Nothing a little Stable Diffusion can't fix. Soon, digital memories will be just like real ones — slightly different every time we look back, but with no way of knowing what's changed
Well, let's see:
ssh user@rsync.net sha256 photos/IMG_1234.HEIC
Yep, checks out.
The checksum commands:
(md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512, sha512t256, rmd160, skein256, skein512, skein1024, cksum)
... are available to run as you see fit.
Nothing about rsync.net per se, other than the general idea that any data you put on "somebody else's server" can't be trusted to stay the same if you don't have a high-quality integrity-comparison content-hash of that data kept somewhere.
0: I'd be willing to bet money at 1:1 odds that MD5 preimages still cost at least 2^96 bit operations (out of a nominal 2^127 hash invocations) 5, 20, or 100 years from now.
Can you? Sure. Are their weird edge cases where it’s mildly helpful to know as opposed to having to ask someone? Debatably. Should you need to in order to not have things break for no reason? Absolutely not.
Maintaining a house or yard, for example, or taxes. Driving also has a pretty high learning curve -- high enough to mandate driving lessons -- but once we learn it we're set for life. (Tech is the same way here....)
As someone who works in generative modeling, that's probably what is creating these issues in the first place. Kinda like how you can see certain GAN type of patterns on Netflix when there is upscaling or if you don't turn off the fancy features on your TVs. Of course, finding how these images are corrupted leads to better models so they will be solved. This isn't the first time Google has edited photos and made them worse and it won't be the last. But the trend is that the photos get better.
By the principle of explosion[0, eg].
You can just hash them locally or use AI to identify modifications.
Agreed. And that promise has been fulfilled - although it costs more than nothing and you need to do your homework.
You know these providers are proven bad actors. You know their business model(s) are antagonistic to your goals. You also know there are stable, time-tested alternatives.
What did you think was going to happen here ?
Edit: to pay a minimum of $12/month??
This is already the case with different image compression algorithms improving on one another. Users couldn't and shouldn't tell the difference between JPG, or slightly smaller / resized JPG, or WebP, or whatever. I personally don't think image hosts should have to alert users when making undetectable changes to their images like this.
It's simply not the same thing. If I opened my file browser one day and saw that all of my FLACs had been converted to MP3, I would go on a murder spree.