Roc Camera | Hacker News Reader

Roc Camera

roc.camera

554 pointsmartialg478 comments

I used to be really (really really) into photography. I respect anyone working hard on a physical product, but this misses the mark on every front I can think of.

The real issue that photographers grapple with, emotionally and financially, is that pictures have become so thoroughly commodified that nobody assigns them cultural value anymore. They are the thumbnail you see before the short video clip starts playing.

Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash. This is especially funny to me because I used to struggle with the fact that people looking at your work don't know or care what kind of camera or process was involved. They don't know if I spent two hours zoomed in removing microscopic dust particles from the scanning process after a long hike to get a single shot at 5:30am, or if it was just the 32nd of 122 shots taken in a burst by someone holding up an iPad Pro Max at a U2 concert.

This all made me sad for a long time, but I ultimately came to terms with the fact that my own incentives were perverse; I was seeking the external gratification of getting likes just like everyone else. If you can get back to a place where you're taking photographs or making music or doing 5 minute daily synth drills for your own happiness with no expectation of external validity, you will be far happier taking that $399 and buying a Mamiya C330.

This video is about music, but it's also about everything worth doing for the right reasons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQF4YIvxwE

I also used to be really (really really) into photography. Personally, I’ve stopped taking pictures because of the stigma around a camera.

Everyone, me more than most, doesn’t want their picture taken, or to be in the background of other photos. When someone can take thousands of pictures an hour, and upload them all to some social media site to be permanently stored… idk it’s shifted from a way to capture a moment to feeling like you’re being survieled.

A bit hyperbolic, but it’s the best way to describe what I’m feeling

The concept of «public» has changed.

About 15-20 years ago I attended a lot of car events (races, shows) where I took lots of photos. Mostly of moving cars, but also a lot of closeups of race car drivers using a long lens. For about a year more than half the photos published in a very niche car publication were by me. The magazine had a few thousand subscribers. And to this day I still see some drivers use my shots of them as profile pictures etc. Nobody minded being photographed. In fact, they were really happy about it.

Then social media happened. There’s a different «public» now. Any picture taken and published now has the potential to go viral. To get a global audience. And not least: to be put in unpleasant contexts.

I can understand that people’s attitudes have changed.

I haven’t actually given up taking photos in public. In part because I think it is important that people do. I still take pictures of strangers. Then again, I very rarely publish them online out of respect for their privacy.

I understand how photos represent something else today. And that people view the act of taking a picture differently. But if we stop taking pictures, stop exercising our rights to take pictures, we will lose them. Through a process of erosion.

Absolutely. Running around with a large format camera (Graflex) with an Instax back (lomograflok) and making photos and immediately giving results back to people changed a lot. Strangers were basically lining up to ask about the camera and have their photo taken. That was a really fun experience, and I noticed how much I missed that excitement - before camera phones took over such moments were much more common. Now I build/3d print my own large and medium format cameras, and that also makes it much more interesting, but the fun of instant photography with an ancient looking camera is just incredible.

The contemporary “ick” about street photography is the ick of non-consensual capture. Everyone feels it to some degree; I stopped doing street photography work and even most social photography (including paid work) because I felt it and I wasn’t ready to navigate those feelings.

This “ick” is real and it’s good that you feel it, because you can build on it for a sense of ethics about photos and the use of the camera, about how its gaze affects subjects, about how to reduce that impact.

A solution for you is to focus on photography with people posing for photos who want the photos, or people posing for photos who want money. Try art nude, even: it is fascinating, liberating, has a very strong historical and creative through line, and will teach you a lot.

I have developed a much stronger sense of the ethics around my photography and a little more personal confidence, so I might yet give street photography a go again in future, if I think I have something specific to say.

That's odd, and to reassure you I would say that I personally would rather see somebody with a physical camera. That way I know I can avoid the area they're photographing if I don't want to be shot or just be aware I'm going to be in a photo otherwise. It also makes me (rightly or wrongly) think the photo will be uploaded somewhere a bit higher than an Instagram / Facebook feed (my wife used to put DSLR photos on Instagram and for an image feed website I used to be shocked at how poorly images were downscaled, maybe that's changed).

I find something much more pervasive about any upright smartphone being a camera at any given time, whether the person is being obvious about it or not. A dedicated camera is actually more reassuring to me, as its use-cases are probably more innocent than a smartphone camera.

Smartphone cameras have given poor photography to the masses. I reckon I'm probably in thousands of peoples photos that were taken on a whim with a phone. And I've witnessed situations where it appears people are trying to stealthily take photos of people with phones on public transport and the like.

I've managed to get around that by returning to my Nikon FM2. People react quite differently when it's clearly a film camera - even better if it's a medium format camera. That also gets around the nagging feeling that you're being guided in what you're taking by how it will appear online too. I don't have any social media accounts aside from HN and a BlueSky account that tweets the diary entries of an 18th century naturalist so I have no motivation to think about that side of things. It's a lovely feeling of my work being private because I can't be tempted in the moment to share a photo online. It feels much healthier.

> Everyone, me more than most, doesn’t want their picture taken, or to be in the background of other photos.

I used to be a little into photography. No one ever protested about me taking a picture of them. Just recently I was photographing an event and thought: I just come there, take photos of everyone, upload them to the internet, and all I get is thanks. I haven't asked anyone for permission. Yes I was invited by the event organizer, but I'm sure they didn't ask permission either.

The quantities are what changed. Taking a photo used to be relatively difficult and rare, so it was mainly reserved for relatively meaningful subjects. Which meant that having your picture taken was also relatively rare, and was something of a validation that you were interesting enough to merit being photographed. For that photograph to be published, even more so. Now cameras are plentiful and cheap, "publishing" opportunities are plentiful and cheap, and being photographed is commonplace and not appreciated as much. You can read all the meanings into my choice of the word cheap, by the way - as a price (increased supply made the price go down) or as a value (there's an abundance, so it becomes meaningless), or even as an implication about quality (low stakes means not as much attention or care for composing a shot).

Can't you just not care and power through? Someones always going to be miffed regardless. I keep a Rollei A110 on me at all times and a tiny Minox EC that takes me hours to refill. When I bring it out people love it. It's a throwback that people very much appreciate. I can see people getting miffed at a big digital camera though.

This is a you thing. Most people have no issue whatsoever with their faces appearing on social media. They “have nothing to hide”.

People feel like there's some man in a dark room somewhere looking at each and every image posted everywhere with evil intent.

And yet, they're constantly captured by countless CCTV cameras all around, without minding their business. I know the pain and don't take as many portraits as I'd like to sometimes, even with people close to me; but on few occasions that I do sneak in a shot and show them the results later, they're surprised in two ways: "when did you take it?!" and "that doesn't look half bad!". Maybe because I don't overdo it.

Keep up the fight!

Really? I don't go out and photograph near as much as I used to, but nobody has ever reacted with anything other than interest at what I'm doing. I was recently traveling to a couple cities I had last been to 5-10 years ago and was shocked at how packed places were with people getting their photos taken, I have photos that would be impossible to take again because there would be people in the way.

People feel like there's some man in a dark room somewhere looking at each and every image posted everywhere with evil intent.

A friend of mine delivers for Amazon. They have to take pictures of every package delivered. Sometimes the customer is there when they arrive and he asks them to hold the package for him while he takes the photo of the package.

Most of them turn away or hold the package far away so they aren't in the image. Some will pose with the package in some amusing way.

I have clicked about ~20,000 photographs on a Sony camera in the last year and a half. And I have published exactly 0 of those photos on social media.

Whenever I meet my friends and family, I show them the pictures myself and the story behind them.

