this may be of use to the blind to identify the note.
The different length of notes was to allow the use of a note gauge - insert the note, read the braille value that remains exposed.
Here is a list of the security features [rba.gov.au] of Australian banknotes.
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a novel idea. Stop printing money and rescind all paper currency. It's easy to print paper. No matter what the government does, it
Re:Duh...? (Score:5, Interesting)
But of course, the unique codes only help partially: If you get two banknotes with the same code, you know one has to be wrong. But if you get only one banknote with a given code, how do you know if it's the original one or a copy? Also, when replicating per printer, it probably would't be too hard to give every one a different number.
But Euro banknotes have some security measures which I can't see how to replicate with a printer (like a metallic surface strip).
They don't have RFID, though (and I hope they'll not have them in the future - I wouldn't feel too well if any potential thief could just use an RFID reader to find out in advance if stealing my wallet would be worthwhile).
Re:Duh...? (Score:2)
The problem is that people don't check to see if the serial number is valid every time they receive a bill. Not only is that ridiculous, but there isn't even a way to check it.
Also, by code they meant source code.
FLAME Next time try basic reading comprehension.
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Interesting)
To my knowledge most anti-counterfeiting measures tend to rely on:
1: Security through obscurity (features which are difficult to det
Re:Duh...? (Score:3, Insightful)
When it comes to fraud prevention, the financial institutions of the world are willing to spend and replace in large quantities.
Witness the current move to 'chip & pin' credit cards in the UK: over the next couple of years, every store that accepts credit cards is going to have to get a new card reader. Why? Because the banks think it wi
Chip and PIN isn't all good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of mugging victims finding themselves relieved of their wallets and purses I can forsee muggers demanding PINs too, so that they can use the cards that they've stolen.
Right now, if a card is fraudulently used and the signature doesn't match that of the cardholder then the bill is footed by the credit card company, even if the card hasn't been reported stolen. Sure, the costs are passed onto the consumer (well, to those consumers that don't clear their card balances at least) but there's no chance of you suddenly being presented with a four- or five-figure debt for the spending that a card fraudster has run up on you card.
But, if you find yourself in a situation where you give an assailant your PIN, even if it's to avoid physical harm, then you're responsible for all spending they clock up before your card is eventually cancelled.
Frankly, as a credit card holder, this scenario frightens me, even though the chance of it actually happening to me is next to nothing.
Of course, the card issuers are being very quiet about all this, which is no great surprise.
Re:Chip and PIN isn't all good... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was mugged, and the PIN to my debit card beaten out of me.
The bank pointed out that they had the PIN, therefore the bank wasn't liable. In addition, they argued, the crime wasn't reported to the police until after the money was removed. [0]
I accept that this is a different situation, in so much as it was a debit card, not a credit card. However, the legal situation is exactly the same - insofar as the argument of authorisation applies.
In the end, the bank gave me part of the money back, as a 'goodwill' gesture. Making it quite clear they didn't have to.
Note that this is a specific case of PIN being forcibly extracted - other forms of fraudulaent use will be covered as before.
Also note that if my signature had been forged, then that would have been clearly fraudulent. Because it was a number, it was considered authorised. This was despite injuries sustained in attepting not to reveal it.
As far as the law stands (UK), you give out the PIN, you are liable. Period.
[0] No shit, Sherlock. One went off with the card and PIN, whilst his (armed) mates stayed with me.
Re:Chip and PIN isn't all good... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is exactly the problem I have with Chip & PIN. I work for a credit card company, and I raised objections about it. But they weren't interested. The party line is that "it is proven to have reduced credit card fraud in Europe, so the UK banking industry has adopted it". Then they have the nerve to try and sell it to the public as a good thing (which it
Re:Duh...? (Score:5, Funny)
sure you can print your own money. but there isn't a US currency denomination large enough for you to get a return on your investment.
next time on CSI: (Score:5, Funny)
Photoshop does this (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Photoshop does this (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Photoshop does this (Score:5, Funny)
I think the general consesus was that this won't do a thing to help stop counterfitting.
