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Would signing actually help? People who trust "Tru Woke Media TV" won't change their minds just because TWM TV signs their stuff.

Signed "by Washington Post" to prevent fake videos with fake attribution wouldn't be "just signing videos". That requires a source of trust infrastructure like the CAs and a display infrastructure the your green lock in the browserbar. Otherwise people will just ignore "by Waѕhington Post" and mistake it for "by Washington Post"

Browsers do that for sites, and I don’t see how sites are different than videos in this regard. Both are information with an origin. CA already exists, only video players have to keep up. People who trust anything they see, hear or read cannot benefit from that, but why is this a concern? Politics and cheap press fooled them since forever. The only problem I see here is that the same amount of uneducated people could be fooled like never before, but the same could (and will) be done in the opposite way to overwhelm them and detract from wrong reasoning.

I mean, the entire “problem” arises not because deepfakes, but because that video thing still lives in a century which allowed “hacking” sites and owning bank accounts via plain-text “secret” queries or cvc codes clearly printed on the back of the card with no additional confirmation required to withdraw your money. That window should have been closed regardless of deep fakes.

Signing videos is the worst of both worlds in my opinion - it provides gatekeepers and prevents anonymity while doing nothing to stop the fakes from getting signed later.

If anything I think collation of data is the way to prove it along with physical evidence or lack of it. If the Washington Monument takes off with thrusters on video and it is still there we know it was faked.

If there is a scorched crater where the monument once was and the Washington Monument can be seen in orbit then it suggests someone engaged in a seriously reckless and expensive prank with a national monument.

I think signing is a particularly weak approach, but we're going to see other tech advances to handle this problem. And I think you're right about the biggest problem: trusted sources were fine before photo evidence and will be fine without signing, but what we're going to miss is the ability for arbitrary people to provide trustworthy accounts of events.

The classic example of a tech fix is a hostage taking photos with the day's newspaper; it's a way to specify an oldest-possible date of a photograph. Similarly, you can prove that a video is not newer than some specific time by publicizing a hash of it. After that, format conversions, rehosts, etc. are all believable as long as they can be traced back to the same-hash original. And until deepfakes reach realtime speed, any specified-time event like a politician's speech can be authenticated just by posting a hash immediately after it ends.

That isn't a full solution to authenticity; a video of some unexpected event could always have been prepared in advance. And trusted-third-source verification is tricky; I'd mostly believe a Periscope or ACLU Mobile Justice video is being shot live, but uploading a pre-faked stream to the service is hardly impossible. Even there, though, I expect we'll see technological solutions. Apps could issue steganography (or other directions, like when to set keyframes) to the client as they record a video, so that pre-altered video won't update the way it's meant to. And I'm sure a lot of other options exist also.

It's going to be an interesting time, but I think we'll see quite a few clever attempts to preserve both anonymity and source-independent trust.

> As for politics and fact-checking, personally I just don’t care. If you do, then sign your damn video with a public key already and check if a video matches it.

I think we're going to see a lot of things like this, soon. Signing for ownership, definitely, but also lots of other tech tricks. We already have livestreaming, which prevents fakes in the moment. If you upload a video as soon as you take it, you can put a Google or Facebook vouched timestamp on the content. If you don't want to rely on their reputation, you can share a hash of the video content before a deep-faker would have had time to edit the content.

Timeless content like a video of police violence is tougher to prove, and fakes will be very hard to disprove, but the idea that convincing-looking fakes obviously destroy trust is a failure of imagination.

> sign your damn video with a public key already

Surely the imaging companies are on to this by now, right? They should be signing the raw data as it comes off the sensor. Tesla does this for the input and the output, on-chip if I recall.

How about encrypting video with the public key, on the hardware? Then we can have cameras all over the place and finally solve issues like rape, etc. by figuring out what happened. We just need the plaintiff or multiple jury members to agree in writing to subpoena the video and decrypt it. You can use shamir secret key sharing to give the ability to obtain a key to a video.

So basically storing a lot of encrypted video from private areas, and trusting the camera makers to not install a backdoor.

I guess the only thing I don't like about this is that a camera maker can be bribed to create a deepfake to frame some person. Video evidence would be admissible in court only from trusted encrypted-camera makers, until one or two scandals for a camera maker will bring the trust to zero.

As long as you can point a camera at a printout, you can get a camera-signed photoshop.

> Surely the imaging companies are on to this by now, right? They should be signing the raw data as it comes off the sensor. Tesla does this for the input and the output, on-chip if I recall.

So all post-production work ceases? Or do we have a situation where the original is published alongside the media-edition where they've applied a few filters and adjusted the colour space?

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just interested in how it might work.

Right, you string the signatures together. "This image was generated by Tom Fipples on a Nikon D610, working the Washington Post, and edited by Jane Wizzlepans working for AP by X copy of Photoshop. Certs include Nikon, Washington Post, and Adobe. Signatures include Tom and Jane. And the whole chain has to be in sequence. Just like intermediate certs in all the other parts of your browser.

OK, so we're effectively (to my mind) looking at something like git with signing on every commit, and an image file being its own self-contained repo, so you can [;ay back through the versions to the 'root' that comes from a camera.

Presumably this format is going to be of interest to journalists and courts, at the very least, though courts are most likely going to be most interested in the simplest case - the provable original.

Interesting idea :)

Or you just don't resize it at all.

Check out ctrl shift face on YouTube