A scientist who spots fake videos
nature.com
nature.com
A filmmaker and video editor, Alan Melikdjanian, started a YouTube channel back in 2007. He debunks viral videos and adverts, whilst performing in character as the rather surreal "Captain Disillision".
Don't let the bizarre performance scare you off - his production values are simply outstanding, especially considering he does this all pretty-much singlehandedly, and has done so with hardly any recognition for the past 10 years. I think his channel only hit 100k subscribers last year, so it looks like he might finally be getting some well-deserved recognition.
Here's a few links to some of his best stuff. You'll probably be thinking "WTF is this?" when you first start watching, but trust me and stick with it:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_slT5YpBok
I think his time has finally come.
No kidding. Even if he hit 100K subscriber 2 years ago or at the beginning of 2015, he is at 500K subscribers now. If his growth hasn't slowed too much, he could be looking at [close] to a million subscribers before this decade is done.
His videos are pretty cool so far. Happy he is able to do this for a living.
He always placed a strong emphasis on strong mathematical fundamentals, once joking in class that we only think AI is hard because we're "bad at math." And to prove it, he showed us endless examples of how the right math makes problems far easier. For example, I remember one time when he showed us how correctly understanding something like the sinc function would improve directional derivatives of sampled data, and then turned this into a better video motion tracker.
He loved working with colleagues in other departments, solving all kinds of fun problems and publishing joint papers. At one point, I think the campus magazine was writing articles on him several times a year, because he always had something cool going on.
People believe whatever they want to believe; forensic hair analysis (not DNA) is also quite a controversial practice, it's still accepted as evidence by many courts in the US. Last Week Tonight had a bit about that issue in a recent episode [0]
It's sad and mindblowing that people have been sentenced to prison/death because a so-called "expert witness" confused a dogs hair with being their hair.
Creating a very realistic fake is now trivial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsuAQcvafCs
Google is very close to synthesizing realistic voice.
It's game over, as far as I can see.
It's a matter of time someone creates a fake video of someone famous saying something very outrageous, like nazi propaganda, and it will result in the destruction of that person's career and life.
We really need something like Secure Enclave in every camera.
EDIT:
Another related video:
In the very simplest case, someone could just point a camera at a very high quality screen and record that, generating a signed video.
A more complex attack would be to effectively emulate the image sensor and pipe image data straight into the camera.
If you want to prove that a video was filmed on or before a certain time, one way would be to hash it and put that hash on a blockchain, but that doesn't really solve the problem of authenticity.
Emulating a sensor sounds like it immediately reduces the number of perpetrators by orders of magnitude.
I agree though, what I'm suggesting is not 100% bulletproof, but it's using a proven technology, and it's relatively simple, assuming hardware manufacturers are willing to add one small chip to their cameras.
1. This was recorded from a TV broadcast
2. Or a CCTV camera
Etc.
Are the signals from the gps satellites cryptographically signed?
Of course, the cameras would need to have very good physical security so that a person can't either extract the private key from it, or do things like replacing the camera part with something that just feeds in the data you want, and still getting it signed with the key.
I think the design that went into the ORWL pc might be good for this (which would quickly delete the private key if it detected tampering).
In order for one of these to be trusted though, there would have to be a trusted source demonstrating that it was constructed and configured correctly (rather than in a way that would allow faking). Maybe by having the construction and setup be recorded with other cameras of the same type which are already trusted, in a web of trust sort of thing? If one had enough of these cameras I don't think that the bootstrapping of the chain of trust would be too difficult.
But if the gps satellites cryptographically signed their messages, would that help this much? And would it be all that much of a cost for future gps satellites to sign their messages?
-- [1] http://fotoforensics.com/
Pretty interesting thinking about the gap between what is possible now and where the human population is with understanding that.