More proprietary software treating their users like criminals as the default.
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.
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...
That link also contains an account of the problems someone faced when using that technique.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Someone pulling off right color and feel is not going to be stopped by CBCDG's crusade to put some nonsense into Adobe Photoshop.
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.
The paper is the most instantaneously obvious to me - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/moolah/anatomypaper.html - just think how different real money is from Monopoly money when handled.
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.
The paper has an interesting bit of history too - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/crane-has-pr...
Well then perhaps that should be the cost of employing people with minimum training for minimum wages. No sympathy.
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.
https://www.wired.com/2004/01/currency-detector-easy-to-defe...
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.
Spending real 2 dollar bills will freak some people out.
Some people just aren’t clued in.
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.
Nobody deserves to be defrauded.
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.
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.
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.
That's what Adobe is trying to prevent. A sophisticated counterfeiter won't be deterred by some "ethics theatre" in Adobe Photoshop.
> 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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-07/mom-with-...
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.
https://www.wired.com/2004/01/currency-detector-easy-to-defe...
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.
Have you ever heard of decreased vision and impaired sensation? Should people with these disabilities be prohibited from working as cashiers?
Same goes for features like transparencies, watermarks, etc.
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.
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.
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?
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.