Moon Disaster
moondisaster.org
moondisaster.org
> Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially faster.
Going slow at the beginning is actually part of exponentials.
Consider advances in travel - you basically had people who saw, within their lifetime, a world of trains become one of planes, including some supersonic passenger flights (not to mention going to space). Even bullet trains are old at this point.
Lotta other examples of stagnation in the physical world rather than the information one since then.
Distance would be pretty similar to the Tokyo to Osaka leg of the Tokaido shinkansen. Total time would probably be similar. I left my apartment 3.5 hours before I arrive in SoCal. Hour and a half on public transit, 30 minute buffer for flight, 30 minute boarding time, 60 minute flight.
1) Multiple camera angles. A simultaneous left / front / right view of a person speaking would be much harder to fake.
2) Higher-resolution video and high-quality audio are harder to fake, although this might not be a problem for entities with sufficient resources and motivation.
3) Attribution to a real person. While this raises problems for people who want to remain anonymous due to very reasonable fears of retaliation, it also makes it harder to push fakes out to social media.
Note many fake 'breaking news' videos are just stiched together old footage, no AI deepfake required. This has been noticeable across multiple platforms wrt Ukraine, for example:
Nothing exemplified this problem more than the recent Twitter takeover. On tiktok, fake news was running rampant, and I saw it happen in real time. At one point someone said that a Twitter employee banned Elon on his way out, while showing a screenshot of the “eIon musk” fake account: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRx6G9mG/
There were also actual deepfakes of Elon’s voice that fooled me. I wish I saved it, since it’s highly relevant to this thread. But it only became clear it was a fake when it started saying ridiculous things. They even had a video of Elon talking, and they didn’t have to bother syncing his lips with the audio. Viral clips just need a veneer of authenticity to short circuit our monkey brains.
It wasn’t till I fell for that deepfake that I started realizing how much of a problem we might be facing. The next few presidential candidates might need to put out statements saying “X wasn’t true,” while the majority of people already believe X because they saw it happen live on tiktok.
I guess the counter (which I think you're pointing out) to that is to publish text to a known-trusted website rather than a video, but I wonder how many folks who get their "news" from TikTok would read it.
By "verified", I assume Twitter has verified that their identity on Twitter matches their real life identity, and I don't see a problem with anyone having an ability to claim that. What's wrong with Jane Random being verified that she _is_ Jane Random?
If people are basing their trust not on someone's identity and history, but on their celebrity (blue mark so far), that's where the problem is.
They then spoof being the real person, and verification then means absolutely nothing cause they are functionally identical to a bypasser.
By having verification be really hard to get, trolls have a lot harder time getting accounts and the problem is smaller in scope.
Having initial validation accessible is not the issue here.
It's like allowing verified emails to be changed to another address without reverifying.
I mean, doh.
He mentions things like "where/when did this happen", where were the people/things in the video at that time, which source did this arise from. Basically there's a whole web of context to any event, which is why the breaking news is the best place for this, but the long term viability is much harder.
He also mentions some NYT tech for timestamping their videos as they record them and to detect manipulation.
Mentioned on page 206, "The Perils and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence" of the book.
https://c2pa.org/ seems to be the latest iteration of it.
> What is the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)?
> The C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project to collectively build an end-to-end open technical standard to provide publishers, creators, and consumers with opt-in, flexible ways to understand the authenticity and provenance of different types of media. C2PA opposes efforts to make content provenance measures mandatory.
What we can have is attestation and reputation, then provenance.
It starts with a container format that allows signatures of both the entire video with audio, audio only, and video only, along with reasonable segments (three seconds?) of each of these.
Excerpts of any of these can be transcluded into another such container. The editor can transform it in any way, the resulting display doesn't have to match the particulars of the excerpt (captioning, noise filtering, color correction) but the excerpt is itself included, or at least the signature.
It would be useful for some people to have cameras which do this at the moment of recording, along with GPS, cell location data, and so on, to get really bulletproof documentary footage.
I don't want that built into my phone, necessarily. As a container format and ffmpeg style tool, this would support anonymous attestation which can be demonstrated by the keyholder at any future time. As a built-in subpoena-able feature of my phone or mirrorless camera? Hmm, probably don't want that. If it snitches proactively, not a chance in hell.
Your comment in particular made me feel like it was worth posting!
We mustn't confuse attestation with reputation, nor even the combination of attestation and reputation with truth.
Attestation is nothing more than someone staking their reputation on the veracity of what they're sharing with the world.
If I'm being frank, I thought this was too obvious to need stressing. If the camera is pointed at David Copperfield, cryptography can't make the lens show you reality.
Attestation solves a lot of problems, but like my first sentence said, video integrity isn't a problem which can be solved anymore, if it ever was.
I’ve written a blog post that addresses many of problems, and your comment was one of the reasons I posted it! You can find it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33558566
Trusted timestamping can attest that a given piece of media was not created after a given instance in time.
