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The obvious worry about this technology is disinformation being spread, misrepresenting who people are and what they have done or said. But it also gives everyo

The obvious worry about this technology is disinformation being spread, misrepresenting who people are and what they have done or said. But it also gives everyone deniability. If someone catches a powerful person assaulting someone, and actually has a video of it, they can just say it was a really good fake. How can we know?

krastanov 8y ago
Trust journalists with a good track record, which is the way we as a society decide whether whistle blowers are to be believed. I get that we tech people dislike relying on humans, and the libertarian among us feel particularly uncomfortable trusting the media, but there are professional investigative journalists that have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place by uncovering the truth. And they have had to deal with similar issues since forever (other types of forgeries have existed for a while). We fight this by having less partisanship and stronger free press.
- kakarot 8y ago
  > Trust journalists with a good track record Really wish we could find a solution that didn't involve trust... rather, cryptographic proof.
  - cpitman 8y ago
    Unless you can find a way to weave cryptography into light, it will always be possible to trick a video camera into recording something that is "fake". Trust is what society is built upon, we're not going to get away from it now.
    - kakarot 8y ago
      Yes, I don't know if this problem can be solved, but it would be folly if no one was trying to crack it. We should always pursue ways to remove trust from vital social systems.
      - topmonk 8y ago
        How about a government enforced mandate that everyone gets a secure computer embedded into their skull in a way that removal will kill them, with a camera that continuously records video, sound and GPS positioning? This could then digitally signed and timestamped by the individual's computer. Then, when a questionable event happens, the video of all participants and anyone nearby can be replayed. Then, all videos of participants can be replayed to make sure they match up, and the video of the time leading up to the event could be scrutinized. Furthermore any one who visited that area in the recent past could be checked to make sure they didn't create some sort of hologram or something that the participants watched rather than the real thing.
  - krastanov 8y ago
    I do not get that point of view. You still need to trust the intention behind whatever is cryptographicly verified. You will never have a verification of what happens inside of someone's skull (or for the scifi counter arguments: inside of whatever else they store their thoughts in). Having cryptography without trust in some form of desire for teamwork in your fellow humans defeats the whole purpose of cryptography... But I admit this is more about my ideology and reasonable people can disagree about it.
    - kakarot 8y ago
      I just hope we can figure out a way to create watermarks, like maybe some kind of hash sum incorporating an asymmetric key which is injected by the camera / device, which can provide verification of source and which cannot be overwritten. Possibly could involve some kind of blockchain tech similar to https://proofofexistence.com https://proofofexistence.com. It doesn't solve all of the problems but at least we can begin establishing a record of source. The point is, something needs to be done to augment the trust we have in journalists because it's easy to trick or buy people out.
      - krastanov 8y ago
        You really do not need anything that complicated (definitely not a block chain, when you only need the merkle tree). All of this is exactly what cryptographic signatures are for, a tech that is decades old. And as mentioned in the above comments, it does not help with analog loopholes and trust in the person being photographed.
        kakarot 8y ago
        The blockchain provides an immutable public record. Yes, not necessary but still an interesting approach and actually a decent fit for a blockchain. A blockchain might still be an over fit but it's useful if I claim to have an undoctored video at a certain point in time but don't want to release it, immediately, and need a distributed way to validate that claim. > And as mentioned in the above comments, it does not help with analog loopholes and trust in the person being photographed. Like I said in my above comment, it doesn't solve all of the problems but at least we can begin establishing a record of source.
- phyller 8y ago
