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The secret codes of British banknotes
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoYou can't falsify banknotes with regular printers and regular paper, but you may need to scan and print them for some art project in which case you should just use Linux and avoid those silly protection measures.
- cstross 11y agoAhem: you can't falsify banknotes with regular printers and commodity paper well enough to fool an alert human being, but the scanners in some vending machines are another matter. With 7 colour 1200+ dpi inkjets readily available for photo printing, if you could find a vaguely passable source of paper you could do wonders -- and one option forgers have used is to take low value notes and bleach them before overprinting with a higher denomination print pattern. (I think this is the rationale for high-denomination Euro banknotes -- €50 and above -- having embedded RFID chips.)
- raverbashing 11y ago> used is to take low value notes and bleach them before overprinting with a higher denomination print pattern. (I > think this is the rationale for high-denomination Euro banknotes -- €50 and above -- having embedded RFID chips. Citation needed You can't take a lower denomination bank-note and print a higher denomination one on an Euro note: the sizes are different (of course, maybe you can pass one note for the next in sequence, but it is slightly harder) Also no RFID is mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_banknotes#Security_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_banknotes#Security_featur...
- reacweb 11y agoRFID are not yet used: http://www.fleur-de-coin.com/eurocoins/banknote-rfid http://www.fleur-de-coin.com/eurocoins/banknote-rfid
- arethuza 11y agoI always thought the coolest thing about Euro notes is their use of traces of the element Europium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europium
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoNight guard at work came to the front desk one night, pockets jangling with quarters. "Did you know the change machine will accept a photocopied bill?" Desk called the police, who called the FBI who came and took him away. Never saw him again.
- jccalhoun 11y agoThe Secret Service deals with counterfeit money not the FBI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoHm. I guess officially. Yet they were FBI. Here's another case: https://www.fbi.gov/minneapolis/press-releases/2010/mp052010a.htm https://www.fbi.gov/minneapolis/press-releases/2010/mp052010... and it says "This case was the result of an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service, the Minneapolis Police Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
- hiharryhere 11y agoAlso another reason to have notes with different dimensions. The 5 euro note is tiny... nobody is gonna mistake that for a 50.
- alkonaut 11y ago> you should just use Linux and avoid those silly protection measures I think the protection is often done in the hardware (firmware), not drivers. At least it has to be for any printer/scanner that can work as a standalone copier.
- noja 11y agoPhotoshop does it in software (unless you import from an existing file).
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoIt was not done in hardware for the scanners and printers I've owned so far.
- gpvos 11y agoYou checked this on all of them? That's some dedication, for sure.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoIt's a good way to test new hardware.
- pm215 11y agoEven the "art project" use may be illegal in some jurisdictions. For instance UK law (Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 s18) states: "It is an offence for any person, unless the relevant authority has previously consented in writing, to reproduce on any substance whatsoever, and whether or not on the correct scale, any British currency note or any part of a British currency note." (This is separate from the actual counterfeiting offence, which requires intent that you or another person will pass off the copy as genuine.) The art project would probably be OK if you get permission from the Bank of England first: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Pages/reproappform.aspx http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Pages/reproappform....
- Someone1234 11y agoThis is one reason why pounds on TV shows and in movies is often bundled. They cannot legally print both sides on one sheet of paper, so they print one side on one and one side on another, and then put them at the ends in wads. If you ever see both sides of a note in TV or film then it is the real deal (at least as far as UK pounds go). A lot of "stage money" has a washed out fake on the other side just in case it gets caught on film (so at least the colors are right). Same colors, the words are nonsense, and none of the detail remains.
- cstross 11y agoFor real lulz: print this pattern of small yellow dots on all your business correspondence with big companies, just to screw with their document management systems. Hours of endless fun for all the bureaucrats! (There's got to be a PDF/postscript file/print filter for the pattern somewhere. Anyone? EDIT: Ah, found it here: http://wildsparx.com/eurionize/ http://wildsparx.com/eurionize/ -- download has vanished, but source is on github: https://github.com/jplona/code/blob/master/eurionize.pl https://github.com/jplona/code/blob/master/eurionize.pl )
- jdimov9 11y agoThe Perl script is from 2008
- jdimov9 11y agoOk, I worded this wrong. I meant it as in "Wow, that Perl script is from 2008, I'm impressed and surprised because the article gave the impression that this is a relatively new trick." Can we stop the downvoting torrent now? Good grief!
- gpvos 11y ago2004 even, if the copyright message is to be believed (and why not).
- plausibility 11y agoThose online fax sites posted here the other day should definitely implement this "feature".
- Someone1234 11y agoOr print it on a t-shirt. If anyone tried to capture a screenshot from a CCTV video feed, well, too bad...
- kaybe 11y agoWhile looking for that I stumbled across patterns and text that only shows up after photocopying due to effects such as aliasing and low-pass filtering, also pretty neat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_pantograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_pantograph And I easily found some shops carrying shirts: http://www.spreadshirt.de/eurion-t-shirts-C4408A23774319#/detail/23774319T6A2PC120434135PA4PC120434136PA4PC120434137PA4PC120434138PA4PC120434139PA4PC120434140PA4PC120434141PA4PC120434142PA4PC120434143PA4PC120434144PA4 http://www.spreadshirt.de/eurion-t-shirts-C4408A23774319#/de... http://www.zazzle.com/eurion_constellation_t_shirt-235509764478000766 http://www.zazzle.com/eurion_constellation_t_shirt-235509764... if you know German, here are some people from AK Vorrat planning a campaign, I don't know whether it's still up to date: http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/EURion http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/EURion And it has been discussed before, huh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8926114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8926114
- mapleoin 11y agoMeanwhile, the rest of the world is switching to plastic banknotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote
- teddyh 11y ago…except Europe.
