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Hypothetical: An anonymous source releases CCTV footage that appears to show a public figure urinating on a homeless person. Do you really believe that we'll al

Hypothetical: An anonymous source releases CCTV footage that appears to show a public figure urinating on a homeless person. Do you really believe that we'll all ignore that footage because the signature doesn't belong to a major news organisation?

bilbo0s 7y ago
Yes. We will. Because the future us will be conditioned to do so by our cryptographically integrated devices. There'll be so much fake video out there that we'll get accustomed to seeing it on our devices with the big huge "fake" sign flashing on it. (Or, again, even worse, it will not have the "real" sign flashing on it that the video from validated publishers and cameras will have.) We can be conditioned to do this extremely quickly. Again, ActiveX is what made all the plugin security warnings start popping up everywhere. But after a while, plugins like flash and unity even fell to the reality of us having been conditioned to click "Do Not Run Plugin" whenever we saw that warning. Are we better off without flash and unity? Probably, but that's beside the point. The point is that masses can be conditioned to implement their own control when you set up a system where only data meeting a certain standard is accepted. And it's a hardware standard. Consider very carefully the position over us that such a system would put hardware makers and those with power over hardware makers in. Now again, I'm not arguing that fakes are not a problem. They are indeed a problem. Just saying we should go about solving the problem with extreme care and caution.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  So you're arguing that at some point in the future, nobody will give even the slightest credence to amateur footage captured on camera phones, small business CCTV systems and a million other sorts of non-corporately-owned camera? Because I think that future is worse than the one that's full of fake video.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Because I think that future is worse than the one that's full of fake video... That's my point. Going down the hardware cryptography path certainly does solve the problem. I'm not here to try and claim that it doesn't. The issue is, 10 or 20 years down the road, how have humans been conditioned because of the fact that only certain cameras can be validated to be real? If cryptography takes over, 20 years from now, no one is going to convict any guy of rape because they see him on a non-signed camera video, or a non-signed CCTV feed. (And don't get me wrong, they shouldn't convict the guy if that's the so called evidence the prosecutor has.) What I'm asking is that everyone take a deep breath, slow down for a minute, and just think about the implications of that. And I was being generous in the scenario I laid out here. In reality, I don't believe it would take 20 years to condition us to dismiss non-signed video out of hand.
  - xienze 7y ago
    > So you're arguing that at some point in the future, nobody will give even the slightest credence to amateur footage captured on camera phones I think that's the end goal of all the "deep fake" hysteria we're being primed with. In the future if some damning video of a politician or other elite member of society pops up the defense will simply be "well you can't rule out that it's a fake, look, it's not signed and it's not in our database of trusted videos!"
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      Or the end goal of the "fake news" scare in general (not to say that there aren't sites that specialize in making up news.) To combat "fake news," you start whitelisting "true news," and defining it by the influence of the provider, not the content. In the end, you just end up with state news sources. related: It's telling that "factchecking" isn't a dialogue between various authorities, but instead just a bunch of weird private judicial systems with no appeals courts, selected and assigned to specific stories by internet aggregation intermediaries. Eventually, this can't help but shake out as stories being divided into two categories: factual and banned from distribution. I sadly feel that we're about 10 years away from licensing journalists with a security clearance-type process that must be sponsored by an approved outlet. The PropOrNot at the Post shook me a bit.
      - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
        1st amendment won't allow that, but then again people seem to want to throw out the 2nd without a constitutional convention so it's not impossible. I can see the arguments now, "it's the freedom of the press, are you the press? Then why do you have a own a fully automatic printing press?"
bob_doggo 7y ago
We probably won't ignore that. So, the "signature solution" doesn't solve every problem, but I would still argue that it solves enough problems, that it would be worth spending resources on trying to implement it.

bilbo0s 7y ago

Yes. We will. Because the future us will be conditioned to do so by our cryptographically integrated devices. There'll be so much fake video out there that we'll get accustomed to seeing it on our devices with the big huge "fake" sign flashing on it. (Or, again, even worse, it will not have the "real" sign flashing on it that the video from validated publishers and cameras will have.) We can be conditioned to do this extremely quickly. Again, ActiveX is what made all the plugin security warnings start popping up everywhere. But after a while, plugins like flash and unity even fell to the reality of us having been conditioned to click "Do Not Run Plugin" whenever we saw that warning. Are we better off without flash and unity? Probably, but that's beside the point. The point is that masses can be conditioned to implement their own control when you set up a system where only data meeting a certain standard is accepted. And it's a hardware standard. Consider very carefully the position over us that such a system would put hardware makers and those with power over hardware makers in. Now again, I'm not arguing that fakes are not a problem. They are indeed a problem. Just saying we should go about solving the problem with extreme care and caution.

jdietrich 7y ago
So you're arguing that at some point in the future, nobody will give even the slightest credence to amateur footage captured on camera phones, small business CCTV systems and a million other sorts of non-corporately-owned camera? Because I think that future is worse than the one that's full of fake video.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Because I think that future is worse than the one that's full of fake video... That's my point. Going down the hardware cryptography path certainly does solve the problem. I'm not here to try and claim that it doesn't. The issue is, 10 or 20 years down the road, how have humans been conditioned because of the fact that only certain cameras can be validated to be real? If cryptography takes over, 20 years from now, no one is going to convict any guy of rape because they see him on a non-signed camera video, or a non-signed CCTV feed. (And don't get me wrong, they shouldn't convict the guy if that's the so called evidence the prosecutor has.) What I'm asking is that everyone take a deep breath, slow down for a minute, and just think about the implications of that. And I was being generous in the scenario I laid out here. In reality, I don't believe it would take 20 years to condition us to dismiss non-signed video out of hand.
- xienze 7y ago
  > So you're arguing that at some point in the future, nobody will give even the slightest credence to amateur footage captured on camera phones I think that's the end goal of all the "deep fake" hysteria we're being primed with. In the future if some damning video of a politician or other elite member of society pops up the defense will simply be "well you can't rule out that it's a fake, look, it's not signed and it's not in our database of trusted videos!"
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    Or the end goal of the "fake news" scare in general (not to say that there aren't sites that specialize in making up news.) To combat "fake news," you start whitelisting "true news," and defining it by the influence of the provider, not the content. In the end, you just end up with state news sources. related: It's telling that "factchecking" isn't a dialogue between various authorities, but instead just a bunch of weird private judicial systems with no appeals courts, selected and assigned to specific stories by internet aggregation intermediaries. Eventually, this can't help but shake out as stories being divided into two categories: factual and banned from distribution. I sadly feel that we're about 10 years away from licensing journalists with a security clearance-type process that must be sponsored by an approved outlet. The PropOrNot at the Post shook me a bit.
    - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      1st amendment won't allow that, but then again people seem to want to throw out the 2nd without a constitutional convention so it's not impossible. I can see the arguments now, "it's the freedom of the press, are you the press? Then why do you have a own a fully automatic printing press?"

bob_doggo 7y ago

We probably won't ignore that. So, the "signature solution" doesn't solve every problem, but I would still argue that it solves enough problems, that it would be worth spending resources on trying to implement it.