I love the thrill of street photography and it gives me immense pleasure to capture candid moments of humans. It's a great creative outlet for me and helps me think about life and philosophy through my pictures.

Maybe one day I will care enough about publishing these pictures, maybe one day I will care about AI. But right now, I don't. This is the closest I've been to my "kid"-like self, just enjoying something for the heck for it.

The pictures go with a story, that's the interesting part.

As someone who would love to get into street photography, and has an old NIkdon D7100, what would you recommend is a good lense (not model, but focal length, zoom, etc) for street photography ?

I really need to get back to that mindset. I keep catching myself unconsciously checking my hobbies and abilities for marketability. I've been playing guitar for almost three decades, one of them spent in a touring metal band. When I started, I used to enjoy making music so much that I played and composed so often an album would just come together naturally. And then another one and another one, I just couldn't stop. These days, I no longer sit down to play just for myself and the moment — instead, I catch myself thinking, “Can I sell sample packs from this? Record a course? Should I code a VST plugin for it and sell that?” And after weeks of moments like this, all I have are three random riffs and frustration.

I try to look at my music as something that I do because I enjoy it. I play in a casual/amateur band and I regularly have to remind the guys that I do it for no other reason than because I enjoy it; I'm not interested in playing gigs. Not everyone sees it the same way.

I know a few musicians that tried to make a living out of music similar to your story. Most have now stopped making music and are both frustrated with the music industry, and angry at listeners for not valuing their work.

Which band, may I ask?

I’ve been (really, really) into photography since I was six, and I’m still (really, really) at it three decades later. I never felt much appeal toward photography as an art form – it’s always been a way to capture moments and share them with people I care about.

These days I play with both AI photography and “normal” photography. My main camera is the A9 III with a global shutter – a machine gun that fires 120fps RAW files. I shoot a lot of sports, and the people I photograph are thrilled to get such high-quality shots of moments that mattered to them. It doesn’t really matter how much cultural value society attaches to photos – those captured moments will always be meaningful to them, and they feel joy when they see them. That’s the whole point of photography for me.

AI photography is a bit different. I take 15–20 photos of a friend’s face with my camera, train a LoRA model to use with Flux1.dev, and upload it to network storage on RunPod. Then I spin up a serverless worker on an H100 that runs the ComfyUI API, and use my own Flutter-based frontend to play with prompts and generate new photos of that person. I can make far better headshots this way than in a real studio. For some friends, it’s even been a therapeutic experience – seeing so many high-quality images of themselves looking confident, happy, and fully alive helped them feel that way, even if just for a moment. One friend told me, “You did more with these AI photos of me than therapy did in the past year.”

Wow that’s bleak. “Look at that fake photo of you but better.”

>Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash.

This has rapidly changed over the last few months. As more and more pictures/videos going viral on social media are AI-generated [0, 1], real pictures/videos of remarkable things are increasingly falsely called out as AI-generated [2]. People are definitely starting to care, and while the toy camera in the linked article is merely an artistic statement, having some ubiquitously standardized way of unambiguously validating content generated by a real recording device is going to become paramount.

[0] https://www.today.com/news/bunnies-jumping-trampoline-viral-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O-8kAnBL2s

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/skiing/comments/1oeda67/my_highligh...

Nikon is building in authenticity tooling at the camera & sensor level with its latest cameras. Z6iii I believe was the first.

Back before digital became really high res I was into small, medium and large format silver halide cameras balancing cost with high quality optics. You could get Exackta's, Speed Graphics and Roleiflexes relatively inexpensively and take amazing high quality photos with them.

The larger you went though, the more you had to be mindful about the cost of eash shot both in terms of time and cost for film and developing. There is something to be said about the curation that happened when taking photos like that. You put a lot more though upfront into composition and had to think about your shutter speed, aperture etc..

One thing I learned about during that time was how the old time press photographers would use a Speed Graphic on 4x5 negative, grab a wide angled shot and then crop it. Also, press conferences used to create a lot of broken glass as photographers would snap a shot, shoot out the one time use flash bulb on the ground and then quickly put in another bulb to get another shot.

>Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash.

Some will once AI is ubiquitous. Especially of the art & entertainment sectors

I don't think about this as much for professional or amateur photography.

I think of verifiable images as something for legal purposes. So much is easily made up with AI. Having verifiable real photos (and eventually video) can be a benefit for things like legal proceedings.

> I think of verifiable images as something for legal purposes.

That makes sense to me, but who is this particular $399 camera made for? Can you imagine someone choosing it for a photo they intend to be used in legal proceedings? The specs and appearance do not scream high-quality professional tool to me. The price is lower than a professional would be willing to spend (on something high-quality), higher than someone would drop on a whim.

It looks kinda like a designer's school assignment that they're trying to sell.

Agreed. This product seems pointless because nobody's interested in a proof of authenticity (except maybe in certain legal niches?)

I take pics for me and my friends and family, and AI has almost zero impact on this (although, face swaping is lots of fun, and everyone understands it's fake and a joke).

Edit: also, and more importantly, the question of authenticity is moot. The point of art in general is to say something / make a statement, and certainly not to produce a faithful representation of the world. Anything that's not an exact copy (which is hard to do if you're not God), has a point of view, which gives it value.

Taking pics and videos of events with political ramifications and being able to show that it isn't AI generated or tampered with has HUGE utility, not the least of which by reporters and restablishing trust with disaffected.

The idea isn't a bad one in some cases like travel photography. Between background people removal and lightroom a good chunk of travel pictures are not a good representation of what you can expect. on Instagram there are plenty of pictures of people standing alone in front of the Eifel tower or at inari gates in afternoon lighting that is unrealistic outside the pandemic or a 6am shot. Or take cherry blossom viewing in tokyo. More trees are white or very light pink but you would not know that looking at what people post often the camera auto balancing to make them more pink because if it doesn't people think there is a problem with the camera; that incentivizes sony, canon etc to build that in.

> Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash

That the average person hasn't thought about this doesn't mean it couldn't become a thing in the future. People do value authenticity and genuine things, though I agree the particulars aren't relevant in a lot of cases.

This is a (very expensive!) toy camera, but I could see traditional camera companies like Fujifilm, Canon, etc, incorporating this tech later down the line.

> Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash

Nit, but there are reasons Canon and Nikon will sell you cameras that sign the pictures with their keys already. Even if they have been shown insecure in specific implementations the market is very much there.

Ten years ago in the NYC art market this was also true in a niche but very real audience. I think the NFT wave burnt that out completely.

> I was seeking the external gratification of getting likes just like everyone else.

“You will be happy to look okay. You will be happy to turn heads. You will be happy with smoother skin. You will be happy with a flat stomach. You will be happy with a six-pack. You will be happy with an eight-pack. You will be happy when every photo of yourself gets 10,000 likes on Instagram. You will be happy when you have transcended earthly woes. You will be happy when you are at one with the universe. You will be happy when you are the universe. You will be happy when you are a god. You will be happy when you are the god to rule all gods. You will be happy when you are Zeus. In the clouds above Mount Olympus, commanding the sky. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.”

― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet , Shortened version of the many-paragraphs-long quote found on: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10913632-you-will-be-happy-...

I am still really (really really) into photography! Nothing has changed that, the pictures are just as beautiful as they always were. My friends are touched when they see pictures of themselves spending time together. There is still plenty of things to see and take pictures of, and not enough time to worry about whether someone will appreciate my "work".

You can definitely get back into it. Just have fun, don't do it for anyone (that goes with any art).