- mapleoin 11y agoDepends on your definition of Europe. Romania fully switched in 2005.
- davb 11y agoWe're using them on £5 notes from some issuers in Scotland. And they'll be rolled out on all UK banknotes over the next few years.
- gadders 11y agoAn FYI for people that don't know (foreigners, London taxi drivers) - Scotland has several different banks which issue Scottish currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling#Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterlin...
- Someone1234 11y agoI'm playing devil's advocate but a lot of the reason why places refuse to take Scottish notes is that in the early 2000s, the English notes had been updated with tons of security measures, while the Scottish notes had not, so forgers targeted Scottish notes (since they could produce very believable replicas) and the market got flooded with them. So for every Thus why the bridge series was introduced in 2007, to add much needed security features and to make Scottish notes respectable again.
- kuschku 11y ago
- jgrahamc 11y agoThis describes the geometry of the EURion constellation: "Recognizing Banknote Patterns for Protecting Economic Transactions" http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/igor.ira/publications/2010/text/igor.ira_Recognizing_Banknote_Patterns_for_Protecting_Economic_Transactions.pdf http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/igor.ira/publications/201... This patent describes how it is recognized: https://www.google.com/patents/US20060279767 https://www.google.com/patents/US20060279767 The short version of which is "find all the circles, measure the distance between them; if you find five with the right distances you've found EURion".
- steaminghacker 11y agoThe measurements in that paper do not make sense. the diagram is impossible because the angle sum around the middle circle is not 360.
- SilasX 11y agoSo wait it doesn't account for dense circle patterns? Like if I have a bunch of circles, then it rejects the image if any five of them have bad distances? I would think it would account for blank space somehow.
- jameshart 11y agoSuggests a way to DOS an image processing application by including a lot of circles, too
- shiggerino 11y agoWhile I agree with the law, I take exception to my own possessions being hijacked for law enforcement. Apparently there's no need for a warrant to sneak in robotic cops in people's homes and offices.
- DanBC 11y agoIt's not just EURion though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7006848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7006848 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/
- jgrahamc 11y agoBTW If you are interested in stories about counterfeiting currency I can recommend: The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Making-Money-Counterfeiter/dp/1592405576 http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Making-Money-Counterfeiter/dp/...
- moyix 11y agoI've done some preliminary work that measures the amount of "attention" an image processing algorithm pays to a given pixel (in terms of amount of computation done on it). Hard to tell at the moment how well it's working, but the results for the £10 note do seem to focus more on a region that includes a Eurion: http://laredo-13.mit.edu/~brendan/eurion_psp_gaze.png http://laredo-13.mit.edu/~brendan/eurion_psp_gaze.png (This is from Paint Shop Pro, version 8.0, which refuses to edit the above image)
- jgrahamc 11y agoHow are you measuring that?
- tacone 11y agoI found these videos on his website: http://laredo-13.mit.edu/~brendan/eurion_attention.mp4 http://laredo-13.mit.edu/~brendan/eurion_attention.mp4 http://laredo-13.mit.edu/~brendan/eurion_tcn.mp4 http://laredo-13.mit.edu/~brendan/eurion_tcn.mp4
- moyix 11y agoYup. These weren't as exciting as I'd hoped. The former (eurion_attention.mp4) basically shows a sliding window of what pixels had computation done on them over time; the most recent 1000 bytes (~330 pixels) get "lit up" in each frame of the video. You can see in the early part of the video how it scans over the image multiple times, but the later parts are not very interesting (and the whole thing is absurdly long; I recommend watching at 50X). The second (eurion_tcn.mp4) one is simpler, and just tracks the mapping between pixel and compute number [1] over time. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778871
- moyix 11y agoIt's based on dynamic taint analysis. We assign each byte the input file a unique label and then track the propagation of those labels throughout a computation. Additionally, we track the "compute number"; basically, if you have an operation in involving tainted data like A = B + C Where at least one of B or C is tainted, the compute number is: TCN(A) = max(TCN(B),TCN(C)) + 1 So if you track the propagation of tainted data and the associated compute number, you can make a map between the byte label and compute number. Then the only remaining step is to map back from bytes in the file to pixels in the image; I used an input file in BMP format so that the correspondence between pixels <-> bytes would be fairly direct. All this is implemented using PANDA [1], which has nice facilities for dynamic taint analysis. I just recorded Paint Shop Pro opening the currency image, and then replayed with the taint analysis to generate the raw data used for that image. The limitation currently is that the granularity is not great (you can see that there are relatively large rectangular sections of the image with the same compute number). My guess is that this is because a lot of image processing algorithms at the lowest level end up being "multiply the image data matrix by this other matrix and pick out the nonzero entries" or some such -- so all the data there has the same amount of computation done on it. But apparently there is some sort of multi-pass algorithm at work here, which gives rise to the differing amounts of computation done on each region. I'm looking at ways to improve the granularity right now, possibly by incorporating the magnitude of the transformation on the data somehow. [1] https://github.com/moyix/panda https://github.com/moyix/panda
- Zarkonnen 11y agoAh, good old Markus Kuhn. Always up for poking security features using any way possible. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you should read https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ which is UoC's security research blog.
- gadders 11y agoThis is not news, is it? I remember reading about this pattern of circles 5+ years ago.
- misnome 11y agoFive years? According to wikipedia it's been around since 1996.
- wereHamster 11y agoI can't find this pattern on swiss bank notes. Any idea if the swiss bank notes can be copied on xerox machines? Or do the swiss banknotes use a different pattern?
- cordite 11y agoHmm, my $1 and $2 bills don't have this, though my $5, $10, and $20 have something like this with the O's (05 for $5)