Hacker News Reader

Comment by splendidHaiku | Hacker News Reader

Everything will be considered fake unless it is proven authentic.

How do we prove authentic? Same way we prove that a website we visit is authentic. Every recording made will be signed/hashed and be able to validate of the public key of the recording device (every phone will have a key). White House, News Orgs, etc. all will use cameras with public keys so everyone can validate. As soon as only one pixel or frequency changes, it will be invalid/fake.

In the end, all will be even more trustworthy than today (there will be some kind of signed/verification label on every video/audio/media that is original/valid).

View on HN

You know, contracts are just pieces of paper. They can easily be faked. Yet try going on court and say that a contract with your signature is invalid because it could be fake. Your argument will be rejected, because it doesn't matter if it could be faked, it matters if you are alleging that it was faked.

So the same thing should be the standard for video. Someone shows a video of you doing something. Either say under penalty of perjury, that you did not do that, and then the authenticity of the video can be looked into, or the video will be accepted as authentic. You don't get a preemptive "this could be fake, so lets ignore it".

That would represent a revolution in terms of how the court operates and how many cases are thrown out. There will be riots.

This is a good idea and would help a lot (though not a perfect solution with the whole "picture of a picture" thing).

I wonder if there is any traction in the industry towards making this happen?

You could take a picture of a picture or a recording of a recording and now it is validated.

But it wouldn't be validated with the original key, so people could know it could have been tampered with.

If the key is just the recording device, why not? Play a fake on some other device and record with your own.

The idea is that the blockchain tracks the date the video was entered onto the blockchain verifiably. Note that this isn't the same as the date the images were taken, but it confirms that the recording is at least X days old.

Datestamps are part of the keyed metadata.

My camera has no clue what date it is beyond what I tell it the date is.

Which makes video evidence from your camera more suspect than video evidence from a cellphone (which, sure, could be fake-dated as well).

Which further reinforces the fact that there is a tremendous amount of real evidence that will be thrown out.

But then the metadata, e.g. gps coords, time of the recording, etc. of the recorded video will not match with what is displayed. So it would be an obvious fake.

GPS can be spoofed by replay

How would that relate to the hashing explained here?

I imagine the guy above is thinking any device can produce a hashed video, but I think we'll need the notion of cryptographically secure cameras or something with write once memory that has to be swapped out once in a while. The alternative being cameras that upload the hash of every clip into a server to provide non repudiation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com