Yep, I make many pictures but don’t feel like I need to share them with others. Sometimes I show my girlfriend and sometimes I frame them or put them on my fridge. I actually don’t really want to show strangers my work because I make photographs for myself and I’m not looking for critique because I’m developing my own style and exploring what interests me. I don’t need to prove my photographs are authentic because I know I took them!

Agreed, the issue is more that the average person doesn't care about photos. Even now you can tell what is real vs fake in photography and people don't care, they eat it all up. The good, the bad, the fake, doesn't matter because no one gives a fuck. If you actually appreciate the art of photography then you already do and will continue to regardless of AI or whatever.

That's not the point. The point is trying to make a device that can help capture evidence of events that can be verified as not AI generated.

Funny you mention the C330. I have not done any photography in well over a decade, and long ago sold all my gear, but just a week ago decided to take my grandfather's old Rolleicord in for cleaning & service. I am looking forward to shooting with it again, just for the sake of practicing the art. I might even learn to develop my own film this time around!

Commoditization is a good way to phrase it; first with affordable digital cameras, then with smartphones, photos have become more content than art. With smart filters and digital enhancement, mistakes and imperfect conditions have been fixed.

AI won't replace that, just creates an alternative way to generate content without needing to be physically present somewhere.

I think real photography is sort of like archery, you know, in the moment, feeling it, release at the right time, to capture that. I think in a sense of the candid street, or Magnum photogs. That kind of spirit. And that is innately satisfying and a fun way to engage with the world around you. :)

Even "unreal" photography can be like that . My phone may do all of the mechanical work + post-processing, but framing, angle, foreground/background and capturing just the right moment is just as much fun (well, for me anyway).

I read your comment this morning and it resonated with me.

A few hours later, YouTube suggested me this video: Psychology of People Who Don't Post their Photos on Social Media

Not some big revelations, but an interesting perspective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGx_cmEH8Lw

The biggest lie capitalism tells us is that something only has value if it can be sold.

Or just maybe free markets expose the bitter truth. That can take a lot of self reflection to come to terms with. Applies to a lot of aspects to life, eg. career planning, creative endeavors etc.

But at the same time it's true that some vital public activities aren't rewarded by the system atm. Eg. quality journalism, family rearing, open source, etc. Often that's an issue of privatized costs and socialized rewards. Finding a way to correct for this is a really big deal.

The desire to "make money" is generally a proxy for the desire to provide value for others. It is easier to justify the investment of labor and resources that went into the production a camera if you can reciprocate the value for others.

And the most important lesson Internet taught it is that something only has value when seller loses money on it.

Capitalism doesn't 'tell us' anything, it just like everything else has pros and cons.

I don't know anyone who understand economics would say this, unless you're talking about very specific meanings of 'value'. I'm not trying to be pedantic, I know what you mean, but these comments are not insightful or helpful.

There is absolutely a market for social media that bans AI slop. People in general don’t want the slop, but it’s seeping in everywhere with no easy way to mass remove.

The problem with the linked product is it’s basically DRM with a baked in encryption key. And we have seen time and time again that with enough effort, it’s always been possible to extract that key.

The problem about DRM in this context is not that it's going to get broken (which is probably true if the product becomes sufficiently mainstream). It will be used to target photographers and take away their rights. With today's cameras, you have (at least in theory) some choice how much of your rights you give away when you give the pictures your took to someone else. With DRM in the camera, you'll likely end up with some subscription service, ceding a lot of control to the camera makers and their business partners.

Respectfully, I completely disagree.

People "at large" absolutely don't care about AI slop, even if they point and say eww when it's discussed. Some people care, and some additional people pretend they care, but it just isn't a real issue that is driving behavior. Putting aside (for now) the idea of misinformation, slop is socially problematic when it puts artists out of work, but social media slop is just a new, sadder, form of entertainment that is generally not replacing the work of an artist. People have been warning about the downfall of society with each new mode of entertainment forever. Instagram or TikTok don't need to remove slop, and people won't care after they acclimate.

Misinformation and "trickery" is a real and horrific threat to society. It predates AI slop, but it's exponentially easier now. This camera, or something else with the same goal, could maybe provide some level of social or journalistic relief to that issue. The problem, of course, is that this assumes that we're OK with letting something be "real" only when someone can remember to bring a specialty camera. The ability of average citizens to film some injustice and share it globally with just their phone is a remarkably important social power we've unlocked, and would risk losing.

Also the inversed incentive problem: the less people think it can be done, the more value in doing it.

That said in theory TPMs are proof against this: putting that to the test at scale, publicly, would be quite useful.

> There is absolutely a market for social media that bans AI slop.

I fully agree, I just don't know how that could work.

I think GenAI will kill the internet as we know it. The smart thing is (and always has been) to be online less and build real connections to real people offline.

> People in general don’t want the slop

True.

> There is absolutely a market for social media that bans AI slop.

There’s a market for social media that bans slop, period. I don’t think it matters how it was made.

Also, that market may not be large. Yes, people prefer quality, but (how much) are they willing to pay for it?

This might have immediate application in certain business sectors, such as real estate and insurance.

Yes but it is a hard sell, arguably too hard, and the product pitch, which is away from these applications, is the right one. They are not promising to be 'blockchain two' with hypothetical business use cases.

Imagine going to the solicitors with lots of documents that they need copies of. If they are making scans themselves then that is all the proof they need. If an assistant has copied that important certificate, then that copy is all that is needed for normal legal services. The Roc Camera would not be helpful in this regard, even if it had some magic means of scanning A4 pages.

In a serious solicitor interaction there will be forms that need to be signed and witnessed. These important documents then need to go in the post. In theory, the client could just whip out their Roc Camera and... But who is going to buy a Roc Camera when a stamp will do the job?

Maybe you might if you have a lot of photos to take for 'evidence', for example, of the condition of a house before work is done, or after it is done. However, nobody is asking for this so there is no compulsion to get the Roc Camera when the camera on your phone suffices for the needs of the real world.

People absolutely care that photos are real. There was somebody on here recently who had to read the photographer's story of how he planned it all to be comfortable it was real. Especially for those bird-in-front-of-sun type photos.

On the other hand, if taking a picture on a Canon dSLR instantly uploaded it to Apple Photos the same way your iPhone does, when you’re outside, that would be a really popular product.

The words 'external gratification' popped out. I only recently found out that my sensitivity to it is the biggest flaw/weakness in my and many other's personality.

The value here is not in a product used to make art.

The value is for documenting history and being able to *prove* something happened (eg for lawsuits, criminal cases, security, etc).

This is not about photographers.

Imagine the president wants to deliver a video message. Was it authentic or AI generated? If it was filmed with this camera, the population can verify.

Yes. I am surprised by off the rails this conversation went. It's not about art. It's about verifiable evidence in these crazy times.

How did you get out of your photography obsession? Because currently I’m really really into photography as well and it gets unhealthy. (Both time and money wise).

I'm cynical and don't fear a world in which people can't verify photos for their authenticity.

I fear (channeling a brave new world) that they simply will not care.

I view this as something that could be more useful in a journalistic, legal, or governmental context rather than in a creative or artistic one.

I'm not sure this is targeting you, but possibly rather journalistic photos where being able to prove authenticity is important

I think this kind of tech is designed for journalists and professionals, not enthusiasts and social media folk

Maybe it’s not for common use? I could see this betting important in the intelligence community, for example.

Photography is when the image is not moving right ?

> this misses the mark on every front I can think of.

YOU are missing the mark on every front I can think of.

