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Another useful tactic is to archive news and commentary (left and right) about current political events, both for accountability and perhaps, to prevent the rew
by fsttx 10y ago
Another useful tactic is to archive news and commentary (left and right) about current political events, both for accountability and perhaps, to prevent the rewriting of history in the era of "alternative facts".
- jl6 10y agoAnd not just archive it, but sign it, time stamp it, verify it, etc.. I see little to prevent someone using ML to auto-generate archives worth of fake history. Imagine a purported DB dump of Reddit with billions of subtlely fraudulent comments scattered throughout.
- rmc 10y agoIs there any good way to timestamp things like this?
- jl6 10y agoHash the content and store the hash in the Bitcoin blockchain.
- anc84 10y agoWhat does Bitcoin have to do with this? That seems like abuse of its blockchain.
- patrickk 10y agoImmutability. But yeah, not ideal use of the Bitcoin blockchain at least.
- tempestn 10y agoAlternatively you could publish the hash in a major newspaper.
- rmc 10y agoI don't have write access to a major newspaper. Sure, big organisations, when the political climate is right, can do things like that. What is there available for the little person?
- mortehu 10y agoSpecifically using OriginStamp[1], which aggregates multiple hashes before creating a transaction. This makes it possible for the service to scale without increasing costs or transaction volume. https://www.originstamp.org/ https://www.originstamp.org/
- jefurii 10y agoOr store it in a Git repository, the "stupid content tracker". If you have binaries use git-annex.
- verytrivial 10y agoWow, the "Stamper" by Matthew Richardson is still running! http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm This is pretty close to what you need. Getting an email with SHA256's of an archive of scrapes signed would do the trick.
- jasonjayr 10y agoThat's awesome that something like that is still running on the internet all these years! EFF, or some organization with more longevity than a single consultant should build something similar.
- petertodd 10y agoSee OpenTimestamps: https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement It timestamps to Bitcoin, and you don't need to own any Bitcoin for it to work.
- Diederich 10y agoBlockchains are good and often mentioned. But I just tweet out checksums of various things.
- DanBC 10y agoProviding diffs would be useful. A bunch of places do silent edits, sometimes making significant changes to meaning of articles. BBC does this, and it's freaking annoying.
- lorenzhs 10y agoThere was a great talk about the datamining possibilities of such an archive at 33c3. English translation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYviBstTUwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYviBstTUwo
- angry_octet 10y agoIt is not sufficient to have a record of facts when others have alternative facts. To your signed record of facts they would just introduce alternate facts with alternative signatures and claim you had made it up. Normal people don't have the tools or experience to differentiate, and the alternative facts support a story they want to believe, rather than hard truths. News media won't even mention your so-called 'real facts', facebook and twitter might not let others see them. Before you know it you'll be denounced by your neighbours, work colleagues and friends as a traitor, a madman. You'll lose your job, or your partner will. There may be a show trial and public denunciation. This has all happened before: the USSR, McCarthy. If you don't want that you need an alternate means of distributing real facts, and countering fake ones. It has to be hosted so deeply in our tech infrastructure that it can't be firewalled or jammed. It needs to be accessible covertly. And it needs to record all the alternative facts too, because they like to change their facts. Let's call it Samizdat.
- wybiral 10y agoThe US government can't make all of the real scientists out there just disappear. Climate models have an impact on many different fields of research and unless there's a total shutdown of science (which seems absurd) those people and facts will still be there. There's a portion of the population who's wanted to deny climate change for a long time and I believe they'll accept the alt-facts to justify their position. But I'm skeptical about the efficacy of successfully silencing existing news groups and the majority of scientists. Has anything like that ever been successful in the connected world? That being said, we do absolutely need to make protect our internet from censorship.
- sandworm101 10y agoGo look at any list of recently-cancelled television shows. You will be shocked at the number of them that you liked, but have now slipped from your mind. Public memory is fickle and it is very possible to remove even widespread facts. Example: a few years back a uk submarine was stuck high aground. As the tide went out the prop was exposed. I and a billion other people saw it live on bbc news. (Blue poly fins, at least 10 inside a housing). Good luck trying to find that image now. It has been sucessfully removed. The internet isnt the great memory well we all want it to be. With effort, facts can be changed, events scrubbed.
- tostrstrudel 10y agoI created a script that allows for periodic archiving of the text of the top articles on several large news sites. There's a configuration file that allows for selecting any RSS feed to pull from. https://github.com/xtruan/newsbot https://github.com/xtruan/newsbot