Not too surprising, since the general consensus on /. seems to be that nothing will ever do a thing to stop anything.
JP
Re: Photoshop does this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Photoshop does this (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't this like admitting defeat? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know they're probably attempting to stop (appearently) rampant counterfitting... but where will it end? I once scanned a dollar and sent it to someone on IRC as a joke (they said, someone DCC me some money). There has to be a better way. Like I said, isn't this really just admitting defeat?
Stupid answer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kinda locking the door after the horse has bolted dont we think people?
oh and FP ! \o/
Nice. (Score:3, Informative)
I see little in the need to copy a bill. We all have issues with forgeries and counterfitting ruining the value of the dollar/euro. Why not?
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong question.
Whenever restrictions are proposed, it is those who are for it who must answer the question, "Why?" It is not necessary for those who oppose a restriction to answer the question "Why not?"
Re:Nice. (Score:3, Interesting)
The proposed lockout algorithms would prevent this, even if the finished output complied with existing laws. It's very roughly analogous to the DMCA, which forbids all potentially infringing use, and fair use too.
(Yeah yeah. In the US, banknote designs are protected by a different title. But in Europe, it's common f
Re:Nice. (Score:3, Funny)
Really... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
-Erwos
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
If Adobe adds banknote detection code into Photoshop, you can't easily remove it.
OSS, instead, allows you to compile the software from the source.
So it would be easy to remove from gimp the banknote detection code.
Of course doing that would be a crime, but who cares ? I mean, if somebody is going to forge fake money he's already breaking the laws.
just my two cents,
Fabio
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
2. How is this law going to be effective even if the detection software is in the open source photo editors? They're OPEN SOURCE, you can just not compile in the detection module.
3. Is this law *really* going to be effective, even if you ignore the open source implications?
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:2)
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
No thank you.
Since currency changes so (relatively) often... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't like the idea of being legally required to update old software. Will this happen?
Re:Since currency changes so (relatively) often... (Score:5, Informative)
No Updating required (Score:2)
T-shirts (Score:5, Interesting)
-
Re:T-shirts (Score:2)
Re:T-shirts (Score:3, Informative)
Cool idea. Won't work though
The positioning of the circles with respect to the other circles is very important. Unless you've got an extremely flat abdomen, the positioning will get screwed up. And well, this being /. and all, I kinda doubt that you have such abs :-)
Re:T-shirts (Score:5, Informative)
>
>What about on the back of the t-shirt?
Here [cam.ac.uk]'s an image of the pattern. As you can see, it's pretty subtle. Putting the shirt directly under a scanner will probably trigger the protection, but wearing it will almost certainly mess up the pattern enough for it not to be recognised. The human body just isn't very flat anywhere.
Of course, I haven't actually tried it myself, so I could be wrong. If that's so, then such a shirt would be wicked cool.
Re:T-shirts (Score:5, Funny)
Get your own Can't Copy Me Tshirt (Score:3, Informative)
Can't Copy Me Tshirt [cafeshops.com]
Impossible... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Impossible... (Score:2)
Re:Impossible... (Score:3, Insightful)
How did this get modded 5, Insightful?
Which part of "black box" didn't you understand? Didn't you pick up on the fact that the legislation may require it be impossible to remove, thus making it impossible to have an open-source graphics program hosted or written by anyone in the EU? Those issues aside, how about the technical difficulties behind trying to provide
Re:Impossible... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Impossible... (Score:4, Insightful)
CheckForMoney();
Furthermore, I find it hard to beleive all these crackers can get around product registration, serial numbers and all that and yet another person can't remove the money check code from closed source products.
This doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
The copies are often good enough to fool vending machines. By using a fake 20 note to purchase a 2 rail fare, the criminal can take away 18 in genuine change.