Trusted hardware running trusted code, combined with remote attestation, can offer a high-degree of assurance that a given video clip is not a product of CGI/ML.
Digital signatures by the entity responsible for a video clip's capture/creation mitigates the creation of media not sanctioned by that entity. Subjects in a particular piece of media could additionally apply their digital signatures to further increase trust in its authenticity. (This is effectively a cryptographically enforced version of your third point.)
This isn't a silver bullet, and suffers all the pitfalls normally encountered in the implementation of cryptographic schemes.
The key difference is that digital signatures allow revocation-of-trust to be an effortless, automatic and delegatable process. As opposed to the current process that involves individual (and intrinsically limited) knowledge of who can be trusted. Frequently one doesn't even have provenance information for a media item, which is a prerequisite for making a trustworthiness judgment call.
The "hocus pocus" is literally the point that distinguishes this scheme from the plainly non-working system that we have today.
I'm not seeing anything in your description that couldn't also be said about using PKI to allow people to sign stuff they published. (And better: it's not broken by non-deceptive edits, like cropping or brightness adjustments)-- except that PKI already exists so we can't imagine that it would magically solve these problems. :) (and there is a long long history of people thinking varrious PKI ideas will magically solve varrious problems and then failing to solve them at all)
(I mean cameras that produced 'signed' output is also a thing that has previously existed too: https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio... and was never particularly popular even with the target market)
Yes, I'm aware this leaves the door open for subversion of certification authorities by nation-states. It's still better than the nothing we have today.
I suppose a chip inside of the camera (in a tamper-resistant housing that self-destructs if you attempt disassembly) which signs the photo before sending it to the microprocessor could be sufficient in practice. Especially if the provider of the key infrastructure embeds a separate key in every camera, and monitors for abuse.
Anyway who is gonna build this? Perhaps Google could start selling special cameras to journalists, such that if the photos in a story on Google News were taken using that camera, the story in Google News gets a special checkmark next to it?
> Anyway who is gonna build this?
If and when specialized imaging sensors become available, I don't see this being a huge lift. One wouldn't even need purpose-built cameras for all but the most high-assurance recording requirements. Remote attestation and trusted code execution is already being incorporated into most newer devices. Bringing it all together would mostly be a software problem at that point.
Of course, there would also need to be a value proposition to justify any kind of work towards this. I personally see this as an inevitability given the frightening pace of progress in the ML field, and the increasing public concern over things like deepfakes.
Thank you for your comments!
I don't see how it all comes together without a partnership between the tech companies that display media (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and the tech companies that provide hardware (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) Maybe what's needed is to go through a nonprofit like the Partnership on AI.
Google is an interesting target because they are basically the only company that's both a media displayer and a hardware provider. If Android devices get a "verified non-deepfake" capability before Apple devices get it, I could see that as being a significant leg up for Android actually. It encroaches on Apple's traditional branding of "we make products for important people". I wonder if the Titan M has capabilities which could be leveraged. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/building-t...
Google would probably sell loads of Pixel phones if it upranked "verified non-deepfake" Youtube videos recorded using Pixel cameras & microphones. Every aspiring Youtube star would know to record using a Pixel. The deepfake thing is a pretty good excuse to defend against an antitrust lawsuit, especially if Google can say that the capability will eventually roll out to competing hardware.
With enough training data and modified network this can also be done.
It's funny how both that and this used "low sound quality" to mask the imperfections in the cloned voice. But I suppose it's only a matter of time before that's no longer necessary.
Though I must say that if the intention of the video was to make me doubt abilities to spot deep fakes, it didn't manage to achieve its goal. Both Nixon's face movements and voice felt highly unnatural and robotic to me. Although I'm sure it won't be many years until the results of such experiments will be come indistinguishable, we are not quite there yet.
That said as someone else pointed out this was done in 2019. If this was made today the face edges would be much better and audio clearer. I'd love to see this remade now.
Because. It’s actually very good.
I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn’t shut up about “wokeness” (we disagree on a few things). The show is effectively an imagining of “America, made great in the first place”, and at least the core premise - that we lost our hunger for exploration after winning the space race, _used to be_ a bipartisan talking point.
Absolutely recommend it. Also, the imagined space shuttles they get to come up with are amazing.
I thought it was leaning a bit too heavily on what we consider modern issues. But then it turns out that some of the characters in the story where real and lived through this or something close to this (I forget now, but one of the women astronauts that never got to fly was a real person)
Later episodes fall victim to lazy "a major catastrophe is about to occur, engineering team comes up with moonshot solution just in the nick of time to save the day" more often than I'd like. And the lesbian romance storyline seemed forced. I could barely finish the third season as it really went off the rails.
The aleida character is the worst though. She somehow has super powers that no one else posseses, but they never articulate her thought process or how she does it. It's just: entire team of rocket scientists stare at problem fruitlessly. Aleida stares at problem, inspiring music plays, her eyes light up and she tells you the solution. And then she explains simple things like impulse vs momentum to other rocket scientists, as if they didn't understand it before.