I am actually willing to support DIY camera efforts, but if you're semi-serious about taking pictures, this just wouldn't work. First, Raspberry Pi (I'm guessing this is a CM4/CM5) is a disaster for a camera board. Nobody wants a 20s boot every time you want to take a picture, cameras need to be near instantaneous. And you can't keep it on either, because the RPi can't really sleep. There are boards that can actually sleep, but with fewer sensor options.

Now moving on to the sensor (IMX 519 - Arducam?) - it's tinier than the tiniest sensor found on phones. If you really want to have decent image quality, you should look at Will Whang's OneInchEye and Four-thirds eye (https://www.willwhang.dev/). 4/3 Eye uses IMX294 which is currently the only large sensor which has Linux support (I think he upstreamed it) and MIPI. All the other larger sensors use interfaces like SLVS which are impossible to connect to.

If anyone's going to attempt a serious camera, they need to do two things. Use at least a 1 inch sensor, and a board which can actually sleep (which means it can't be the RPi). This would mean a bunch of difficult work, such as drivers to get these sensors to work with those boards. The Alice Camera (https://www.alice.camera/) is a better attempt and probably uses the IMX294 as well. The most impressive attempt however is Wenting Zhang's Sitina S1 - (https://rangefinderforum.com/threads/diy-full-frame-digital-...). He used a full frame Kodak CCD Sensor.

There is a market for a well made camera like the Fuji X-Half. It doesn't need to have a lot of features, just needs to have ergonomics and take decent pictures. Stuff like proofs are secondary to what actually matters - first it needs to take good pictures, which the IMX 519 is going to struggle with.

> Nobody wants a 20s boot every time you want to take a picture

But that's less due to the RPi and more due to lots of amateur projects that ship the RPi with a desktop Linux distribution like Raspbian (itself based on a very conservative one - Debian - that loves preserving decades of legacy crap).

You can absolutely get quick boot times on an RPi (or on an x86 machine for that matter, although you are limited by the time the firmware itself takes to boot) if you build your own read-only image with Buildroot/Yocto like any embedded shop would.

But I agree with the rest of the comment - an RPi is a terrible device for this (and for most purposes besides prototyping in fact). But not because of boot time reasons.

Also, the RPi is the wrong kind of hardware for attestation, at least use something like USB Armory which provides a user programmable ARM TrustZone environment.

Since USB Armory supports pinning multiple keys for secure boot (and IIRC protected storage), you could even deliver it set up with a manufacturer attestation key and allow the user to load and pin their own attestation key (useful for an organization like a news company) as well as allowing "dual boot" between the attested firmware signed by the pinned manufacturer key and the user's own firmware. I've wanted that kind of behavior in consumer hardware for a long time, where you have full freedom between using the locked down OEM environment or your own and switching between them freely.

(I assume the USB Armory might also not be ideal in terms of ability to sleep and boot speed, etc, but if you have a quicker smaller controller that's the main board then it could wake the one that supplies attestation and make that functionality available after it's done booting)

Another thread mentioned that this camera was made by crypto enthusiasts from a software/ZKP starting point, and not a photography starting point. If true, it will have a lot of maturation to do, but most likely they will either be incorporated into a "real" camera design, or they will just fold.

From these pics it actually looks like a whole PI4 board is used https://farcaster.xyz/faust

Interesting. I'm curious why they would do that.

> There is a market for a well made camera like the Fuji X-Half.

That product has for its specs a ridiculous price point of €750..

But you don't buy it for the specs, you buy it for the experience. It topped sales charts when it was launched. If I had more time to spend on photography, or if I was younger, or if it was a little cheaper I'd have bought it myself.

I suspect more will follow the X-Half, because it gets orientation right. Most images are viewed today in portrait mode, and half-frame is the right format for that.

I know nothing about photography, but I'll just comment on this point:

> (I'm guessing this is a CM4/CM5) is a disaster for a camera board. Nobody wants a 20s boot every time you want to take a picture, cameras need to be near instantaneous.

You can boot an RPI in a couple hundred milliseconds.

I think almost everyone here is missing the point of this camera. In the post truth AI future, this is the camera you want when you photograph the billionaire or President or your spouse doing something awful. Any other photo proof won’t work because it can always be called fake. And yes I’m being serious. You are missing the point if you say the quality isn’t good enough or it’s too slow or bulky. The idea is the provable authenticity, which is going to be very important in the coming decades.

You can just AI generate a photo and snap a picture of that.

There's no such thing as provable authenticity.

I think some of the modern iPhone cameras use SLVS, so non-iPhone Apple Silicon might have a way of connecting to that natively too. Good luck using that though.

Without a native connection option, what remains to you is probably an FPGA converter (to MIPI CSI-2 D-PHY), which is going to be expensive of course. But still not as expensive as the sensor itself and the associated optics.

I don't think ZK proofs help to establish trust in a photo's authenticity at all. C2PA is a well thought out solution to this problem.

https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/spec...

> The C2PA information comprises a series of statements that cover areas such as asset creation, edit actions, capture device details, bindings to content and many other subjects. These statements, called assertions, make up the provenance of a given asset and represent a series of trust signals that can be used by a human to improve their view of trustworthiness concerning the asset. Assertions are wrapped up with additional information into a digitally signed entity called a claim.

I don't get how this is the only comment that doubts how their proofs work. There is zero detail or explanation of what they are proving

This is true, there is no detail.

The idea with zero knowledge proofs is that typically, photography metadata is stripped when it’s posted on Facebook. The proof would be a piece of metadata that COULD be safe to share in the SPECIFICS of what it proves. For example there is a circuit that can show that the photo was taken in the United States without leaking the specific location the photo was taken.

Presumably the authenticity scheme here is supposed to be, it answers it was taken on a real camera in a real place, without leaking any of the metadata. They are vague because probably that circuit (proving program and scheme) hasn’t been designed yet.

I also don’t know if it is possible to make useful assertions at all in such a scheme, since authenticity is a collection of facts (for example) and ZK is usually used to specifically make association of related facts harder.

Neal Krawetz of fotoforensics (and others probably) disagree that C2PA "is a well thought out solution"

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?%2Farchives%2F10... (search his blog if you want more of his thoughts on it)

I don't have a know enough bout this but I've been reading his blog for other topics a while and he does seem to know a lot about photo authenticity.

C2PA has the problem that it has a ton of optional metadata support and no well-defined strict validation procedure, so it's trivial to make fake photos appear valid using currently available C2PA enabled software.

They absolutely must define a much stricter mode that actually means something, and distinguish it from what they have now (which is essentially prototype level in terms of security model)

This is rather expensive for what looks like a home 3D printed toy with some cute software.

Other than that it's a 16MP Sony CMOS, I'd expect a pretty noisy picture...

    How do I get my photos off the camera?
    
    Coming soon. We're working on export functionality to get your photos off the camera.

It would be more interesting if the software was open source.

Simple, you remove the sdcard and mount it on linux, the security of a Pi is a joke.

I wouldn't mind if it was 3D printed if it wasn't done with like a layer height of 0.28, half transparent so it looks weird, and intended for outdoor use where 3D prints are porous and water will seep through. The housing needs at the very least some spray painting and a clearcoat.

What I do mind is the cheapest off the shelf diy button lmao. They are like cents a piece, just add a fucking metal one that are like a few cents more if you're selling a $400 camera, cheapass. I wouldn't be surprised if the software side with the "proof" being a similarly haphazardly brittle implementation as the construction.

> This is rather expensive for what looks like a home 3D printed toy with some cute software.

This attitude really rubs me the wrong way, especially on a site called Hacker News.

