> I'm sorry, but you're not thinking this through.

Please don't respond to swipes with more swipes. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You don't need to be able to prove the video is raw footage, you just need to be able to verify that a publisher you trust says they recorded it. An HMAC allows you to verify that a message (like a video file) was not modified after the author signed it.

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?

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.

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.

>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.

> 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!"

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.

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?"

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.

I was under the impression that the whole point of such a system was you could trust any video from any (non-cracked) camera.

If we're at the point of trusting videos only from select providers, well, that's not really much of an improvement over just finding the video on that provider's website over HTTPS.

I absolutely agree with this point but I think it's terrifying - rather than a reassurance. In modern society our "truth" is becoming partitioned into tribal groups with topics as extreme as the curvature of the earth and efficacy of vaccines being suddenly up for debate. If someone like Alex Jones were to publish a video where the Clintons discuss making the frogs gay then his audience - a decent portion of which trust him as a journalistic source - would be able to confirm that this highly edited video has been verified true by Alex Jones.

Audio and video were sort of aberrant in fact that they could still generally be accepted at face value (as compared to quotes and attributions) and we're very quickly losing that stability.

Publishing has always been based on trust. Trusting publishers with a track record of openness and journalists with a track record of integrity is the best we have. We just have more options for cross referencing information now.

I believe what HN User gambler was getting at is a world far more insidious. One where no one cares whether or not file B is fake. No one cares whether transcoded file C is fake. He's talking about a world where the power elites have effectively set themselves up as the only source of cryptographically secure and verified image feeds.

ie - A world where so much fake image data has flooded into the zeitgeist that people only believe the feeds that are announced to be "real" by their cryptographically secure devices. They can play the fake video, even play video that may not be fake, but was not cryptographically validated. Their devices will just be flashing a huge warning sign right next to each such image feed. (Or even worse, it will only flash a "real" sign next to the image feeds it and the central have concerted to cryptographically validate.) It'd be kind of like the huge warning dialogs that always popped up at a certain point when people went somewhere with an ActiveX plugin in the page. After a while, it wasn't just ActiveX, it was everything. People just got conditioned to believing that every plugin, no matter the source, was horribly bad for them. (Every plugin probably was, but that's a separate issue.)

Only this time, the powers that be will be the only ones capable of delivering data that is guaranteed to be pure. Everything else will be either, not validated by their cryptography standard. Transcoded, (and consequently the masses will dismiss it out of hand). Or out and out fake, (which, yes, the masses should dismiss out of hand. I get that).

But I'm just saying that people should think a little further ahead here when they are trying to solve this problem. If we want to use cryptography to solve this problem, that's perfectly reasonable. (And yes, it would work. It would work only too well, and that's the entire problem.) I'm only saying that we should do what we can to make sure that cryptographically validated image feeds are not uniquely identifiable, for instance. Because when you go down this road you need to realize that with hardware cryptography, the hardware makers and those with power over them become de facto arbiters. And they can potentially use distribution to control the masses. Because they have the only pure sources. They could potentially even use attribution to control the masses. (You sure you want to video tape that police beating and mail it to the media "anonymously" with one of these devices?)

I'm just saying. Stop and think it through a bit.

And having a plan based on, "Oh... We're smart enough to get around it!" Is a very foolish plan for two reasons. First, because we won't be able to get around it, and second because it's the same as having no plan at all.

What in the current political climate makes you believe that, in the future, we'll trust big corporations more than we trust whichever in-group we identify with?

Apparently, we're talking about different problems. I am talking about the problem of content creators being able to demonstrate that what they post is real footage. You're talking about the problem of someone being fooled by some arbitrary video online. If you think that the latter is somehow a fundamentally new threat created by AI, you must live in a parallel universe, to put it politely.

In what world is content creators needing to prove the footage they took is "real" a problem? Considering most content creators also do post editing I don't think that has any relationship at all to what's being discussed. We're talking about the kind of video that triggers a scandal, be it a police shooting, politician caught committing a crime, sex tape, etc. This is not the kind of thing being captured by "content creators". What's the purpose at all of what you're proposing?

I will try explaining this for the last time.

We already live in the word where a video is not a 100% proof that something happened. Given enough time and money you can use video editing, actors and CGI do show almost anything. This does not, however, completely invalidate all videos as evidence, because the cost of faking something is fairly high.

Deep fakes can potentially decrease the cost of impersonation of someone in any video to almost nothing.

To mitigate that we can introduce additional technologies that will bring the cost of video impersonation back up, effectively restoring the current status quo.

Like most security, it's all about the costs involved in attacks and mitigations. I remember the time where most of HN visitors understood this very well.

That has nothing to do with the comment you responded to:

Can you explain what you mean as the distinction between "content creators" and "some arbitrary video online" if the same technology is used to "authenticate" both?

> Like most security, it's all about the costs involved in attacks and mitigations.

Ignoring the fact that this could likely be done fairly cheaply, unlike other security improvements this actually weakens the next layer down substantially, faked content that does beat the system introduces a new seal of approval on that content. I don't want to see people get convicted because footage that's later found out to be faked has a green checkmark when the jury watches it.