The parts I loved about it faded away, but I stuck around anyway. :P
Otherwise it was ok.
There are a few stories were currently popular agendas overlap with reality, such as the story of Alan Turing. You cannot tell his story without also talking about the government abuse based on his sexuality. In those situations, you can tell the story neutrally, and let the audience judge. Obviously fiction is different though.
I was a kid back then and I watched the TV broadcasts as they happened or as they were first reported so I was already familiar with those short videos though I originally saw them all on a black and white television. I have seen the same footage in color a number of times over the years since.
Growing up during this time period there was a sense of wonder, awe, hope, and we could look forward to even more missions and discoveries. It was a great time to be an American and there was some enhanced prestige associated with being a Texan since a lot of this happened because NASA was in Houston. Texas schools focused on science, technology, mathematics, and kids fitness was still encouraged through programs like the President's Physical Fitness tests. Even today I weigh only 30 lbs (13.6 kg, 2.14 stone) more than I weighed when I graduated high school. That part of the message stuck with me.
The video had too many repeat sections that were obvious fakes since it was too jerky. Live video and audio never sounded or looked that bad even when you were watching with a tuned rabbit ear antenna.
I have a feeling that the audio portion of the astronaut dialog designed to lead the viewer to believe that they had seen bad things happen was fake too and it used manipulated footage to build the mental image.
It was good seeing Walter Cronkite again. We watched Chet Huntley and David Brinkley a lot too. I think they were NBC news. Journalism has sure fallen on hard times over the last 40 years after we (the hearts and minds of the American people) were sold out to corporate pigs by a change in regulations that allowed one corporate entity to control all forms of media available locally. Independent local newsrooms could not compete with a well-funded national operation that could pump news stories into your homes over television, radio, and through a competing newspaper. Local newspapers sold out to national interests who used (and still use) partisan editorial control to sell their narrative. If you are under 40 your news has been a feed of carefully curated stories delivered by pretty faces intended to keep you engaged. Using those pretty faces to create a facade of attractive people with nearly plastic features evidently works. One network in particular uses so much makeup even on the male personnel that could all be wearing silicone masks during the broadcasts. This is intended to distract you from the message and to keep you watching their channel. Remember that Huntley, Cronkite, and other journalists on television every night weren't chosen for their looks. They were pretty ordinary looking men who would probably be a 5/10 where today's anchors are gussied up to try to hit an 8/10 appearance. You won't see any two-baggers on TV nowadays.
Unfortunately, all this new deep fake technology will be convincing enough to fool a lot of people. Propaganda is a huge problem today in all media forms without resorting to totally faked broadcasts delivering invented "truths". Our educational system is failing the people of the United States in many areas as religion goes back into classrooms, charter schools rob the public school systems, and private schools increasingly become a pathway for wealthier parents to pass their own political, religious, or social beliefs on to their kids with the assistance of others in their social circles. It is a tool for siloing the next generation so that they have none of the normal social interactions with people from different backgrounds that they would have had in a public school setting. This helps the older generation maintain social problems like racism, homophobia (through some religious-based private schools), women's place in society, etc.
A long time ago I thought we were getting close to solving problems like racism. As an older adult I see that we lost our way, not because it is intractable but because we were intentionally led back to the well-traveled path by bad actors after we had initially collectively chosen the less-traveled branch which offered a solution. Picking the less-traveled branch of the trail required us to be courageous, to be open-minded, empathetic, and civil to each other. Instead, while navigating this difficult path we chose leaders who did not deserve our confidence and who consistently, and intentionally in some cases, failed us eventually steering us back on to the original track where we are today.
Since life moves in cycles we will always encounter those branches in the trail that present opportunity and require courage. Thus there can always be hope that we will either willing choose to trace an alternate cycle or accidentally stumble onto the less-worn path and decide that it is more interesting and then decide collectively that we should continue that adventure.
And so it goes...
You're welcome.
Consider watching Frontline on PBS. While not the same format, the journalism is well done.
Thanks for reading.
Imagine where this tech will be in five years.
They spliced the content in a way that is misleading
E.g. have you heard the voices from https://play.ht/ ?
Those capture inflection and tonality quite well, and are able to reproduce near-natural sounding laughter, pauses, and other human qualities. I wouldn't say it's perfect just yet, but give it another ~5 years and it will get there.
and they are multilingual as well.
For me it was the first time to (afaik) to hear tts of this Quality in my native language (which is a major one)
On "fake" it says "nice try, but real". On "real" it says "nice try, but it's fake, we edited the mouth".
So... which is it? Did I miss something?
I'd have to watch Nixon's resignation speech and this without sound back to back.
http://hummingbirdclock.info/about
"The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound, yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has edited the recording."
If you see a video of someone on a link that hasn’t been minted by them, then it’s not genuine.
I'm too young to tell.
Amazon Prime Video link https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-Douglas-Miller/dp/B07R...