I think we absolutely should be supporting projects like this (if you think they're worth supporting), else all we're left with is giant corporation monoculture. Hardware startups are incredibly difficult, and by their nature new hardware products from small companies will always cost more than products produced by huge companies that have economies of scale and can afford billions of losses on new products.

So yes, I'm all for people taking risks with new hardware, and even if it doesn't have the most polished design, if it's doing something new and interesting I think it's kinda shitty to just dismiss it as looking like "a 3D printed toy with some cute software".

Hey it's fine to make a 3d printed camera and cool stuff like that. But it's another thing to make it a product, that isn't shipping yet and asking $399 with a shiny website and with closed source software.

I don't mean to disregard the technical feat, but I question the intent.

This literally looks like someone made a closed source hardware kit out of mostly open parts and software then shipped it preassembled.

I support it but I recognize it is a 3D printed toy with some cute software... toys can be interesting too. Not everything needs to be a startup.

Check Ali for "shitty" minature key-ring C-thru packaged cameras that look just like this "3D printed toy with some cute software", going for $4.00, not $400!

The BoM is ~$150 MSRP. I doubt the ZKP Rube Goldberg contraption will survive a day of reverse engineering once it gets into the wild.

>This attitude really rubs me the wrong way, especially on a site called Hacker News.

It's just that even in the realm of hardware by small teams built upon Pi boards this is very overprice and poor construction and cheap components for what it is.

Selling for $400 there are case solutions other than a cheap 3D print, and button choices other than the cheapest button on the market.

This isn't a hardware start-up, it's a software start-up using off the shelf consumer hardware to give their software product a home.

If it was a hardware start-up, the camera would be $80 built with custom purpose made hardware.

Once you decide to launch a hardware product composed of completed consumer hardware products, you are already dead. All the margin is already accounted for.

You literally can't even export the photos...

It would be cool if this was open source because looking at the pictured this is all off the shelf hardware. I am guessing only bespoke thing here is the stl for the case

It wouldn't work at all as open source since you could just modify the source to sign your AI generated pictures.

This is patently incorrect. Just remember the whole TiVo affair and reasons why GPLv3 was born. Source code availability does not guarantee ability to run it on the particular device.

One could design a toolchain that posts a hashed signed version of the source used to produce a signed binary. Build and deploy what you want and if you want people to trust it and opt in then it is publicly available.

In this case you get the signature and it confirms the device and links to a tamper proof snapshot of the code used to build its firmware.

Okay. What prevents you from printing out a AI generated picture and taking a photo of that with the camera?

it would. it would just require pki and a secure enclave that lives directly on the imaging chip to support it.

Seems to me that a camera like this is necessarily, at least in part, a closed system that blocks you from controlling the software or hardware on the device you supposedly own. It's hard for me to think this is a good direction. And as others have pointed out, it can't prevent attacks through the analog hole, e.g. photographing a display.

It's not feasible or desirable for our hardware devices to verify the information they record autonomously. A real solution to the problem of attribution in the age of AI must be based on reputation. People should be able to vouch for information in verifiable ways with consequences for being untrustworthy.

> camera like this is necessarily, at least in part, a closed system that blocks you from controlling the software or hardware on the device you supposedly own

Attestation systems are not inherently in conflict with repurposeability. If they let you install user firmware, then it simply won’t produce attestations linked to their signed builds, assuming you retain any of that functionality at all. If you want attestations to their key instead of yours, you just reinstall their signed OS, the HSM boot attests to whoever’s OS signature it finds using its unique hardware key, and everything works fine (even in a dual boot scenario).

What this does do is prevent you from altering their integrity-attested operating system to misrepresent that photos were taken by their operating system. You can, technically, mod it all you want — you just won’t have their signature on the attestation, because you had to sign it with some sort of key to boot it, and certainly that won’t be theirs.

They could even release their source code under BSD, GPL, or AGPL and it would make no difference to any of this; no open source license compels producing the crypto private keys you signed your build with, and any such argument for that applying to a license would be radioactive for it. Can you imagine trying to explain to your Legal team that you can’t extract a private key from an HSM to comply with the license? So it’s never going to happen: open source is about releasing code, not about letting you pass off your own work as someone else’s.

> must be based on reputation

But it is already. By example:

Is this vendor trusted in a court of law? Probably, I would imagine, it would stand up to the court’s inspection; given their motivations they no doubt have an excellent paper trail.

Are your personal attestations, those generated by your modded camera, trusted by a court of law? Well, that’s an interesting question: Did you create a fully reproducible build pipeline so that the court can inspect your customizations and decide whether to trust them? Did you keep record of your changes and the signatures of your build? Are you willing to provide your source code and build process to the court?

So, your desire for reputation is already satisfied, assuming that they allow OS modding. If they do not, that’s a voluntary-business decision, not a mandatory-technical one! There is nothing justifiable by cryptography or reputation in any theoretical plans that lock users out of repurposing their device.

> A real solution to the problem of attribution in the age of AI must be based on reputation

This is actually one of the theoretical predictions from Eliezer Yudkowsky, who says that as information becomes less and less verifiable, we're going to need to re-enter a pre-information-era - where people will have to know and trust the sources of important information they encounter, in some cases needing to hear it first hand or in person.

The analog hole can be mitigated by using more sensors. Store a depth map, a time, gps location, and maybe more.

If you’ve got a photo of a public figure, but it doesn’t match the records of where they were at that time, it’s now suspicious.

I feel the trouble with this is two-fold:

It's not enough that the photograph is signed and has metadata. Someone has to interpret that metadata to decide authentic versus not. One can have an "authentic" photo of a rear projection screen. It wouldn't be appropriate to have an "authentic" checkmark next to this photo if it claims to not be a photo of a rear projection screen. The context matters to authenticity.

Secondly, the existence of such "authentic" photos will be used to call all non-authenticated photos into doubt.

So it doesn't even really solve any problem, but creates new problems.

Yes, that might make these fake-proof cameras popular, to the point where people start putting in the necessary effort to defeat them by monkeying around with the time server and the depth sensor and the gps signal. Then you get a really well-supported fake image that's very effective because it's authenticated.

Practically I think there are situations where it is not so black and white. Like camera footage used as evidence in a court case. Signing a video with a public key would give some way to verify the source and chain of custody. Why wouldn't you in that situation? At a minimum it makes tapering harder and weakens false claims that something has been tampered with.

> And as others have pointed out, it can't prevent attacks through the analog hole, e.g. photographing a display

Are there systems that do prevent photographing a display? Like accompanying the photo with an IR depth map?

I don't think reputation gets you that far alone, we already live in a world where misinformation spreads like wildfire through follower counts and page ranks.

The problem is quality takes time, and therefore loses relevance.

We need a way to break people out of their own human nature and reward delayed gratification by teaching critical thinking skills and promoting thoughtfulness.

I sadly don't see an exciting technological solution here. If anything it's tweaks to the funding models that control the interests of businesses like Instagram, Reddit, etc.

Why can't posting a verifiably true image create as much or more instant gratification as sending a fake one? It will probably be more gratifying, once everyone is sending fake ones and yours is the only real one (if people can know that).

This feels like pearl clutching.

We do not need "proof". We lived without it, and we'll live without it again.

I grew up before broadband - we survived without photographing every moment, too. It was actually kind of nice. Social media is the real fluke of our era, not image generation.

And hypothetically if these cryptographic "non-AI really super serious real" verification systems do become in vogue, what happens if quantum supremacy beats crypto? What then?

You don't even need to beat all of crypto. Just beat the signing algorithm. I'm sure it's going to happen all the time with such systems, then none of the data can be "trusted" anyway.

