[boredguy8]

Can someone clarify for me:

1) Why do manufacturers do this? Is it for their own internal warranty control / tracking, or is there a broader federal mandate motivating this?

2) The dots are only useful in after-the-fact analysis, correct? If I print something and then there's reason to suspect me they can print something, compare, and verify, but there's no mechanism to find the initial document and find the printer, correct?

[d2viant]

It was intended as a tracking mechanism against counterfeit currency.

[jamesbressi]

Isn't that just a beautiful explanation for security measures? Kind of like suspending or limiting Miranda Rights because of terror.

[motters]

That's the explanation I've heard given in the past, although I don't know if it's the official one given. The East German Stasi also used to mark typewriters so that they could tell who wrote subversive articles.

[megablast]

On top of this, a number of applications, like Photoshop, will detect that you are trying to print out a US note, and will not allow it.

This seems like a lot of effort to prevent the stupidest form of counterfeiting, and doing nothing against the real problem.

[hugh3]

On the other hand, if they didn't put in a lot of effort to prevent the stupidest form of counterfeiting, then the stupidest form of counterfeiting would be the real problem.

[Devilboy]

I seriously doubt that this helps at all. If someone tried to print bank notes from Photoshop and fails, they'll just try some other graphics app. I'm pretty sure Gimp and many other apps will work just as well as Photoshop would have.

[thefool]

But this isn't govt mandatated right? Its just a printer manufactures internal policy as I understand it.

[there]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation is also recognized in many photo-editing software packages like photoshop. not government mandated, but i'm sure the software companies get leaned on to support it.

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=vnc6rm&s=5

[michaelfairley]

Re 2: Supposedly the manufacturer is supposed to keep track of which printers go to which stores, and the stores are supposed to keep track of the credit card used to purchase the printers.

[tibbon]

Hmm. Note to self: buy printers with non-sequential currency.

Then again, I wonder if they'll stop accepting cash for printer purchases if enough people did that (like they did with iPads)