Dear Gunnar,
Many thanks for the ZDnet URL. It gives a clearer picture of the technology. The discussion on ZDnet seems to suggest a way of apparently bypassing the code by removing part or all of the Digimarc plugin folder.
This sorts out some of the practicalities in this case. It leaves, however, lots of other unaddressed issues - political, social, ethical, commercial, infomatic, creative and technical.
One example is around resources. Designing graphic images is a resource heavy process that is frequently up against the performance limits of the computers being used. High performance computers have high lease and capital costs. Pattern recognition is one of the most resouce hungry aspects of graphic manipulation processes. To identify an image at any scale, orientation, pixel depth or colour gamut that might be part of any other image is not straightforward. Undertaking pattern recognition as a background task would be expected to give a performance handicap in the image managing tasks in which it operates. Who pays for providing the higher performance computing system to compensate or pays the increased designer costs associated with the reduced performance? There are some ethical questions when such a commercial performance hit is imposed on businesses - especially when the imposition of these processes involves agencies that wield significant power and monopoly . Through Adobe and others' actions, businesses using Adobe's software are paying the cost of the counterfeiting measures while others (banking operators &government security agencies) gain for free the extensive benefits.
There are many socio-technical dimensions to the Adobe counterfeiting issue and the technological trajectory of which it is a part. It looks like this area would make one or more interesting PhD topics for candidates with a polymath bent. Addressing many of these issue requires a single individual to have good doctoral-level understanding across a complex of subject areas in science, engineering, the social sciences and philosophy.
I'm interested in the thoughts of other PhD supervisors on this issue. Many problems of design research can only be addressed though a complex of high level analyses simultaneously undertaken across the knowledge areas of multiple, often radically different, disciplines. Is it reasonable to expect some PhD candidates to have the skills of a polymath ? What are the implications for the design research field if most PhD candidates are capable only of operating from a single disciplinary perspective?
Best wishes,
Terry
===
Dr. Terence Love
Dept of Design
Curtin University
===
-----Original Message-----
From: Gunnar Swanson
Sent: 15/01/2004 5:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Big brother? New area of ethics in Design Research?
Anyone worried that Photoshop CS's blocking of the latest pics of Ol'
Hickory is just another American government plot to push everyone
around will be delighted to know that it's a united effort of US,
Canadian, European, and other banks under the banner of the Central
Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group. And it's not just the US $20 bill.
Apparently some Euro notes are rejected by the software, too. I knew
that copy machines used the scheme but apparently many color printers
have used the same detection scheme for some time.
A good introductory article is at
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/
0,39020384,39119018,00.htm
Gunnar
----
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
536 South Catalina Street
Ventura, California 93001-3625 USA
+1 805 667 2200
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
|