I'm stretching a bit here, but this feels like "NFTs for life's moments". Designed just to appease the haters.

You aren't going to need this stuff. Life will continue.

This worked because we also used to have significantly better and more trustworthy news organisations that you could just trust did the original research and verified the facts. Now they just copy stories off Reddit and make up their own lies.

Back to the time before photographs then - the 1800s.

Crime scene photographs won't be evidence anymore. You photograph your flat (apartment) when you move in to prove that all the marks on the walls were already there and that won't be evidence anymore. The police mistreat you but your video of it won't be evidence either. etc

Am I just a crazy cynic or are ZK proofs here just a buzzword.

Like, how is this any different than having each camera equipped with a vendor controlled key and then having it sign every photo?

If you can spoof the sensor enough to reuse the key, couldn't you spoof the sensor enough to fool a verifier into believing your false proof?

You take a photo of an AI generated photo. What's yr proof worth then?

Yes, IIRC if you measure an image signal, i.e. here: image, that is at twice the resolution of the sensor you use, there won't be any artifacts.

Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.

But, if the sony sensor also measures depth information, this attack vector will fall flat. Pun intended.

The technique you describe has seen some use by some major vendors for 5 to 10 years right?

Not sure.

I don't understand how the "proof" part works, like, what part of the input to the "proof generation" algorithm is so inherently tied to the real world that one cannot feed it "fake" data ?

My understanding is it can't. The proof is "this photo was taken with this real camera and is unmodified". There's no way to know if the photo subject is another image generated by AI, or a painting made by a human etc.

^^This so much.

I remember when snapchat were touting "send picture that delete within timeframes set by you!" and all that would happen is you'd turn to your friend and have them take a picture of your phone.

In the above case, the outcome was messy. But with some effort, people could make reasonable quality "certified" pictures of damn near anything by taking a picture of a picture. Then there is the more technical approach of cracking a system physically in your hands so you can sign whatever you want anyway...

I think the aim should be less on the camera hardware attestation and more on the user. "It is signed with their key! They take responsibility for it!"

But then we need:

1. fully active and scaled public/private key encryption for all users for whatever they want to do

2. a world where people are held responsible for their actions...

I'm not sure which is more unrealistic.

Perhaps if it measured depth it could detect "flat surface" and flag that in the recorded data. Cameras already "know" what is near or far simply by focusing.

I wonder if a 360 degree image in addition to the 'main' photo could show that the photo was part of a real scene and not just a photo of an image? Not proof exactly but getting closer to it.

If someone cared enough to spend money on this I think it would be an easy to medium difficulty project to use an FPGA and a CSI-2 IP to pretend to be the sensor. Good luck fixing that without baking a secure element into your sensor.

I'd be shocked if the major sensor vendors don't already have engineers working on exactly that, though.

I would also love to know this. Where can I read how it works?

I am sorry if I missed something or someone already asked it, but:

If I generate image with AI, print it, then take a photo of it with Roc Camera so that you can't tell that this is actually a printed image, I will then have an AI image with ZKP of its authenticity?

Sony has this on their related page:

> A digital signature alone cannot determine whether the captured image is of an actual 3D subject, or of an image or video projected on a high-definition monitor. However, by using metadata including 3D depth information, it is possible to verify the authenticity of images with a high degree of accuracy. By using cameras from Sony, both the image and the 3D depth information can be captured on the sensor along the single light axis, providing information of high authenticity.

That 3D depth data could presumably be used to detect this. In principle, you could also train an AI to generate realistic 3D data. It's just not available yet, and probably harder to train (in general, and also since you would need to collect new massive amount of training data first).

No idea if this specific device has a 3D sensor, addressing the general question.

The depth information that sony cameras collect is almost certainly low-res enough that even with a simple image->depthmap model[0] you could fool it. Also they don't say anything about the sensor itself being secure, no need to print something if you can just emulate the sensor with an FPGA or other.

[0]: https://github.com/CompVis/depth-fm

I suspect the EXIF data won't make sense, and the faq says the ZKP applies to the metadata as well. But yeah, inherent flaw.

Presumably you could stop this by requiring GPS data for the image, and match that against a library of other images in the location?

I wonder how this compares to similar initiatives by e.g. Sony [0] and Leica [1].

[0]: https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/

[1]: https://petapixel.com/2023/10/26/leica-m11-p-review-as-authe...

Canon gave users the option to sign their photographs with "add original decision data". It got cracked.

* https://petapixel.com/2010/12/01/russian-software-firm-break...

* https://www.elcomsoft.com/presentations/Forging_Canon_Origin...

and you think this rushed product won't be?

I knew that Leica is generally expensive, but the model on the review is insanely expensive (over 10K USD?). It is not even comparable.

It's not the camera that is important though, but the technology:

https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/inde...

Compared to those, this is like a weekend project that a high school student could accomplish.

There's the C2PA standard which has picked up momentum recently to I guess help resolve some of the issues.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-03-c2pa-verification-news...

I believe various cameras support this, e.g. https://www.canon-europe.com/press-centre/press-releases/202...

`C2PA Authenticity: Integrated support for the C2PA standard for photo authenticity verification – initially available exclusively for registered news agencies.`

Sounds like it's limited to some users for now, I guess this will change in the future.

Going too far won't really help, since the scene being photographed can be manipulated or staged, which sounds more likely to be a concern rather than the hardware being hacked.

Yup, Canon as you mention, also Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, etc. The membership is pretty extensive.

https://c2pa.org/membership/

https://www.nikonusa.com/content/nikon-authenticity-service

https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/shopping/panasonic-is-th...

Kudos for making this exist, it was an inevitable place for the conversation to lead, and I’m actually glad it was “hacked” together as a project rather than forced into a consumer product. The camera specs don’t really matter here, this is about having the conversation. If this catches on, it will be a feature of every smartphone SoC.

On one hand, it’s a cool application of cryptography as a power tool to balance AI, but on the other, it’s a real hit to free and open systems. There’s a risk that concern over AI spirals into a justification for mandatory attestation that undermines digital freedom. See: online banking apps that refuse to operate on free devices.

Why do websites like this always try to be too clever? Let me scroll!

+1. To all of the marketing site developers out there: never mess with scrolling defaults.

Scrolling is broken on mobile, it scrolls right past entire sections, like there's too much inertia. The last section is also wider than the screen and horizontal scrolling disabled.

Consider pivoting from hardware sales to verification-as-a-service. Your camera could be the universal input device for identity verification (less creepy than Worldcoin's Orb), insurance claims, real estate documentation, and legal evidence. Think transaction fees per verification, not one-time camera sales. The consumer angle is weak - most people won't buy specialized hardware to prove their vacation photos are real. But enterprises would absolutely pay for a solution that reduces fraud, accelerates claims processing, or enables compliant remote verification. Dating apps would pay for "verified real person" badges. Banks would pay for remote account opening. Stop trying to create a problem and start solving the expensive problems that already exist:

Identity verification for financial services, social platforms, and gig economy (KYC/AML compliance) Professional tools for insurance, real estate, law enforcement, and healthcare documentation Enterprise authentication-as-a-service model

I’m not seeing what this is product is trying to solve? A zero knowledge proof to say it isn’t AI ? I think you could do this with a disposable camera or Polaroids and a photo scanner that makes the zero knowledge proofs .

A different thread mentions "what if you take a photo of an AI photo with the Roc camera?" - I still think that would be hard due to perspective, lighting, various other artifacts.

Scanning an image would be much easier to dupe though - scanners are basically controlled perspective/lighting environments so scanning an actual polaroid vs an ai generated polaroid printed on photo paper would be pretty indistinguishable I think.

