[mazlix]

I think you have a bit backwards. If you want to publish pixels on a screen there should be no assumption that they represent real events.

If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.

Also since no one likes RAW footage it should probably just be you post your edited version which may have "AI" upscaling / de-noising / motion blur fixing etc, AND you can post a link to your cryptographically signed verifiable RAW footage.

Of course there's still ways around that like your footage could just be a camera being pointed at an 8k screen or something but at least you make some serious hurdles and have a reasonable argument to the video being a result of photons bouncing off real objects hitting your camera sensor.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.

At which point nobody could verify anything that happened with any existing camera, including all past events as of today and all future events captured with any existing camera.

Then someone will publish a way to extract the key from some new camera model, both allowing anyone to forge anything by extracting a key and using it to sign whatever they want, and calling into question everything actually taken with that camera model/manufacturer.

Meanwhile cheap cameras will continue to be made that don't even support RAW, and people will capture real events with them because they were in hand when the events unexpectedly happened. Which is the most important use case because footage taken by a staff photographer at a large media company with a professional camera can already be authenticated by a big corporation, specifically the large media company.

[miki123211]

also the three letter agencies (not just from the US) will have access to private keys of at least some manufacturers, allowing them to authenticate fake events and sow chaos by strategically leaking keys for cameras that recorded something they really don't like.

[eek2121]

For all the folks that bash the United States for "reasons" this one gave me a chuckle. Our handling of privacy and data and such is absolute ass, but at least we *can* hide our data from big government with little repercussion in most cases (translation: you aren't actively being investigated for a crime that a judge isn't aware of)

Of course that says nothing about the issues of corruption of judges in the court system, but that is a "relatively" new issues that DOES absolutely need to be addressed.

(Shoot one could argue that the way certain folks are behaving right now is in itself unconstitutional and those folks should be booted)

Countries all over the world (EVEN IN EUROPE WITH THE GDPR) are a lot less "gracious" with anonymous communication. The UK actually has been trying to outlaw private encryption, for a while now, as an example, but there are worse examples from certain other countries. You can find them by examining their political system, most (all? I did quit a bit of research, but also was not interested in spending a ton of time on this topic) are "conservative leaning"

Note that I'm not talking just about existing policy, but countries that are continually trying to enact new policy.

Just like the US has "guarantees" on free speech, the right to vote, etc. The world needs guaranteed access to freedom of speech, religion, right to vote, healthcare, food, water, shelter, electricity, and medical care. I don't know of a single country in the world, including the US, that does anywhere close to a good of job with that.

I'm actually hoping that Ukraine is given both the motive and opportunity to push the boundaries in that regard. If you've been following some of the policy stuff, it is a step in the right direction. I 100% know they won't even come close to getting the job done, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. I definitely do not support this war, but with all of the death and destruction, at least there is a tiny little pinprick of light...

...Even if a single country in the world got everything right, we still need to find a way to unite everyone.

Our time in this universe is limited and our time on earth more-so. We should have been working together 60 years ago for a viable off-planet colony and related stuff. If the world ended tomorrow, humanity would cease to exist. You need over 100,000 people to sustain the human race in the event a catastrophic event wipes almost everyone out. Even if we had 1,000 people in space, our species would be doomed.

I am really super surprised that basic survival needs are NOT on the table when we are all arguing about religion, abortion, guns, etc. Like really?

[tsimionescu]

> We should have been working together 60 years ago for a viable off-planet colony and related stuff. If the world ended tomorrow, humanity would cease to exist. You need over 100,000 people to sustain the human race in the event a catastrophic event wipes almost everyone out.

We are hundreds of years away from the kind of technology you would need for a viable fully self-sustainable off-world colony that houses 100k or more humans. We couldn't even build something close to one in Antarctica.

This kind of colony would need to span half of Mars to actually have access to all the resources it needs to build all of the high-tech gear they would require to just not die of asphixiation. And they would need top-tier universities to actually have people capable of designing and building those high-tech systems, and media companies, and gigantic farms to make not just food but bioplastics and on and on.

Starting 60 years earlier on a project that would take a millennium is ultimately irrelevant.

Not to mention, nothing we could possibly do on Earth would make it even a tenth as hard to live here than on Mars. Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere. And Mars is still the most hospitable other celestial body in the solar system.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Nuclear wars, the worse bio-engineered weapons, super volcanoes - it's much, much easier to create tech that would allow us to survive and thrive after all of these than it is to create tech for humans to survive on a frozen irradiated dusty planet with next to no atmosphere.

This is the best argument I've heard for why we should do it. Once you can survive on Mars you've created the technology to survive whatever happens on Earth.

[shafyy]

> I am really super surprised that basic survival needs are NOT on the table when we are all arguing about religion, abortion, guns, etc. Like really?

