Hi folks, it seems that big brother has been hard at work in the background for the last few years. Special software has been implemented into many electronic imaging devices, such as, Printers, Scanners, Software and soon, cameras, that will fail to operate if a banknote is detected. In some cases, such as Hewlett Packard printers and Adobe Photoshop software, The operation halts, you are then directed to a webpage that warns on the illegalities of duplicating and counterfeiting currency, your ISP and some other details have been logged and will no doubt be passed on to appropriate authorities. At the moment not all world banknotes are recognised by the software, but notes from U.S.A., U.K., Australia, and some other nations are recognised, and will cause more than a local headache, some folks keep replacing ink cartridges and/or, send in the printer for a service when it doesn't need one, and are not told why this happened. We HAVE BEEN KEPT IN THE DARK. What is an honest notaphilist (banknote collector) supposed to do in order to image for records or insurance purposes, their banknote collection, lest it land them in trouble with the authorities for attempted counterfeiting???? This technology has been coming in for years, especially with photocopiers, but now, it is in most imaging devices, and it tags you as a crim first and then reports you?????
Some links with more information..

http://seclists.org/lists/politech/2004/Jan/0034.html

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread98051/pg1

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/08/0111...tid=152&tid=185

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.periph...=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.periph...3a9f79afece97b5

There are many, many more links on this.

It seems this has been fairly well known in a lot of circles for the last couple of years, but I didn't know, so I assume a lot of others don't either.
I think myself lucky now to have older equipment that does not call me a counterfeiter....Kevin.
I read an interesting suggestion. Make T-Shirts with the security code image on it and the photos of the subjects will not print out, Oh, bye the way, I beleive copies of the image are also phoned home by the software. Printer software is also being made that prints a faint yellow ID tag on every doc, that can ID a machine, owner. Great to catch counterfeiters and terrorists,,,,, and political activists, and anyone with something to say to the world via leaflets. The world is not going mad, it went mad long ago, it's just that not many people noticed.
Kevin.

One step closer to communism

No, this has been around for quite sometime when color laser printers became affordable to the people. It is then when most world government became concerned about the quality of such prints that they decided that color laser printer should have some kind of special "coding" behind it.

So if you print anything with a color laser printer, some real macro traces of yellow can be found. This alone is more than enough to tell what printer model it is and even possibly the serial number. But of course, that is not good enough if this was done in an underground faculty.

Hence such ridicious securities were built in. But honestly, those are just reducing the number of average Joe into making counterfeit notes. To stop high end counterfeiters? Zilch. This has zero effect. There are always ways to counter it.

If you want to keep a copy of the scans, why not, you can use it with your old technology. But to print? I am going to disagree. What on earth do you need to print a 100% full scale sized note for? Unless you are a dealer and have full responsiblity of what you are going to do with a copy of the note for display, I don't quite see the necesscity of a 100% full scale.

I believe you mean totalitarianism.

Hi gxseries, I agree with your statement about not needing to make a 100 % print of a note, unless you were in fact attempting a counterfeit copy, but, what if I attempt to print a small detail of a particular part of a note, from say, someones auction, Failure and reporting is what happens. This code comes into effect if it sees the security code, regardless of whether it is a whole note or just a close up of say the serial number, and, what will become of our ability to image notes? For either selling them online, records or insurance reasons. Scanners and cameras will at first baulk at the attempt and then report you to the authorities. As is already happening. Cheers, Kevin.

Hiya there. My best suspect of the rumors that I have been hearing is that only the higher denomation notes, such as a 100USD, 500Euro, 100Euros, 1000 SWF, 10000JPY etc, would be the only ones to be taken high caution of. It is not difficult to program a scanner to take note of such banknotes as memory capacities of such scanners are definately a lot more than it's preceders.

Another suspicion that I would suspect is that this only occurs to very recent banknotes, probably issued after 2000, where most probably recent technologies (orion printing?) were added to such banknotes, which would mean that older notes would not face much problems.

The real problem would be how modern banknotes can be scanned. It is true that it would be a real hassle if you want a scan just for illustration. Let's say you got hold of a genuine banknote. That is definately one note that you aren't going to counterfeit! But traces of the security features would break the alarms going and hence, there is the trouble. Indeed, I do sympathize the problem - but you know, it is never find to find out when you happened to get hold of a counterfeit note... I nearly got hit by it and that was when I fully despicted such illicit activities.

here are some samples of the "hidden code" some software looks for on banknotes. interesting to note is that the german banknotes had the technology incorporated onto them in 1996.

George Orwell's vision is a few step closer.

I had noticed the yellow dots and stuff myself out our notes. I didn't know what it was for though.

its a constellation of five circles repeated in a pattern. if you know the pattern, you can sneak it onto letters and documents you don't want photo-copied. i hear it only works on color-copiers though.

This is why I'm glad I collect coins mainly and not notes. After all, notes are only paper, often pretty paper (or plastic), but nothing more. I think that is why these governments are so protective of their printing monopoly. If the public ever really knew what kind of games are played with their "money" they would take up arms against their governments (well, maybe not in Europe). In either case, give me a nice heavy piece of gold any day!

I've just noticed that the pattern is orange on the current Canadian $10. I wonder if that would still have the same effect?

same effect. £20 notes have green circles, 100 dm notes have blue circles, and 10 euro notes have red circles. i think it's more of a design call, especially with british designers turning them into musical notes, and american designers using them as small numbers (50's & 20's).

hmm....it appears the dots only prevent photocopying. newer software recognition is a lot more complicated.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/projects/currency/

That's the Limey's for you, they never can do anything straight forward.

I don't have a £20 note handy, just £5 and £10. I'll pick one up tomorrow.