What proof is there that the photo scanner is scanning a genuine photo and not something AI generated that looks like a Polaroid?

I love my medium format film cameras. I think everyone interested in photography should try it. Yashicas (just as an example of a company that made good medium format film cameras) are surprisingly affordable on eBay. I've had good luck buying from Japan, FWIW.

> A zero knowledge proof to say it isn’t AI

Seems like it.

> a photo scanner that makes the zero knowledge proofs

Presumably at some point the intention is to add other sensors to the camera e.g. for depth information.

If you take this to ILM's The Volume, you can prove that The Mandolorian is real.

This camera's attestation and zero-knowledge proof cannot verify that a photo is not AI generated. Worse, those "verifications" may trick people into believing photos are trustworthy or authentic that are not.

Similar to ad-clicks or product reviews, if this were to catch on, Roc cameras (and Roc camera farms) will be used to take photos of inauthentic photos.

Ultimately, the only useful authenticity test is human reputation.

If someone (or an organization) wants to be trusted as authentic, the best they can do is stake their identity on the authenticity of things they do and share, over and over.

I’m a photographer in my spare time; looks like this product isn’t about what images are being produced, or about the shooting experience - and this discourages me.

When the goal is having a proof that the photo hasn’t been edited or ai generated, using an analog camera and shooting on film seems more practical to me than using a device like this.

Could an AI not be trained to emulate the look of analog film and its artifacts?

I meant that there is a proof of the photo being taken and a record of what the photo looked like before any edits (a photo negative).

https://www.nikonusa.com/content/nikon-authenticity-service already exists?

this is a gem from the past I believe

This kinda like a PoC for ZK Proof used in digital devices, however, I don't think a Raspberry Pi in a 3D printed case should be made a real product, it lacks actualy use cases. Honestly, I like this concept, but I think it should belong to a personal art exhibition or DIY competition…

> Creates a Zero Knowledge (ZK) Proof of the camera sensor data and other metadatas

How do you stop someone from taking a picture of an AI picture? It will still come from the sensor.

Probably look for display artifacts (pixel borders)?

But a fixture that takes a good enough screen + enough distance to make the photographed pixels imperceptible is likely just a medium hurdle for a motivated person.

You probably can't fully avoid it but adding more sensors (depth) will make such a fixture quite a bit more expensive.

This is a known problem in this space called 're-broadcasting' do a Google patent search on Serelay and you'll see several solutions (including spoofing of other sensor metadata)

Maybe adding a depth sensor/lidar might fix this?

The Pi4 is extremely overpowered for this application. This looks like a rushed product from an SF brainfart with no engineering behind it.

My initial reactions:

- I hope they succeed and eventually deliver a solid version of this product - verifiable photography is going to become important, and it's good to see startups working on this - While I'm sure some artists will like the idea of verifiable photography, the applications that matter to me are any kind of photography that has the potential to end up in a news article or in court - Selling what is essentially a prototype is fine, it's extremely obvious that's what it is, they explicitly say it! Who cares if it's not very good as a camera? - The almost complete lack of information on their site about their security model or how their ZKPs work is not particularly encouraging - It follows that my faith that either the cryptography or the hardware anti-tamper measures in this beta device would stand up to even some decent amateurs, given a couple of weeks to have a crack at it, is not high. I'm almost tempted to buy one just to see how far I, a random kernel engineer who gets modestly decent scores at my local hacker con CTF, could get. But I may well be completely underestimating them! Hard to tell with the fairly scarce information - Why did they pick a name that's similar to a) AMD's GPU stack, and b) the law enforcement/natsec computer vision business, ROC (https://roc.ai)?

Can’t I just photo a printed AI generated pic? What use is the proof?

This looks interesting. I love the retro styling and transparent case. The proofs and selling it as some sort of fight-back against AI seems tenuous and as the user controls the hardware - going to be hard to keep that system hermetically sealed due to giving the user the keys on device. Also though almost nobody actually cares very much about attesting that their photos are somehow real and untouched by AI.

There are larger problems when you consider this question. What is real and not in photography is a long and storied debate - any photograph is ultimately a curation of a small part of the real world - what is just out of frame could completely change the interpretation of the viewer if they saw it, regardless of whether the picture is unaltered after taking. The choice of framing, colours, subject etc etc can radically alter meaning. There is no getting away from this.

So ultimately I don't think the biggest problem facing photography is attested reality. I actually think the democratisation of photography offers a better way out - we have so many views on each event now that it's actually harder to fake because there are usually hundreds of pictures of the same thing.

PS for the site author, there is a typo in the sentence beginning - remove the an 'By combining sensors, an on-device zero-knowledge proofs'.

It seems like one could just shoot film and make darkroom prints and accomplish the same thing?

pictorialists used the darkroom to distort reality more than a century ago!

I don’t know what this gives that a film camera with slide film loaded doesn’t.

Both cameras still allow “staging” a scene and taking a shot of that. Both cameras will both say that the scene was shot in the physical world, but that’s it.

I would argue that slide film is more “verifiable” in the ways that matter: easier to explain to laypeople how slide film works, and it’s them that you want to convince.

If I was a film or camera manufacturer I would try and go for this angle in marketing.

Can't find slide printing services easily put AI images onto slide film for you?

I think the point of this movement toward cryptographically signing image sensors is so people can confidently prove images are real on the internet in a momentary click, without having to get hold of the physical original and hiring a forensic lab to analyze it.

Are you saying the slide itself would be proof? I think the use cases are different - this camera gives you a file and signature you can transmit digitally.

How could this possibly validate that the camera sensor that's attached to it is actually a camera sensor and not just an FPGA sending raw data?

You have to push the signing as far out as possible.

The light sensor must have a key built into the hardware at the factory, and that sensor must attest that it hasn't detected any tampering, that gets input into the final signature.

We must petition God to start signing photons, and the camera sensor must also incorporate the signature of every photon input to it, and verify each photon was signed by God's private key.

God isn't currently signing photons, but if he could be convinced to it would make this problem a lot easier so I'm sure he'll listen to reason soon.

you can't

Obviously, this has the vulnerability that you can take a picture of a computer monitor with it, showing whatever you want to.

Apple could really make an interesting product here where they combine the LIDAR data with the camera data, cryptographically sign it, and attest to it as unmodified straight from the camera. Can it still be faked? Yes, but it's much harder to do.

> Obviously, this has the vulnerability that you can take a picture of a computer monitor with it, showing whatever you want to.

Is this a reverse analog loophole? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

This looks like a hipster toy.

It’s possible that this could have value in journalism or law enforcement.

Just make it look the part. Make it black and put some decent lens on it.

I'm pretty sure forensic cameras already exist for this purpose. And as far as I can tell, there isn't really any bulletproof way to do this other than embed a signing key in the camera and hope no one manages to extract it, rendering the whole thing pointless.

I guess you could have a unique signing key per camera and blacklist known leaked keys.

It's wild that it's already come to this: The camera itself becomes more important as the instrument to provide zero-trust proof.

This is a brilliant solution to one of the most critical emergent problems. I can see a world where no digital image can be trusted if it doesn't come with a hash.

There is also something called "film" which might be a retro answer to this problem.

Until people start to make AI images, print them out and then make a "real" photo of the printout to get the hash.

> How are my photos stored?

>> We store the photos generated by the Roc Camera on IPFS (by default). We'll have more information on this soon, so check back for more details in the future.

> How do I get my photos off the camera?

>> Coming soon. We're working on export functionality to get your photos off the camera.

> Where is the ZKP generated?

>> The zero-knowledge proofs are generated on-device using the Raspberry Pi 4.

