5 ms·

The openness of the raw video is great, but comes at a cost as well. For one, it will be hard to authenticate which videos are real and which are fake. While

The openness of the raw video is great, but comes at a cost as well. For one, it will be hard to authenticate which videos are real and which are fake. While the curation of the news allowed the US to cherry pick only the "good stuff", it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson.

ethbr0 5y ago
Has anyone worked on a standard for authentication / attestation of video? I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's enough money in it that someone has to be working on the problem. E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time of capture in a verifiable manner
- ISL 5y ago
  Yes, but to my knowledge nobody has found a trusted solution. My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication seems very difficult indeed.
- r1b 5y ago
  Yes, see https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/
  - terr-dav 5y ago
    An expert's criticisms: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Closed-Standards.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Cl... https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-Another-Bad-Example-from-CAI.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-An...
    - r1b 5y ago
      Thanks, I was skeptical too :) I especially liked the phrase “chain of blame”
- XorNot 5y ago
  It occurs to me this is the sort of problem the satellite internet constellations could help solve. The issue of authenticity is getting some third party to attest that video happened at a particular date and time - at least part of that solution could be getting the various low orbit constellations to provide a simple timestamping service for hashes. Since the orbits are known, and position can be triangulated, any 3 satellites signatures would at least prove you transmitted a particular hash for attestation at a given date and time. This obviously doesn't help with someone traveling there and sending junk, or using local repeaters to send junk, but it ups the difficulty level a notch.
  - Grimburger 5y ago
    > at a given date and time *after a given date and time There's nothing stopping people forging the data later with already broadcast cryptographic signatures
    - XorNot 5y ago
      That's the idea of using the low orbit constellations - obviously this doesn't work if you're just passively recording a broadcast, it has to be 2-way - which rules out anything not designed for that. But low-orbit satellite internet is designed for 2 way communications, and probably already has the equipment on board to calculate checksums (or at the very least is a sufficiently trusted third party). So we develop a protocol we can run on miniaturizable boxes which can be served point-to-point with the constellation members to at least prove transmission origin providence.
      - Grimburger 5y ago
        How do you trust the satellites without them all being controlled by a central authority? It's the Byzantine Generals problem.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        In this scheme they would be controlled by a central party, as effectively we're talking about Starlink and SpaceX. Or maybe one of the legacy satellite internet providers. Assuming that though, you send a hash of your content up to the system, which geolocates it (based on physical reception), adds a timestamp and geolocation into the metadata, and returns the signed information, using the central party's key. You also could run a similar method on cellular networks by using towers as the signing node and the telecom as the centralized entity. Because realistically, it's not Byzantine Generals. What you want is (a) timestamp verified by a trusted party, (b) geolocation verified by a trusted party, (c) content hashed/signed to prevent subsequent modification, (d) prevention of replay forging of (a) or (b), & (e) most of the infrastructure not physically accessible by users (e.g. signing chip embedded in a camera).
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Leaking data via DRM/watermarking, just what journalists need to protect the identity and lives of their anonymous sources.
- initplus 5y ago
  Ultimately, you have to trust some photographer or organisation. The camera sensor is not a trusted input. Nothing can prevent somebody pointing their camera at a high resolution screen displaying a manipulated image. Or a staged scene. No image signing mechanism can prevent this kind of attack. There are manipulation detection techniques, but they are imperfect. And even if you verify the image is an unmodified camera original, you still have to analyse the context surrounding the image (what is portrayed in the image, does it line up with other reports, who is the photographer etc.) to determine if it is actually a true. It is trivial to digitally sign text, but a signature on a string doesn't mean that string is telling the truth. It just means someone signed it. Highly recommend http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ for in depth digital image forensics content.
iKlsR 5y ago
Yh there was an ARMA 3 gameplay video making the rounds on twitter this morning that hoodwinked a lot of people. https://twitter.com/schoolboyefr/status/1496827604422348807 https://twitter.com/schoolboyefr/status/1496827604422348807
- sterlind 5y ago
  Jesus those graphics are realistic. the long horizon, the way explosions light up scenery like it's saturating the sensor of a low-budget camera.. I really couldn't tell this is fake.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    Same here. The house in the beginning looks a bit strange, but nothing that couldn't be caused by a potato camera. I'd fallen for this, too (though the plane does not look like a Russian one).