  I would love this to be the case. My problem with this approach is that every single news report that I have actually had personal knowledge of has been ridiculously flawed. I just can't bring myself to believe that there is some protected elite cadre of journalists I should trust when 100% of my actual experience has been the opposite. Their direct incentives are getting sales (and now clicks), which doesn't appear to be highly correlated with accuracy. Additionally, my experience in college was that it wasn't the best and the brightest going into that field, though I deeply hope that it was a skewed sample, and believe that there are many deeply intelligent people working there. However, I think it likely that many people are not drawn to the field for the pursuit of pure objective truth, but because they have a particular agenda and want to enlighten the world with it. There is a quote about a logical fallacy that I can't quite remember, it goes along the lines of the following: You read an article about something with which you are deeply familiar. You laugh to yourself at the childish misconceptions of the journalist. You then turn the page to something you know little about, and assume that everything that is written is true. That doesn't make sense.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    IME, in most things I have personal knowledge of the better news sources do a pretty good job; they rarely have significant errors, for example. The lesser, non-partisan sources also rarely have significant errors, but they cover issues with less sophistication. My most common objections are that they don't go deep enough (but if it's something I already know about then I'm not the intended audience - the NY Times isn't going to cover tech issues as deeply as I'd like) and that what I see as important questions are left unanswered and sometimes unasked. On the other hand, I should't presume my own superior intelligence - if the journalist and I disagree, perhaps I'm not the one in the right; the smartest people I know often disagree with me about things like which questions are important. Beyond that, I'm not sure stereotypes of any large group of human beings are worth addressing, other than to point them out for what they are.
  - krastanov 8y ago
    You are talking about this anecdote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect And I partially agree! But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I am a physicist myself and have seen how the Gell-Mann effect has become less problematic over time, especially in respected journals that want to be taken seriously by scientists: Just make a decisive effort to 1) go out of your bubble and 2) learn about logical fallacies.
- leibwiht 8y ago
  >Trust journalists with a good track record Do these journalists work for large mainstream media corporations that are all owned by a shockingly small number of partisans, by any chance?
  - krastanov 8y ago
    This is a very lazy way to shut down a conversation. Huffington Post and Fox News are indeed owned by partisans and are partisan themselves, but even such cheap shots have respectable journalists (Smith and Wallace at Fox for instance). WaPo is owned by a partisan but has a good track record. NPR has many underwriters but that does not stop them from having good investigative journalists. Do you have a complaint different from "It is not perfect so I do not believe in any of it"?
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      > WaPo ... has a good track record. Sure, if you go back to the Watergate investigation. Their track record in recent years is abysmal. They are basically the pseudo-official mouthpiece of the U.S. Democratic Party, and somewhere between the New York Times and the Huffington Post in terms of seriousness.
      - krastanov 8y ago
        If we are sticking to soundbites I can simply respond with "Reality has a liberal bias". When facts aling with a policy idea this makes the policy good, not the facts wrong (and we should applaud both parties when they do it). I do not read every single article in WaPo but their front page and push notifications are most of the time fact based.
        umanwizard 8y ago
        I said nothing about liberal ideology. I mentioned a specific organization: the U.S. Democratic Party. That party hated Bernie Sanders (who is plenty “liberal”[1]) nearly as much as it hated Trump, and both were covered very negatively by the Washington Post. I don’t know why you assume I’m criticizing the Post from a right-wing perspective. Perhaps you are too steeped in the two-sided U.S. political culture, where disliking one party must mean liking the other? By the way, reporting objectively correct facts does not make a publication unbiased or serious. Even if everything TMZ reports about celebrity relationships is true, do you consider them a serious news source? Deciding which facts to emphasize is just as important as telling the truth. [1] To head off in advance any off-topic responses: this is true regardless of whether you mean “liberal” in the American or European sense.