Follow this logic: While we can't make vending machines clever enough to tell the difference between real dollars and fake ones, we can make your computer smart enough to not let you do anything with money.
This'll work.....
Re:This doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you miss the point. Modifying the vending machines would cost corporations money. Instead they'd rather put the onus on the end user -- we should pay to protect their investment. Or, put succinctly, business as usual.
Re:This doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
You need to take some elementary economics, friend.
And what about... (Score:3, Insightful)
This does not seem to be the right solution to me. Too many false-positives. I think somebody has already mentioned plastic bank notes.
Besides will
Welcome to Europe (Score:2, Insightful)
Makes me wonder if Microsoft is slipping money into pockets over here to try and kill open source.
useless (Score:5, Insightful)
This is useless. Banknotes do, and should, have security markers on them that cannot be produced by normal software tools anyway (I am thinking of markers that have tactile feel, holograms, etc). Thus, you need advanced techniques to forge these: and anyone capable of such advanced techniques is going to be able to work around any of these standard software embedded countermeasures.
All these countermeasures are doing is addressing joe average who uses a scanner, photoshop and a printer to make poor forgeries: exactly the type of forgeries that are picked up easily.
Further: I'd like to hear more detailed assessment of forgery rates, nature of how forgeries are constructed and so on, to determine whether the cost of all of this is really justified.
Re:useless (Score:2)
A counterfeit bill doesn't have to be accepted by a bank to be profitable... the counterfeiter can pass the bill to any cash-a
Re:useless (Score:4, Informative)
As for forgery rates, there were 551 286 found counterfeit Euro banknotes in 2003, most of them were 50 EUR notes. This can be seen from the annual report [ecb.int] of the European Central Bank [ecb.int], see chapter 3.2.
Re:useless (Score:3, Interesting)
That howstuffworks article (http://money.howstuffworks.com/counterfeit.htm) on counterfeiting is US centric: in the US you have poor banknotes that have not evolved with the time. I suggest looking at modern EU (and Australia) banknotes that are highly sophisticated. Especially since this article is about banks in the EU.
GPL (Score:2, Interesting)
The goal (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I read somewhere that a large percentage of the fake money is actually created by everyday people. This is an effort to stop that. If they think it's something more they're kidding themselves.
Some people ARE really clueless (Score:3, Insightful)
In my personal opinion if you want such regulations to have any effect both OpenSource and posession, use and selling of compilers/decompilers should be controlled by the state the same way as heavy arms/munitions. In particular it should be banned to own/use/sell/produce compilation tools, exept in the case you are a professional company having obtained a suitable license.
Re:Some people ARE really clueless (Score:2, Insightful)
slower work (Score:2, Insightful)
What I bet you they are doing... (Score:4, Interesting)
And unlike the movies, I bet they are doing this in secret. Other things they could add to software is the printer to have small dots indicating when the money was print (based on the bios or os of the system), or maybe something to identify the system it was printed (like something unique like the mac address of the nic or something equally unique).
Re:What I bet you they are doing... (Score:2)
Sure, the determined copier of $1,000,000 worth of cash won't be stopped by this... but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stop the little guys so that more resources are free to go after the big guys in other ways.
Another advantage to open-source (Score:3, Interesting)
Dear European Union (Score:5, Funny)
I am an open source software developer. Could you please send me samples of all EU notes, so that I can include image protection in my software. 10-20 copies of each should be enough to complete the work needed.
Get ready for the inevitable OSS tirade (Score:4, Insightful)
I just know some idiot will latch on to this and use it as an excuse why OSS is bad/evil/wrong.
See? We can tell Adobe to lock down their software to stop counterfeiting, and it happens. But not those OSS people. Having the source means you can change the source. It makes counterfeiting possible, promotes communism, and makes baby Jesus cry.
Unfortunately, it's not the software that's the problem - it's the law thinking it can mandate things like this that's the problem. But you watch - OSS is going to take a beating for this anyhow.