    - AS37 5y ago
      > though the plane does not look like a Russian one A-10 "Warthog", only flown by the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
- mhitza 5y ago
  Something looks sketchy in the video but couldn't point to it exactly. Maybe the light effects when explosions happen, maybe the unnatural velocity of projectiles that enter from the left side of the screen. But out of context, it could have fooled me too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Grimburger 5y ago
    > unnatural velocity of projectiles Unless it's been modded you'll find the Arma games have an absurd level of accuracy in their physics, they have the correct speed of bullets down to decimal points and other real world interactions like gravity and air resistance. The entire engine is built around simulating the real world as far as technically feasible and the other half of the game studio uses it to sell war simulations to militaries around the world.
renewiltord 5y ago
> ...while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson. You're right about the layperson, but that's a low bar, the p50 of the population. What measures did you take to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia on this point? This seems to be one of those things that everyone takes to be true, but which I have frequently found to be false on manual inspection. Here are examples where I tested this by chasing to the primary source in areas not of my expertise: - California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill. - Indian Railways budget reporting. This was Bloomberg, and it was re-reported elsewhere. The numbers were wrong. This informed decisions I made in the next case. - SuperMicro spychips. Bloomberg again, but rebroadcast by other media outlets. This was one of my directional trades. I bought SMCI calls off the fact that Bloomberg was poorly informed and that reporters were mostly low-grade GPT-3 copy-machines off each other. In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news. So, yes, better than the layperson, but not better than the average techie I know. And this yields a data pipeline problem: if you have a lossy compressor in your pipeline, the loss cost can overwhelm the compression advantage. I think for anyone reasonably intelligent, news has passed that point.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  There are two pieces to this. First, past wars involved journalists directly embedded into forward units. If they said 7 rockets were fired into City X because they were present and witnessed it, then what they were reporting was correct. It doesn't require expertise in anything to correctly report that. The vetting was on the part of the news organizations themselves, not hiring war correspondents who were blatantly making things up. Now that everyone has access to publish their claims to directly witness something, there is no longer any sort of filter on whether they're even actually there. So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization, you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating the video. If your source of videos is TikTok, you no longer have much in the way of assurance that what you're seeing is even real video footage. The second part is what you're talking about, whether the "expert" opinions of pundits writing in professional news outlets are any better at interpreting events than a layperson. This is much more of an open question.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson. It also lets professional journalists cover up atrocities. Speaking of the Ukraine, Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine. He was celebrated and even won a Pulitzer Prize. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Speaking of the Ukraine Outside of Russian propaganda, it's just “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”. > Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine. It was Ukraine then, too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - YATA0 5y ago
    >Outside of Russian propaganda, it's just “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”. That is false. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18233844 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18233844
ryandrake 5y ago
Given that one of the primary belligerents in this conflict has a longstanding, solid, undeniable reputation as a producer of online misinformation and state-sponsored trolling, it's easy to predict that the next few weeks/months will produce an unprecedented amount of fake war content. I'm going to have a hard time believing anything I read, unfortuately.
areoform 5y ago
This is where sources like Bellingcat come in, they’ve been working on verifying and geolocating videos coming out of the region. https://twitter.com/ryanmofarrell/status/1496919144477839373 https://twitter.com/ryanmofarrell/status/1496919144477839373 And clamping down on insanity, https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1496984468141522945 https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1496984468141522945 For those who don’t know, the incredible team at Bellingcat are the same ones who hunted down the FSB hit squad sent after navalny.
- Lascaille 5y ago
  >incredible team at Bellingcat Aren't they basically CIA/NSA? I mean, I love their content and find it fascinating but I find it very hard to believe it isn't sanctioned/released/funded from the very highest levels. You don't get that sort of quality out of somebody's garage.
Mezzie 5y ago
This is correct. The horrifying part is that I honestly don't think any of the governments involved (except possibly Ukraine's, and good for them) have considered the full implications of this.

