A few months ago, my roommate Matt got Adobe Photoshop CS and was delighted with it; as a graphic designer, he loves the newest version of anything Adobe produces. He tried to scan an image of US currency so he could photoshop it, but met with problems; it wouldn't work. Why not?

Unbeknownst to practically anyone, Adobe inserted anti-copying technology into the latest version of Photoshop which prevents it from opening images of US or European currency. The anti-copying device runs constantly, checking each image that is opened to see whether or not it is US or European currency (an algorithm checks for the existence of a five-dot pattern on the currency). This is scary stuff. Then I found an article on Slashdot which talks about this technology pervading other places. Apparently, newer HP printers won't print images of currency. An exasperated Slashdot forum reader wondered at what point CD burners would have DRM built-in to prevent them from copying protected media. In much the same way that DVD makers have decided what we may do with the product we purchased, so, too are software manufacturers doing the same thing.

On a totally different note, I was uninstalling spyware from a computer the other day, and the spyware generated a number-picture that I had to confirm in order to uninstall the software. It's the same kind of thing that Yahoo! or Hotmail uses: it asks you to tell it what word you see to prevent advertising robots from signing up for free accounts; only humans can read the text in the picture. Only this was the spyware that was defending itself from being automatically uninstalled by Ad-Aware or Spybot. The software is fighting back! It's becoming more powerful! Scary stuff. And it angers me that the spyware people are going to great lengths to prevent you from uninstalling their crap that you never asked for in the first place.