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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

For news we can assume that it's signed by the journalists and news agencies who created the content. Or who researched the origin and are willing to put their credibility on the line.

Edit: To clarify, this doesn't prove if something is real or fake. It just makes attribution of the origin easier and creates a traceable chain of trust.

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>It just makes attribution of the origin easier and creates a traceable chain of trust.

This kills anonymous sources, maybe literally under hostile regimes.

If it's signed by the equipment that originally recorded it (you're smuggling evidence of crimes out), you may not be able to verify it anyway.

It would be signed by the journalists or news agencies verifying their report.

Individual sources can still be anonymous.

So no video editing then?

Not without losing the signature. But if you take a clip from a larger video you can (and should) refer back to the source.

Maybe with a chain like with SSL certificates & authorities? Or maybe there could be a reference database with all the versions signed by a given authority so that you could verify it's an approved version? Why not go even further and show the same kind of alerts / block content if the source / signature can't be trusted?

For my master's thesis, I designed/built a prototype that would track video modifications and add them to a signed report like this. Maybe it's finally relevant: http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2015/E_Houle_0...

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