ethbr0 5y ago

Has anyone worked on a standard for authentication / attestation of video? I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's enough money in it that someone has to be working on the problem. E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time of capture in a verifiable manner

ISL 5y ago
Yes, but to my knowledge nobody has found a trusted solution. My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication seems very difficult indeed.
r1b 5y ago
Yes, see https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/
- terr-dav 5y ago
  An expert's criticisms: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Closed-Standards.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Cl... https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-Another-Bad-Example-from-CAI.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-An...
  - r1b 5y ago
    Thanks, I was skeptical too :) I especially liked the phrase “chain of blame”
XorNot 5y ago
It occurs to me this is the sort of problem the satellite internet constellations could help solve. The issue of authenticity is getting some third party to attest that video happened at a particular date and time - at least part of that solution could be getting the various low orbit constellations to provide a simple timestamping service for hashes. Since the orbits are known, and position can be triangulated, any 3 satellites signatures would at least prove you transmitted a particular hash for attestation at a given date and time. This obviously doesn't help with someone traveling there and sending junk, or using local repeaters to send junk, but it ups the difficulty level a notch.
- Grimburger 5y ago
  > at a given date and time *after a given date and time There's nothing stopping people forging the data later with already broadcast cryptographic signatures
  - XorNot 5y ago
    That's the idea of using the low orbit constellations - obviously this doesn't work if you're just passively recording a broadcast, it has to be 2-way - which rules out anything not designed for that. But low-orbit satellite internet is designed for 2 way communications, and probably already has the equipment on board to calculate checksums (or at the very least is a sufficiently trusted third party). So we develop a protocol we can run on miniaturizable boxes which can be served point-to-point with the constellation members to at least prove transmission origin providence.
    - Grimburger 5y ago
      How do you trust the satellites without them all being controlled by a central authority? It's the Byzantine Generals problem.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        In this scheme they would be controlled by a central party, as effectively we're talking about Starlink and SpaceX. Or maybe one of the legacy satellite internet providers. Assuming that though, you send a hash of your content up to the system, which geolocates it (based on physical reception), adds a timestamp and geolocation into the metadata, and returns the signed information, using the central party's key. You also could run a similar method on cellular networks by using towers as the signing node and the telecom as the centralized entity. Because realistically, it's not Byzantine Generals. What you want is (a) timestamp verified by a trusted party, (b) geolocation verified by a trusted party, (c) content hashed/signed to prevent subsequent modification, (d) prevention of replay forging of (a) or (b), & (e) most of the infrastructure not physically accessible by users (e.g. signing chip embedded in a camera).
selfhoster11 5y ago
Leaking data via DRM/watermarking, just what journalists need to protect the identity and lives of their anonymous sources.
initplus 5y ago
Ultimately, you have to trust some photographer or organisation. The camera sensor is not a trusted input. Nothing can prevent somebody pointing their camera at a high resolution screen displaying a manipulated image. Or a staged scene. No image signing mechanism can prevent this kind of attack. There are manipulation detection techniques, but they are imperfect. And even if you verify the image is an unmodified camera original, you still have to analyse the context surrounding the image (what is portrayed in the image, does it line up with other reports, who is the photographer etc.) to determine if it is actually a true. It is trivial to digitally sign text, but a signature on a string doesn't mean that string is telling the truth. It just means someone signed it. Highly recommend http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ for in depth digital image forensics content.

