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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

This is not a technical problem IMO. You can't cryptographically sign reality. There's always the analog hole[1].

It's a problem of trust within society. Look at many very mainstream conspiracy theories these days: there's ample proof that it's not true, but people want to believe so they'll believe.

You can't fix the lack of trust in society with cryptography.

I just went on a constructionist website I sometimes lurk when I'm bored, literally the first story I find is titled `The Age of "Credentialism" and "Experts" is over. Every Single Institution works against your interests'. You can't fix this mindset with maths.

Video is cryptographically signed? But what about the secret computers in the Pentagon's basement that run on Quantum CPUs using ancient alien technology found in the pyramids? They can certainly break ECC. Here, watch this Youtube video...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

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You can't sign reality, but people can sign statements.

If you see a video at a date D1 where you say Statement1, and cryptographically sign it with your key K, then at a later date someone can verify that at least you said you've watched an backed your statement.

In a way all of security relies on the physical safety of some kind of secret data. So you have the deniability of key compromise in any case.

If everything a president states publicly is signed with his key Kp, then:

1) If something controversial is published without signature, the president can say it's not standard procedure and a plausible forgery;

2) If the president publishes officially without a signature, the public can demand one so there's no later equivocation;

3) Anything that has been said can be verified in the future by checking the presidential signature.

In this case, the worst case is really a compromised key (although key scheduling should mitigate it), but most forgery cases of statements (and potentially documents, mandates, etc.) are eliminated.

In practice, it would be difficult to get your public figures to sign everything they say (and difficult to get them to accept this kind of potential auto-incrimination for the public good).

That doesn't work for adversarial recordings. No one will sign an embarrassing or damning video of themselves, and those are the cases where authenticity is the most important.

Your solution is technologically cool, but I think the current system of "was this published by a domain controlled by the office of the press secretary" is probably accomplishing this case well enough.

For adversarial recordings, I wonder if we could have a camera that instantly uploads a timestamp and hash of each video taken to a blockchain. This way, we could have videos that we know for a fact were recorded at the latest at a certain time. It would still be vulnerable for a fake video to be post dated, but never pre dated.

Doesn't stop the adversary from simply timestamping, and uploading their fraudulent video's hash to that blockchain.

Seconding this. The fracture at the heart of our society is not rooted in unintelligence, or lack of education or access to facts. It's rooted in a lack of trust. The most rigorous science is only as good as the trust people place in those performing it (and the entire chain of reporting from there to its reception). Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.

> Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.

The institutions could start telling the truth once in a while. Statements like "27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London" (BBC) and "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" (CNN) with the city burning down in the background account for why trust in media is rapidly approaching zero. It makes it clear that the violence and devastation is just a curiosity to the upper-class elites that control these institutions, but normal people who actually have to live with aftermath are not amused.

Fauci is another huge contributor. First don't wear masks, they can actually hurt. Then you have to wear masks. Now wear two or three! But earlier he was ridiculing people who wore multiple masks. Along with all the knowingly false statements about how long lockdowns would last. Clearly Fauci should not be allowed to speak in public, but unfortunately the blast radius of his mistakes extends beyond him to the government and media institutions that defend him and amplified his misinformation.

with the city burning down in the background

No exaggeration there ◔_◔

I get that you're complaining about 'liberal' media downplaying disorderly and often dangerous events such as riots to suit a political agenda, but the converse is also true; if one relies on 'conservative' media then you'd think many major American cities are post-apocalyptic smoking holes in the ground.

My larger complaint was about rich people who don't care about the several dozen deaths, uncounted injuries, and billions of dollars of property damage caused by the riots because it doesn't affect their class. I don't watch conservative media, so I don't know anything about the portrayal of major American cities therein.

I'd argue it's the opposite. We've relied too much on trust and promises and not enough on rigor and exactness. Most people aren't given facts, constraints and limitations until it's too late, if ever. What they're given are viewpoints with selective evidence and glaring omissions. It's remained a unsolved since the beginning of humanity. A solution to this problem is a rigorous self-proving system that wouldn't need one to convince another of the facts.

I don't want to live in a trustless society. What you describe sounds like a totalitarian dystopia to me.

I want escape hatches. I want plausible deniability. Facts in a vacuum are useless and can be used to propel all sorts of narratives. Facts without framing and contextualization aren't worth much. You can manipulate easily without technically lying, just by cherry picking facts that suit your agenda.

