FE-Schrift – forgery-impeding typeface

I'm reminded of a story in the Book Of Heroic Failures which went something like "Mr Smith, who attempted to pull off the worlds largest single cheque forgery, altered his pay cheque from 14 pounds 8 shillings to 148 million pounds. The fraud was successful right up until the moment he tried to cash it."

The best security for thousands of years has been simple - be a suspicious bastard.

Other than the one to two transformation, are there others? Was the formal system a response to these problems or how it has always been done?

Very interesting, thanks - does it apply to Japanese, too?

It's worth noting that before sci-fi took hold of the term to add its connotations, "cybernetics" has the rather conventional definition of:

  "the scientific study of how people, animals, and machines control and communicate information"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cybernetics

Cybernetics is more common term in the continental Europe. Anglo-Saxons use "systems theory" and it's slowly replacing cybernetics. If you want to read about cybernetic psychology and related subjects, you might want to google "systems psychology", "systems neuroscience", "systems biology" instead.

I guess they still have 1 million plates in some storage facility. Nah, jokes aside: what they actually do is to not only legally, but practically issue their own plates, which would include stamping them. Also, they don't use the reflective background white. So not only they don't need it, they also have reasons to continue with the old variant. (And actually, they might indeed have a huge stock of them. Military supplies are often aquired at ridiculous numbers.)

(PS: Sorry, auto-correct inserted a typo, just fixed)

> Interesting that the the military vehicles don't get it.

Note to others: also "civilian", mostly un-marked car models, buses, trucks etc. get the old-style, non reflective plates in our military.

Then again, their layout looks vastly different from civilian plates, so someone forging a BW plate doesn't really gain anything.

I think that is just a function of military vehicles being excempt from that law in the first place. To force them to also use the standard font would mean changing a totally different law, maybe even add a whole new one if the current status is not defined in federal laws but only in some military-interal regulation. Not that that is impossible, but there is little motivation either.

Sometimes the severity of a crime outweighs the frequency. It may be worth preventing any forgery since, when it does happen, the effects are bad.

The article explains:

> The motivation for the creation of the typeface was spun in the late 1970s in the light of Red Army Faction terrorism

Given the amount of money spent on vehicle licensing, the additional work to create a font is small potatoes. It certainly doesn't cost more to produce.

It's analogous to choosing between TAI and UTC time in a system. They differ by only 36 seconds, but UTC clocks break during leap seconds. Why not just choose the right one.

   Whilst the DIN typeface was using a proportional font, 
   the FE-Schrift is a monospaced font (with different 
   spacing for letters and numbers) for improved machine 
   readability. 

The German version of the Wikipedia article says more clearly that (despite the name: FE = hindering falsification) machine readability was the other important reason for the design and introduction of the typeface.

I believe it is a problem here in the UK, where one can expect to be ANPRed several times on any journey that takes one out of town. A little bit of black tape can turn a six into an eight and make one anonymous, or make a stolen car appear legit.