Hacker News Reader

Comment by StevenRayOrr | Hacker News Reader

Given that we're just talking HTML, I don't see how you could meaningfully prevent bad actors, absent storing screenshots of the original text -- and even then (see any number of fake tweets that circulate). Hypothetically, instead of linking to the original source, I suppose it could link to the Wayback Machine version of the text, but I don't think that's a helpful default way to link to people's work. As a fallback when sites disappear, sure, but otherwise...

View on HN

Here's one possibility. Creating a quoteback could: 1. tell archive.org to create a snapshot of the page 2. store a link both to the human-friendly version of the page and the archive snapshot 3. then the reader's browser (rather than the webpage hosting the quoteback) could verify that the quote is present either at the linked source or at the snapshot of the linked source.

In the happy path (where the quoteback is genuine) the browser could indicate to the user that the quoteback is genuine and the link would take the user to the normal website if it still has the quote, otherwise to the archive snapshot.

In the unhappy path (where the quoteback is disingenuous) the browser could notify the user that the quoteback is disingenuous.

Great path, a few hundred lines of code, less if you can use the ia python library.

There could be an extension to the model, where a quoter can provide a snippet to the author's website and request a signature (perhaps from a common path like /.well-known/quotesign.)

If the snippet does indeed come from the website in question, the website will return a signature which the quoter can embed along with the snippet on their own website.

The signature would prove that the content came from the same person who controls domain X (as attested by the CA fo your choice). The user agent can display all this information where the content is quoted.

Even the Wayback Machine will not exist and there will probably be a reincarnation of it with archived copies of Wayback URLs. This is why blockchain tech is so exciting. Very soon everything can be cryptographically proven to have existed, stopping people from rewriting history and denying things like The Holocaust etc

> Very soon everything can be cryptographically proven to have existed, stopping people from rewriting history and denying things like The Holocaust etc

Sounds nice, but my gut feeling is that you wildly underestimate how far people will go to work around anything that could change their beliefs.

This seems to hold true on all sides of the political spectrum, in art as as well as in science and the only difference is what beliefs people stick to.

As a deeply religious person this might come of as really ironic and the irony is not lost on me: quite the contrary and for that reason I've thought about it multiple times.

Rigid, ingrained beliefs can't beat a math problem

Did you hear about the man who believed he was dead? His doctor tried everything but couldn't convince him he wasn't a corpse. Finally, in exasperation, the doctor says, "Look, corpses don't bleed right?"

The man agrees, "Yeah, corpses don't bleed."

The doctor pokes him in the arm with a needle and blood wells up.

The man looks at his bleeding arm in astonishment and says, "I'll be damned! Corpses do bleed!"

(This is a true story. I think it's in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" IIRC.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com