Reader Jim Herd points to this Toronto Globe & Mail story:
Adobe Systems Inc. acknowledged on Friday it quietly added technology to the world’s best-known graphics software at the request of government regulators and international bankers to prevent consumers from making copies of the world’s major currencies.
The unusual concession has angered scores of customers.
Adobe, the world’s leading vendor for graphics software, said the secretive technology “would have minimal impact on honest customers.” It generates a warning message when someone tries to make digital copies of some currencies.
The U.S. Federal Reserve and other organizations that worked on the technology said they could not disclose how it works and wouldn’t name which other software companies have it in their products. They cited concerns that counterfeiters would try to defeat it. . . .
Adobe revealed it added the technology after a customer complained in an online support forum about mysterious behavior by the new $649 “Photoshop CS” software when opening an image of a U.S. $20 bill.
Kevin Connor, Adobe’s product management director, said the company did not disclose the technology in Photoshop’s instructions at the request of international bankers. He said Adobe is looking at adding the detection mechanism to its other products.
“The average consumer is never going to encounter this in their daily use,” Mr. Connor said. “It just didn’t seem like something meaningful to communicate.”
Angry customers have flooded Adobe’s Internet message boards with complaints about censorship and concerns over future restrictions on other types of images, such as copyrighted or adult material.
“I don’t believe this. This shocks me,” said Stephen M. Burns, president of the Photoshop users group in San Diego. “Artists don’t like to be limited in what they can do with their tools. Let the U.S. government or whoever is involved deal with this, but don’t take the powers of the government and place them into a commercial software package.” . . .
The technology was designed recently by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, a consortium of 27 central banks in the United States, England, Japan, Canada and across the European Union, where there already is a formal proposal to require all software companies to include similar anti-counterfeit technology. . . .
Richard Wall, the Bank of Canada’s representative to the counterfeit deterrence group . . .[,] said nearly all counterfeit currency in Canada is now created with personal computers and ink-jet printers.
“We’ve seen a shift of what would normally be highly skilled counterfeiters using elaborate equipment to basically counterfeiters who need to know how to use a PC,” Wall said.
Some policy experts were divided on the technology.
Bruce Schneier, an expert on security and privacy, called the anti-counterfeit technology a great system. “It doesn’t affect privacy,” he said. “It stops the casual counterfeiter. I can’t think of any ill effects.”
Another security expert, Gene Spafford of Purdue University, said Adobe should have notified its customers prominently. He wondered how closely Adobe was permitted to study the technology’s inner-workings to ensure it was stable and performed as advertised. . . .
It’s hard to fully evaluate this, because for understandable reasons Adobe isn’t revealing the exact details of this feature — we don’t know for sure, then, how much of a burden it is on law-abiding customers. It’s also hard to tell for sure the circumstances of how the government persuaded Adobe to do this — whether it was simply appealing to Adobe’s public-spiritedness, or whether it was using heavier-handed tactics (e.g., threatening harassment of some sort).
But if all is as Adobe describes, sounds to me like a pretty decent step on Adobe’s part (though it might have been better if their documentation had at least mentioned this). Counterfeiting is a serious problem, and if businesses can voluntarily do what they can to prevent crime with relatively little burden on the law-abiding, that’s generally pretty good.
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