Weaselmancer
EU in the dark (Score:4, Insightful)
Black box in open source SW? (Score:2, Insightful)
Will it be a criminal offence to compile out the black box in graphics programs used within the EU? I bet it will, as soon as legislators realize that open source SW exists.
Will open source developers living outside the EU add the black box to thei
Rules for us currency (Score:2)
nifty info
Time for a physical change... (Score:2, Insightful)
Rather then changing the virtual world, I think its time for the affected countries to 'upgrade' their banknote manufacturing processes.
I am going to try scanning a coin, printing it, then using it on a vending machine. Somehow MAYBE it won't work... Hmm... Maybe try on a laser printer...
Anti-counterfeiting measures... (Score:2)
...will only inconvenience legitimate users.
It may also stop some teenagers from printing up obvious fakes and landing themselves years in prison. Of course, this wouldn't be so huge an issue if ambitious politicians didn't insist on throwing the book at them.
Criminals will go "oh, that's cute" and switch to something else, implement a workaround, or whatever it takes to keep business running.
The rest of us will have to deal with software self-destructing, hardware seizing up, open source projects bec
Why not improve money? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is, there are many ways to make money more robust, and there are many excellent detection schemes on the market today. That US dollar bill marker is a good example. But like that US dollar bill marker, nobody uses them. It ads another thing to do. It's easier to just push this all onto the people making graphics applications, and assume the worst. Of course this will shut down most open source software packages and any pictures of money in commercials, but that's a small price to pay for piece of mind, right?
tons of software already has this voluntarily (Score:2, Insightful)
Black Box Code? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's stupid - there's no such thing as black box code. If a computer can read it, a person can use a computer to read it. There's no such thing as black box code. That's the "soft" part of software.
In order to have "black box" information of any kind (code or no), you have to have some physical device that does not let that information out. A "black box" that can't be opened without destroying the information.
So they're going to make a law that requires "black box code", but there is no such thing. Brilliant.
Imagine I want to counterfeit money... (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Remove banknote detection module
3. Profit!
The problem is proving (2) as long as I keep the modified software to myself. Oops - of course I meant-- as long as the counterfeiter keeps the modified software to himself. Come on, criminals break laws. A law more or less isn't going to make that much of a difference.
It has nothing to do with the circles. Anymore. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK. The last time this came up, it consumed about twelve straight hours of hackery. You can go ahead and play with some of the black boxed code using the demo version of Paint Shop Pro [jasc.com] (or the latest Photoshops). Let me tell you: This has nothing to do with the circles. I was actually quite saddened by this fact, as I was planning to print up a "secure t-shirt" that would be unphotographable and unprintable by modern image manipulators. (It'd be a great excuse to talk at Black Hat wearing a T-Shirt *laughs*).
Alas, such adventures were not to be had. Experimenting with copy/paste between an unprotected app and the demo PSP, it quickly became clear that while some old copiers might indeed trigger on the inter-circle distances, counterfeiters now had a vastly more difficult system to fight. What there seems to be is some sort of size and position invariant image fingerprint function, probably wavelet based, that receives the full image after every large scale image transform, executes a fingerprint matching vs. a confidence value, and returns true or false depending on what the confidence threshold is set to. It's not perfect -- Stirmark [petitcolas.net] does seem to cause the algorithm to occasionally stumble, though not consistently (see this gallery [doxpara.com] for details) -- but it's very good work nonetheless.
Certainly, it does not appear possible to manipulate the watermarking system to create new and unique images that appear, computationally, to still be money. That's a very good thing. And while it's somewhat problematic to have code refusing to obey its controller, the integrity of the financial system really is an important thing. Remember the privacy case for cash -- if paper money becomes something we all distrust, what exactly are we left with? The fault with the RFID approach is that it forces us to carry a reader to validate funds. If we cannot self-validate, we cannot trust (notably, the biggest weakness with the metal strip approach is that we cannot quickly notice that the metal strip has been removed -- the wealth is actually thus represented not by the bill but by an invisible strip of iron and plastic!).
