3 ms·

It’s too bad there’s no way at all to know if any media whatsoever is plausibly real, say such as by a cryptographic web of trust. Even though similar mechanism

by anselm 3y ago

It’s too bad there’s no way at all to know if any media whatsoever is plausibly real, say such as by a cryptographic web of trust. Even though similar mechanisms are used to secure services such as domain name resolution clearly nothing similar can be applied here. I guess we’re just doomed to be fed a diet of adulterated content.

crazygringo 3y ago
It's simply called using common sense and relying on trusted sources. "Cryptographic trust" is never going to prove anything. Even if a camera can encrypt a photograph to try to prove a particular photograph was taken at a particular place and time, nothing is preventing someone from spoofing a GPS signal and snapping a photo of a doctored photograph with the camera. Adulterated content has been around for basically as long as the printing press.
- anselm 3y ago
  Your idea only works for tiny networks and doesn’t scale. Enjoy your completely unfiltered social network. It’s not my problem if you can’t see any benefit whatsoever to any kind of trust filtering.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I never said anything about unfiltered social networks. I already have trust filtering, just by following specific journalists whose reporting I trust. They do the work of verifying photographs, because it's part of their area of professional expertise, and I appreciate it.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Have you noticed that any time anyone says anything about common sense, it's after common sense has already failed?
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    ...no? Where has common sense already failed?
- brookst 3y ago
  Trust can never be 100% proven in anything. None of these mitigations are intended to provide that level of technically impossible certainty. The intent of all trust systems is to make it more difficult (technically, financially) to falsify information. It’s a statistics game — the harder it is to break a trust system, the fewer people will do it. This is true for everything from house keys to PKI to currency to ID cards.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    But this isn't like ID cards. The general population doesn't care about whether an image was cryptographically signed. It's going to have zero effect. People who don't care about the truth are going to continue to pass around edited images, while those who do get their news from trusted journalists and aren't paying attention to random images on social networks.

by anselm 3y ago

crazygringo 3y ago

It's simply called using common sense and relying on trusted sources. "Cryptographic trust" is never going to prove anything. Even if a camera can encrypt a photograph to try to prove a particular photograph was taken at a particular place and time, nothing is preventing someone from spoofing a GPS signal and snapping a photo of a doctored photograph with the camera. Adulterated content has been around for basically as long as the printing press.

anselm 3y ago
Your idea only works for tiny networks and doesn’t scale. Enjoy your completely unfiltered social network. It’s not my problem if you can’t see any benefit whatsoever to any kind of trust filtering.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  I never said anything about unfiltered social networks. I already have trust filtering, just by following specific journalists whose reporting I trust. They do the work of verifying photographs, because it's part of their area of professional expertise, and I appreciate it.
pixl97 3y ago
Have you noticed that any time anyone says anything about common sense, it's after common sense has already failed?
- crazygringo 3y ago
  ...no? Where has common sense already failed?
brookst 3y ago
Trust can never be 100% proven in anything. None of these mitigations are intended to provide that level of technically impossible certainty. The intent of all trust systems is to make it more difficult (technically, financially) to falsify information. It’s a statistics game — the harder it is to break a trust system, the fewer people will do it. This is true for everything from house keys to PKI to currency to ID cards.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  But this isn't like ID cards. The general population doesn't care about whether an image was cryptographically signed. It's going to have zero effect. People who don't care about the truth are going to continue to pass around edited images, while those who do get their news from trusted journalists and aren't paying attention to random images on social networks.