Most people in the world struggle to feed themselves and their families. This is the basic survival need. Do you think they fucking care what happens to humantiy in 100k years? Stop drinking that transhumanism kool-aid, give your windows a good cleaning and look at what's happening in the real world, every day.

[parthianshotgun]

The transhumanist/effective altruism types really do a great service in making me chuckle. I wonder where that attitude comes from, lack of community?

[rrr_oh_man]

Narcissism

[LtWorf]

> but at least we can hide our data from big government with little repercussion

They come and ask. You say no? They find cocaine in your home.

You aren't in jail because you refused to hand out data. You are in jail because you were dealing drugs.

[robertlagrant]

I think at minimum YouTube could tag existing footage uploaded before 2015 as very unlikely to be AI generated.

[bandrami]

The first (acknowledged) deepfake video is from 1997

[BeFlatXIII]

Hence, "unlikely" instead of "guaranteed real."

[wpietri]

I think doing this right goes the other direction. What we're going to end up with is a focus on provenance.

We already understand that with text. We know that to verify words, we have to trace it back to the source, and then we evaluate the credibility of the source.

There have been periods where recording technology ran ahead of faking technology, so we tended to just trust photos, audio, and video (even though they could always be used to paint misleading pictures). But that era is over. New technological tricks may push back the tide a little here and there, but mostly we're going to end up relying on, "Who says this is real, and why should we believe them?"

[tivert]

> If you want to publish proof of an event, you should have some pixels on a screen along with some cryptographic signature from a device sensor that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony / etc. being "in on it" to fake.

That idea doesn't work, at all.

Even assuming a perfect technical implementation, all you'd have to do to defeat it is launder your fake image through a camera's image sensor. And there's even a term for doing that: telecine.

With the right jig, a HiDPI display, and typical photo editing (no one shows you raw, full-res images), I don't think such a signature forgery would detectable by a layman or maybe even an expert.

[teaearlgraycold]

I worked in device attestation at Android. It’s not robust enough to put our understanding of reality in. Fine for preventing API abuse but that’s it.

[dataflow]

> I worked in device attestation at Android. It’s not robust enough to put our understanding of reality in.

I don't follow. Isn't software backward compatibility a big reason why Android device attestation is so hard? For cameras, why can't the camera sensor output a digital signature of the sensor data along with the actual sensor data?

[qbit42]

I am not sure how verifying that a photo was unaltered after capture from a camera if very useful though. You could just take a photo of a high-resolution display when an edited photo on it

[dataflow]

That wouldn't look nearly realistic. And it would be significantly harder to achieve for most people anyway.

[michaelt]

It's true that 1990s pirated videos where someone snuck a handheld camera into the cinema were often very low quality.

But did you know large portions of The Mandalorian were produced with the actors acting in front of an enormous, high-resolution LED screen [1] instead of building a set, or using greenscreen?

It turns out pointing a camera at a screen can actually be pretty realistic, if you know what you're doing.

And I suspect the pr agencies interested in flooding the internet with images of Politician A kicking a puppy and Politician B rescuing flood victims do, in fact, know what they're doing.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-and-il...

[dataflow]

That's a freaking massive LED wall... with professional cinematography on top. If you believed my comment was intended to imply that I believed that's somehow impossible, well... you and I have a very different understanding of what it means to "just take a picture of a high-resolution display"...

[teaearlgraycold]

There's been a slow march to requiring hardware-backed security. I believe all new devices from the last couple of years need a TEE or a dedicated security chip.

At least with Android there are too many OEMs and they screw up too often. Bad actors will specifically seek out these devices, even if they're not very technically skilled. The skilled bad actors will 0-day the devices with the weakest security. For political reasons, even if a batch of a million devices are compromised it's hard to quickly ban them because that means those phones can no longer watch Netflix etc.

[dataflow]

But you don't have to ban them for this use case? You just need something opportunistic, not ironclad. An entity like Google could publish those devices' certificates as "we can't verify the integrity of these devices' cameras", and let the public deal with that information (or not) as they wish. Customers who care about proving integrity (e.g., the media) will seek the verifiable devices. Those who don't, won't. I can't tell if I'm missing something here, but this seems much more straightforward than the software attestation problem Android has been dealing with so far.

[johnny22]

Woudln't that prevent most folks from being able to root their devices without making the camera lesser than everyone else's camera?

[dataflow]

What does this have to do with root? The camera chip would be the one signing the data flowing through it, not the Android kernel.

[miki123211]

> that would necessitate atleast a big corporation like Nikon / Sony etc. being "in on it" to fake

Or an APT (AKA advanced persistent teenager) with their parents camera and more time than they know what to do with.

[mr_toad]

So you could never edit the video?