Well if you measure the amount of regulation compared to the development of the technological understanding it seems less and less qualified opinions constitute the basis for regulations.

Example: at one time those that made regulation had some history in the industry they suggested regulation upon. Now there are abstract and derived notions on what should or should not be based upon, white papers and expert opinion reports that are submitted to regulators to judge. As it turns out the regulators are lobbied by those with vested interests, contorting even the best suggestions.

Eventually technological break throughs will not be made public and will be used exclusively for small groups organized to keep government out and maintain their advantage. Imagine if you will a group of folks that found they could use phone lines to tranmit complex sets of data and messages in real time, thereby leveraging the phone system already in place, but did not tell anyone. In fact no one had a Personal Computer because the same group had it as their own. The world would be the same as it was in 1970, only a very few folks would have the information, for what purpose, I do not know.

Heh! What if the bad guys keep using the equipment they already have? I guess this only starts to work, after all the older equipment wears out.

I guess these sorts of ideas will make the world a better place for our grandchildren... or should I say, enrich some of them and impoverish and subjugate others.

The really valuable technologies are the ones that enrich the current generation and systematically enslave future generations. Or enrich the population within one political unit, by systematically tapping people far away. You gotta hand it to the Europeans, they really know how to work from the high-level Requirements,

Todd

As a side note not to be taken too seriously: the EU has understood that technology can't fix problems ;-)

In the FC we often say: first comes physic, then economics, and then laws. Which is to say that physics drives economics and economics drives laws.

So hopefully the EU hasn't taken an alternative view that they can fix technology with law...

The EU is trying hard to normalize any- and everything (even dumpster format). The reason is that they want to enable companies to work pan-European. Whether that makes sense is a whole different matter. Where the US started off as individuals that believed in money the EU started off as an economic society and it still shows even if many European citizens nowadays believe in the political power of the Union.

Uh, one more thing I almost forgot: the current PhotoShop and PaintShop Pro versions don't allow scanning and working with banknotes for some time. There was mention of this on January 8, 2004 on the German Heise Newsticker forum (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/43456).

Over on cryptography@metzdowd.com, John Gilmore writes:

My proposal, when this stuff surfaced a few months ago, was that we build two filter modules for the GIMP:

* One *detects* the banknote pattern, putting up a little constellation symbol or currency symbol in the corner of the GUI, or optionally some sort of unobtrusive pop-up. And does nothing else.

* One *inserts* the banknote pattern into existing images. This makes them unprocessable by PhotoShop and other government-monkeywrenched proprietary software or printers. Isn't mandatory DRM wonderful?

In my malicious moments, I think GIMP should ship with both of these filters turned on by default.

A third filter would remove the banknote pattern from images -- or would cripple it sufficiently well that it is not detectable by other software.

Every country is going to have to work out for itself whether it thinks that free countries can ban expressive works such as software. Though we set early precedents in the US (Bernstein & Junger), this is still not considered a settled question (or DeCSS and DVD X-Copy would not have lost in court). The less honest judges are still willing to twist fundamental principles, in order to get the result that Hollywood wants. Now in the EU we'll see the first round of TRUE mischief that the wrong answer can cause.

John

Also on cryptography@metzdowd.com, Richard Clayton writes:

The circles act as a "do not copy" for recent models of colour photocopier. They are NOT the mechanism involved in the latest round of software detection by Adobe et al .. hence the fun is limited :(

The circles have been on UK and EU notes for some time, you can also see them all over the latest US $20 bill. It is suggested that there is more information to be extracted from the way that the basic five circle units are combined together (said to identify the issuing bank), but no firm results are known.

Just the five circles on an otherwise blank sheet are definitely sufficient to cause the particular copier experimented with to indicate the presence of currency. ie: it's all true :)

Markus Kuhn originally worked out the nature of the pattern in February 2002. It is now believed to have been invented by Omron, but this is hearsay :( not something citable.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf

-- richard Richard Clayton