You need some amount of trust and solidarity if you want to live in a healthy society.

This is not a technical problem IMO. You can't cryptographically sign reality. There's always the analog hole

Reality has a pretty strong "hash" naturally built in. Even manipulated picture carries a huge amount of information that isn't changed or isn't changed as much as one thinks.

The manipulated pictures the motorcyclist uploaded still would give someone a good idea where and even when they were taken. That doesn't matter here but if you're making a more detailed argument, it's harder.

Just consider, "computer forensics" is a thing even though any single bit on the computer can be overwritten and "faked".

Your theory is basically the theory behind Minority Report.

What is this analog hole of which you speak? Only nature delivers analog ;)

But nature doesn't create deep fakes - though not as the term is being used here. I would argue that nature has been making deep fakes for millions of years.

Anything that is created by CNN Deep Fake tech is delivered via computer - either using printer or with some sort of screen screen. Let's eliminate printers as nobody uses them anymore. What about screens? I smell a business opportunity.

I was recently watching The Brainwashing of My Dad. Rush Limbaugh made millions of dollars selling lies to the American public. At one point there is a video clip of him admitting that the truth of what he is saying on radio is irrelevant. It doesn't matter to him. He lays out the recipe for generating fear and uncertainty. Basically, if you say something loud enough and with enough confidence no one will stand in your way. Because, as fact checkers know, it takes considerable time to research a bullshit claim. By the time the research is done and published, the bullshitter has moved on and told an additional 20 lies. He also makes a statistical argument for how his business works. He doesn't need to hook every listener. But he does know that enough people will fall for his shtick.

The troubling aspect is that all of this bullshit is blending together. My dad watched Fox News. Now he's hooked on Youtube conspiracy garbage. I'd be terrified if he ever became a QAnon type. We're dealing with literal internet cults becoming a mainstream phenomenon. We're nowhere near equipped for the mess we, the technologists, have made. You have Alex Jones out there claiming that an elementary school shooting didn't happen. You think these guys are going to trust encryption? Or anything that their Youtube priest tells them is a "hoax"?

Education would be the answer. But education is at war with engagement algorithms and attention spans.

This is a technique known as the Firehose of Falsehood:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

The goal is not necessarily to convince people of a particular claim, it's to levy so many claims and use the scrambling of media acting in good faith to vet those claims as an overloading mechanism to get regular people to tune out entirely.

Also known as 'flooding the zone'. Like many political tropes, this originates in team sports which in turn is an abstraction of war. It's an awful lot easier to understand the media landscape if you consider it as cultural warfare with ideas and tropes as territory, although this is hard to visualize in spatial terms.

The answer to this (and the accompanying tribalism that pervades public discourse nowadays) is often said to be education and critical thinking, but that requires years of investment and often-unwelcome external discipline to internalize and actuate; it's a statement of what we would like to have instead rather than an actionable solution to its own absence.

Friendly emotional persuasion can work better as a de-escalation-bridging tactic, as suggested here: https://dr-gleb-tsipursky.medium.com/how-to-talk-to-a-scienc...

This is also helpful for gathering information to understand the dynamics and attractiveness of false information, even if no changing of mind can occur; think of it as the difference between carefully dismantling an unexploded munition in order to figure out how it works vs. a controlled explosion to minimize future risk at the expense of continued vulnerability.

Where conflict is unavoidable or deliberately fomented (eg people arguing in bad faith rather than sincerely believing falsehoods), an overtly hostile response imposes a cost on the aggressor, and when consistently and predictably applied it effectively alters the payoff matrix in an adversarial game: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/

Many people are aware of Mutual Assured Destruction as a kind of nuclear diplomacy, where you are deterred from nuking me because I've made it very clear that if you do I will take you down with me, leading to a heavily armed but uneasy peace. There are also lesser-known concepts like Power Transition Theory (about how wars originate from weaker countries challenging stronger ones) and nowadays scholars of international relations tend to adhere to Hegemonic Stability Theory (one very powerful country plays Teacher/cop) or World System Theory (every dog has its day). Developing familiarity with the broad concepts of interstate conflict (without going too deep down any intellectual rabbit hole) can be helpful in modeling smaller scale political conflicts, divisions in civil society etc.

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