I do not think that image manipulation software is the right place to put this code, specifically because it's too easy to write an image editor from scratch (what are you going to do, ban compilers?). Scanners and printers are however sufficiently single sourced that they're far superior places to trust that anti-counterfeiting logic will be in place. But then, that's just IMHO.
--Dan
Ban compilers? (Score:3, Funny)
Shsh... don't you give 'em politicians new ideas!
"Overheard from imaginary Members 1 to 4 of Some Parliament:"
Re:It has nothing to do with the circles. Anymore. (Score:5, Interesting)
* It is difficult to update. All counterfeiters have to do is find *one* image that can get past the blocking code. Futhermore, there is a *huge* set of printers out there that have no such blocking.
* Printers have limited memory and CPU capabilities. I really think that HP will not be thrilled with blowing a bunch of each on doing "currency detection" on every chunk of every page for each country that latches onto this.
* Printers have only the ability to "block". "Blocking" penalties for a detection of counterfeiting is the *easiest* variety of protection, since people just poke at their images until they print. Photoshop or other can "phone home". Some folks might think ahead enough to have a fully-disconnected computer, but as network connectivity grows...and it only takes one "phone home" with a detected serial number of a page of bills that are showing up with bogus numbers to nail someone.
* Printers were never designed to be highly secure embedded devices (for example, a number have easily-replaced firmware slots). It's a good bet that printer manufacturers don't go to a lot of trouble to hide diagnostic data. Sure, no random counterfeiter might be able to crack such a system -- but (a) there's lots of money involved to hire such a geek, and (b) there are major "geek points" involved in figuring out how to break such a system, and legitimate reasons for doing so. Remember the Xbox -- yes, it was cracked so that people could put Linux on it, but it opens things up to piracy. What if people want to improve image quality, add their own rendering engines (because it's not like they can easily build modern printers in their basement)? When someone distributes detailed instructions for how to disable such protection, it won't take a brilliant counterfeiter to beat the thing.
I really think that this is more a case of "we need to do something new with our currency". Currency was designed in a day and age when it was hard to accurately reproduce detailed images on a piece of paper. It was a very good design for that environment. I think that if we had to come up with a new system, we'd have something wildly different today.
You know what *could* make a major improvement?
Smart cards replacing "stupid magnetic strip" credit cards.
Currently, the reason that you can't use credit cards everywhere is because the credit card companies rake in money on each card, and it imposes overhead that not every retailer wants to pay (in vendor fees and per-charge costs).
Smart cards (with *associated readers*) make credit card fraud much more difficult, and thus reduce credit card company costs, and ultimately reduce prices to retailers.
This will help produce smart cards be more commonly used.
Of course, the downside is the big credit card issue -- more easy tracking of money flow, which is a bit Orwellian. Technically, it's possible to build a system that doesn't track fund flows (and still has the hard-to-counterfeit benefits), even if your credit card vendor is malicious, but there is probably little public interest in such a property. Plus, given the commercial value of people's credit card records (and pressure from law enforcement to monitor them) I don't think that it will happen.
Solution Targets Wrong People! (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, circumventing the technology (PARTICULARLY IF IT'S IN AN OSS PROJECT!) will prove to be fairly trivial to criminal counterfeiters. I myself can think of several ways that would take all of 5 minutes, although I won't share them here because I don't want the black helicopters landing on my front lawn.
In the meantime, some 37-year-old woman, with no criminal intent, trying to scan money to use in some car dealer's newspaper ad (DEALS DEALS! CASH BACK!) is going to go crazy. Likewise for the Art 101 student trying to make a collage out of GWB's face and the US $100. Likewise for the vending machine engineer trying to scan bills to teach the reader how to recognize them. And so on...