iKlsR 5y ago

Yh there was an ARMA 3 gameplay video making the rounds on twitter this morning that hoodwinked a lot of people. https://twitter.com/schoolboyefr/status/1496827604422348807 https://twitter.com/schoolboyefr/status/1496827604422348807

sterlind 5y ago
Jesus those graphics are realistic. the long horizon, the way explosions light up scenery like it's saturating the sensor of a low-budget camera.. I really couldn't tell this is fake.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Same here. The house in the beginning looks a bit strange, but nothing that couldn't be caused by a potato camera. I'd fallen for this, too (though the plane does not look like a Russian one).
  - AS37 5y ago
    > though the plane does not look like a Russian one A-10 "Warthog", only flown by the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
mhitza 5y ago
Something looks sketchy in the video but couldn't point to it exactly. Maybe the light effects when explosions happen, maybe the unnatural velocity of projectiles that enter from the left side of the screen. But out of context, it could have fooled me too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Grimburger 5y ago
  > unnatural velocity of projectiles Unless it's been modded you'll find the Arma games have an absurd level of accuracy in their physics, they have the correct speed of bullets down to decimal points and other real world interactions like gravity and air resistance. The entire engine is built around simulating the real world as far as technically feasible and the other half of the game studio uses it to sell war simulations to militaries around the world.

renewiltord 5y ago

> ...while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson. You're right about the layperson, but that's a low bar, the p50 of the population. What measures did you take to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia on this point? This seems to be one of those things that everyone takes to be true, but which I have frequently found to be false on manual inspection. Here are examples where I tested this by chasing to the primary source in areas not of my expertise: - California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill. - Indian Railways budget reporting. This was Bloomberg, and it was re-reported elsewhere. The numbers were wrong. This informed decisions I made in the next case. - SuperMicro spychips. Bloomberg again, but rebroadcast by other media outlets. This was one of my directional trades. I bought SMCI calls off the fact that Bloomberg was poorly informed and that reporters were mostly low-grade GPT-3 copy-machines off each other. In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news. So, yes, better than the layperson, but not better than the average techie I know. And this yields a data pipeline problem: if you have a lossy compressor in your pipeline, the loss cost can overwhelm the compression advantage. I think for anyone reasonably intelligent, news has passed that point.

nonameiguess 5y ago
There are two pieces to this. First, past wars involved journalists directly embedded into forward units. If they said 7 rockets were fired into City X because they were present and witnessed it, then what they were reporting was correct. It doesn't require expertise in anything to correctly report that. The vetting was on the part of the news organizations themselves, not hiring war correspondents who were blatantly making things up. Now that everyone has access to publish their claims to directly witness something, there is no longer any sort of filter on whether they're even actually there. So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization, you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating the video. If your source of videos is TikTok, you no longer have much in the way of assurance that what you're seeing is even real video footage. The second part is what you're talking about, whether the "expert" opinions of pundits writing in professional news outlets are any better at interpreting events than a layperson. This is much more of an open question.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson. It also lets professional journalists cover up atrocities. Speaking of the Ukraine, Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine. He was celebrated and even won a Pulitzer Prize. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Speaking of the Ukraine Outside of Russian propaganda, it's just “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”. > Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine. It was Ukraine then, too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- YATA0 5y ago
  >Outside of Russian propaganda, it's just “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”. That is false. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18233844 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18233844

ryandrake 5y ago

Given that one of the primary belligerents in this conflict has a longstanding, solid, undeniable reputation as a producer of online misinformation and state-sponsored trolling, it's easy to predict that the next few weeks/months will produce an unprecedented amount of fake war content. I'm going to have a hard time believing anything I read, unfortuately.

areoform 5y ago

This is where sources like Bellingcat come in, they’ve been working on verifying and geolocating videos coming out of the region. https://twitter.com/ryanmofarrell/status/1496919144477839373 https://twitter.com/ryanmofarrell/status/1496919144477839373 And clamping down on insanity, https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1496984468141522945 https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1496984468141522945 For those who don’t know, the incredible team at Bellingcat are the same ones who hunted down the FSB hit squad sent after navalny.

Lascaille 5y ago
>incredible team at Bellingcat Aren't they basically CIA/NSA? I mean, I love their content and find it fascinating but I find it very hard to believe it isn't sanctioned/released/funded from the very highest levels. You don't get that sort of quality out of somebody's garage.

Mezzie 5y ago

This is correct. The horrifying part is that I honestly don't think any of the governments involved (except possibly Ukraine's, and good for them) have considered the full implications of this.