krastanov 8y ago

Trust journalists with a good track record, which is the way we as a society decide whether whistle blowers are to be believed. I get that we tech people dislike relying on humans, and the libertarian among us feel particularly uncomfortable trusting the media, but there are professional investigative journalists that have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place by uncovering the truth. And they have had to deal with similar issues since forever (other types of forgeries have existed for a while). We fight this by having less partisanship and stronger free press.

kakarot 8y ago
> Trust journalists with a good track record Really wish we could find a solution that didn't involve trust... rather, cryptographic proof.
- cpitman 8y ago
  Unless you can find a way to weave cryptography into light, it will always be possible to trick a video camera into recording something that is "fake". Trust is what society is built upon, we're not going to get away from it now.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    Yes, I don't know if this problem can be solved, but it would be folly if no one was trying to crack it. We should always pursue ways to remove trust from vital social systems.
    - topmonk 8y ago
      How about a government enforced mandate that everyone gets a secure computer embedded into their skull in a way that removal will kill them, with a camera that continuously records video, sound and GPS positioning? This could then digitally signed and timestamped by the individual's computer. Then, when a questionable event happens, the video of all participants and anyone nearby can be replayed. Then, all videos of participants can be replayed to make sure they match up, and the video of the time leading up to the event could be scrutinized. Furthermore any one who visited that area in the recent past could be checked to make sure they didn't create some sort of hologram or something that the participants watched rather than the real thing.
- krastanov 8y ago
  I do not get that point of view. You still need to trust the intention behind whatever is cryptographicly verified. You will never have a verification of what happens inside of someone's skull (or for the scifi counter arguments: inside of whatever else they store their thoughts in). Having cryptography without trust in some form of desire for teamwork in your fellow humans defeats the whole purpose of cryptography... But I admit this is more about my ideology and reasonable people can disagree about it.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    I just hope we can figure out a way to create watermarks, like maybe some kind of hash sum incorporating an asymmetric key which is injected by the camera / device, which can provide verification of source and which cannot be overwritten. Possibly could involve some kind of blockchain tech similar to https://proofofexistence.com https://proofofexistence.com. It doesn't solve all of the problems but at least we can begin establishing a record of source. The point is, something needs to be done to augment the trust we have in journalists because it's easy to trick or buy people out.
    - krastanov 8y ago
      You really do not need anything that complicated (definitely not a block chain, when you only need the merkle tree). All of this is exactly what cryptographic signatures are for, a tech that is decades old. And as mentioned in the above comments, it does not help with analog loopholes and trust in the person being photographed.
      - kakarot 8y ago
        The blockchain provides an immutable public record. Yes, not necessary but still an interesting approach and actually a decent fit for a blockchain. A blockchain might still be an over fit but it's useful if I claim to have an undoctored video at a certain point in time but don't want to release it, immediately, and need a distributed way to validate that claim. > And as mentioned in the above comments, it does not help with analog loopholes and trust in the person being photographed. Like I said in my above comment, it doesn't solve all of the problems but at least we can begin establishing a record of source.
phyller 8y ago
I would love this to be the case. My problem with this approach is that every single news report that I have actually had personal knowledge of has been ridiculously flawed. I just can't bring myself to believe that there is some protected elite cadre of journalists I should trust when 100% of my actual experience has been the opposite. Their direct incentives are getting sales (and now clicks), which doesn't appear to be highly correlated with accuracy. Additionally, my experience in college was that it wasn't the best and the brightest going into that field, though I deeply hope that it was a skewed sample, and believe that there are many deeply intelligent people working there. However, I think it likely that many people are not drawn to the field for the pursuit of pure objective truth, but because they have a particular agenda and want to enlighten the world with it. There is a quote about a logical fallacy that I can't quite remember, it goes along the lines of the following: You read an article about something with which you are deeply familiar. You laugh to yourself at the childish misconceptions of the journalist. You then turn the page to something you know little about, and assume that everything that is written is true. That doesn't make sense.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  IME, in most things I have personal knowledge of the better news sources do a pretty good job; they rarely have significant errors, for example. The lesser, non-partisan sources also rarely have significant errors, but they cover issues with less sophistication. My most common objections are that they don't go deep enough (but if it's something I already know about then I'm not the intended audience - the NY Times isn't going to cover tech issues as deeply as I'd like) and that what I see as important questions are left unanswered and sometimes unasked. On the other hand, I should't presume my own superior intelligence - if the journalist and I disagree, perhaps I'm not the one in the right; the smartest people I know often disagree with me about things like which questions are important. Beyond that, I'm not sure stereotypes of any large group of human beings are worth addressing, other than to point them out for what they are.
- krastanov 8y ago
  You are talking about this anecdote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect And I partially agree! But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I am a physicist myself and have seen how the Gell-Mann effect has become less problematic over time, especially in respected journals that want to be taken seriously by scientists: Just make a decisive effort to 1) go out of your bubble and 2) learn about logical fallacies.
leibwiht 8y ago
>Trust journalists with a good track record Do these journalists work for large mainstream media corporations that are all owned by a shockingly small number of partisans, by any chance?
- krastanov 8y ago
  This is a very lazy way to shut down a conversation. Huffington Post and Fox News are indeed owned by partisans and are partisan themselves, but even such cheap shots have respectable journalists (Smith and Wallace at Fox for instance). WaPo is owned by a partisan but has a good track record. NPR has many underwriters but that does not stop them from having good investigative journalists. Do you have a complaint different from "It is not perfect so I do not believe in any of it"?
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    > WaPo ... has a good track record. Sure, if you go back to the Watergate investigation. Their track record in recent years is abysmal. They are basically the pseudo-official mouthpiece of the U.S. Democratic Party, and somewhere between the New York Times and the Huffington Post in terms of seriousness.
    - krastanov 8y ago
      If we are sticking to soundbites I can simply respond with "Reality has a liberal bias". When facts aling with a policy idea this makes the policy good, not the facts wrong (and we should applaud both parties when they do it). I do not read every single article in WaPo but their front page and push notifications are most of the time fact based.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        I said nothing about liberal ideology. I mentioned a specific organization: the U.S. Democratic Party. That party hated Bernie Sanders (who is plenty “liberal”[1]) nearly as much as it hated Trump, and both were covered very negatively by the Washington Post. I don’t know why you assume I’m criticizing the Post from a right-wing perspective. Perhaps you are too steeped in the two-sided U.S. political culture, where disliking one party must mean liking the other? By the way, reporting objectively correct facts does not make a publication unbiased or serious. Even if everything TMZ reports about celebrity relationships is true, do you consider them a serious news source? Deciding which facts to emphasize is just as important as telling the truth. [1] To head off in advance any off-topic responses: this is true regardless of whether you mean “liberal” in the American or European sense.