-JT
Not just time to write, it's time to VOTE now! (Score:3, Insightful)
money-wise, such as banknotes with RFID serial numbers (making anonymous transactions impossible even for cash, plus creating a huge data trail even for innocuous daily purchases, and finally giving robbers the opportunity to single out the most promising victim before aiming their gun or swinging the baseball bat), which seems to scare even the RFID industry itself [rfidjournal.com], and
otherwise, especially with respect to the creation of dangerous additional intellectual property rights (undue powers for copyright holders, and software/business method patents) [ffii.org].
This database [beauprez.net] should give everyone a good idea whom to elect, and whom to vote out of office ASAP.
The fact that so few people participate in European elections only adds to the weight of your votes.
A reasonably composed European Parliament (which can now veto most of the proposals by Commission and Council) is our best chance for (more) sensible lawmaking in the future.
This will never work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, nobody would ever think to remove that code!!!
I think that ultimately, a lot of software companies would push for this because they would want to see free software made illegal for one reason or another. The problem is that even in closed source proprietary black box software, someone who wants to counterfeit money will figure out, or hire someone to figure out, how to disable that code. And no matter how obfuscated the code is made, it is ALWAYS possible to do something like that. It's only a matter of time and money, and to the counterfeiters, the money is practically free anyway.
Technological measures designed to enforce the law will never work. While they might keep the honest people honest, those people are, by definition, honest anyway; but the dishonest will find a way around it. For example, by using old graphics software, or by modifying current software, be it free/open or proprietary.
I say just make the bills much harder to counterfeit, and do it in such a way that it's easy to detect the fake ones.
Profit! (Score:4, Funny)
Have them with scamper about with a video grabber and the black box algorithm.
Set them loose to harvest money.
Seriously, it seems to me that the black box library would just be
as easily used as a dependable proof reader for money image duplicators,
and a much more easily targeted point of failure.
Is this software actually closed-sourced? (Score:3, Insightful)
Although the /. post says that the banknote detection software is "black-box", I see nothing to that effect in the Observer article. I wonder if in fact the software is closed source. If it isn't, then it isn't a problem for FLOSS, leaving aside details of license compatibility.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great Idea (Score:2)
The software doesn't come with source and is thus incompatible practically all oss licenses.
Jeroen
Re:Great Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
1) And so it should be. I would be rather concerned about the Orwellian trojan horses that would be in such a blackbox
2) Forgers can also easily reverse-engineer the blackbox software, so what's the point.
I believe it is again one of those dumm ideas politicians have that are professional politicians without knowledge of the subject matter.
Re:Great Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The FA mentions the fact early deduced, that these work by detecting a pattern of 5 small circles. So exactly how this is implemented isn't important or necessary to keep secret. More important from the bank's point of view is that OSS can simply be compiled from source with this code omitted (similar example is the code blocking printing of PDFs in Ghostscript, easily commented out).
Re:Great Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a perfect place to weaken the conflict of national "trade secrets" with "viral" OSS licenses. Just include a rider in the banknote law removing the right of anybody to sue for copyright infringement, if the only reason to do so is the refusal to distribute the closed source required by the banknote law. This will remove the teeth from all GPL-like licenses, and thus render them unenforceable for this parti
Re:Great Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The last thing we need is the government forcing OSS project to include some closed source code into every project that deals with graphics. If this goes through in the EU and not in the US then the EU is just going to having to do without OSS graphics software.
Re:Great Idea??! (Score:2)
Don't you mean "forgery" (Score:5, Informative)
The term for faking currency is "forgery" with fake currency being "counterfeit". "Piracy" has nothing to do with it.
Re:Great Idea (Score:3, Funny)
The major sources of counterfeiting are other governments and large multinational crime organizations. They'll be able to get around this stuff.
Now that the little guy can make his own passable bills, they're all out to squash him down. Nothing new here.
Beacuse (Score:2)
A 2nd reason is ( at least in theory ) cash is backed by something and are 'something'..., bits on a card are not either...
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Have I fulfilled the requirements ? (Score:3)