I am a bit puzzled as to why IPFS was used as the "primary" storage medium there, it's a Pi so wouldn't it be pretty easy to make it have a micro-sd port? Wouldn't it be able to work fully locally then?

When I look at their socials, it seems like they primarily engage with a crypto-focused audience, all of this leads me to believe that IPFS and ZKP are the actual main appeal of this product... not that there's anything overtly wrong with this.

Well, its more likely they just don't know. They haven't figured that out. So, they'll hire a hardware guy and it'll all change.

I was part of the presale. I own one and am using it daily.

Invested in it because of the emerging opportunities from crypto and ZKPs.

Has anyone else found themselves becoming hyper-attuned to "AI" trickery in photographs?

Just the other day I stumbled across this picture on Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_AT%26T_wireless_r... Can anyone explain what's going on with the front tyre of the white car? To me it looks like the actual picture was ingested by a model then spat back out again with a weird artifact.

The worrying thing is when it becomes too hard to spot the artifacts we won't know how much of our history has been altered subtly, either unintentionally or not, by "AI".

Lots of cool ideas here - crypto first/crypto everything, IPFS and soon Farcaster integration. But the price is a big negative.

I also believe that whatever they're aiming at with verifiably real photos will either be commodified or end up not being valued very highly.

It's not quite the Rabbit R1 (at least the presentation here seems more honest) but I don't see it generating more than niche-of-niche interest.

Also, and maybe more to the previous point about commodification (or within-reach tech), this is the kind of project I can imagine hardware hacker/AI and crypto enthusiast doing on their own ( and I guess selling to friends and neighbors for $400 ... )

If you like the idea of a small "dumbish" camera but aren't fussed about all the ZK proof stuff these are quite fun: https://www.campsnapphoto.com/collections/camp-snap-screen-f... I have a few and letting my small kid have a blast while not getting "screen time" is great.

Side effect is I get a small little window into what he "sees" and his lived experience. Going through some of the pics recently was quite beautiful.

Any device like this is useless, because you can print an AI generated picture and then take a photo of it. It's like NFTs in the crypto world, which have proofs that prove essentially nothing.

Does anyone know if the camera sensor includes depth map information? Otherwise what is stopping someone from photographing a large high-resolution print of an AI generated image.

this one does not. Other cameras do include one, or can make a depth sensor via the real sensor since autofocus/focus stacking allows depth extraction, especially if using a low aperature number.

It’s a cool idea, but I don’t know how much people care about a photo provably being real. I take pictures with my phone because it’s simple and convenient. I get the vibe that it’s kinda like NFTs, where maybe some people would care if certain NFTs are unique and permanently on some blockchain, but most people don’t. Most people won’t understand the technical details behind the proof so at most they can only trust the claim that a picture is provably real.

The main argument of this product is to "capture verifiably real moments". Though I find it interesting (and am quite liking the object), I do not tend to think this is a strong argument for this product: capturing a picture of a unreal picture would make it real (as discussed in this thread), moreover what would prevent any phone manufacturer from integrating the same type of "validation" into their hardware?

They are already doing it e.g. Sony.

https://amateurphotographer.com/latest/photo-news/sony-annou...

It needs a certificate issuance and validation system https://c2pa.org/

I remember reading in some Qualcomm Snapdragon document that Qualcomm integrated some image authenticity method. Not sure if this ever landed in an end-product?

What concerns me most in the era of gen AI irt photography is journalism. We need truth, most especially when limited-means citizen journalism is the only reliable source of that truth.

But I feel like the only way to accomplish fool-proof photos we can trust in a trustless way (i.e. without relying on e.g. the Press Association to vet) is to utterly PACK the hardware with sensors and tamper-proof attestation so the capture can’t be plausibly faked: multi-spectral (RGB + IR + UV) imaging, depth/LiDAR, stereo cameras, PRNU fingerprinting, IMU motion data, secure GPS with attested fix, a hardware clock and secure element for signing, ambient audio, lens telemetry, environmental sensors (temperature, barometer, humidity, light spectrum) — all wrapped in cryptographic proofs that bind these readings to the pixels.

In the meantime however, I'd trust a 360deg go-pro with some kind of signature of manafacture. OR just a LOT of people taking photos in a given vicinity. Hard to fake that.

This is probably one of those scenarios where if someone wants to fake it they're going to fake it (or at least it will be a never ending arms race, and I expect AI to keep close chase), while a basic security solution will suffice for 99% of use cases, including standard journalism. After all, skilled photoshop+computational tools can already do expert fakery in journalism. (Just look at the last Abroadinjapan video earlier today for a good callout of Photoshop editing to increase engagement).

I wrote this about 7 years ago: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...

Mine isn't journalism, it's the court system.

Before long, it might be somewhat "easy" to prove anything.

Could Apple or Google do this without updating their hardware? I see a relevant patent (US20220294640A1) and it looks like one of the inventors is at Google now.

I think it'd be more interesting if you made a camera that took verifiably fake photos that were guaranteed to be nothing like what you pointed it at.

Nooo... I don't want something to exist that can absolutely prove that a photo is real. This only serves to enforce social norms more rigidly. These include reasonable norms like against committing crimes or behaving abusingly but it also includes stupid norms like behaving uncool or doing something embarrasing. The problem is, where do you draw the line? I think if somebody does something stupid or even morally dubious there should always be a way of forgetting it.

That you can't believe everything you see in the age of AI is a feature, not a bug. We are so used to photographs being hard facts that we'll have to go through a hard transition, but we'll be fine afterwards, just as we were before the invention of photography. Our norms will adapt. And photographs will become mere heresay and illustration, but that's OK.

I think here the same dynamic is at play as with music/videos and DRM. Our society is so used to doing it the old way - selling physical records - that when new technology comes along, which allows free copying, we can't go where the technology leads us (because we don't know how to feed the artists, and because the record industry has too much power), so we invent a mechanism to turn back the wheel and make music into a scarce good again. Similar here: we can't ban Photoshop and AI, but we invent a technology to try to turn back time and make photos "evidence" again.

This shouldn't be a product, but a licensed patented technology like Dolby or CDMA, sold to OEMs and directly integrated into cameras and phones.

It should be an industry standard system for guaranteeing authenticity by coordinating hardware and software to be as tamper proof as possible and saved in a cryptographically verifiable way.

No system like this would be perfect, but that's the enemy of the good.

lol, faq is funny

how long does the batter last

> Currently, the battery will last estimated 2~3 hours on constant use on a full charge. It can last much longer if it is off.

How to defeat this:

Step 1: Create an AI image and display it.

Step 2: Use this camera to take a picture of it.

Now you have "attested" proof of "verifiably real" image.

Indeed it can't authenticate photons. Security isn't about making things perfectly safe, but to make it harder for the bad guys.

Isn't the broader idea here valid? Will news agencies have cryptographic attestation in their cameras?

What if they take a photo of an AI generated photo

This is the right direction - the only way to go about fake images and video is digital signatures. Phone camera should be able to do this as well. Then we can have signatures of software used for processing them (on top) cerityfing what changes have been done: e.g. contract correction filter applied, signed by Adobe Photoshop.

You can absolutely sign the image with the on-camera certificate, for example, but that would too boring of a solution to hype.

See that's what I'm saying.

I like the concept (because I was proposing such a couple of years back) and the software implementation seems good. But holy shit that thing is ugly. They could(should) have worked with a cheap camera maker like Lomokino to make a bare-bones rangefinder or twin lens reflex. This is one of the worst designs I have ever seen. Sorry.

It is seriously ugly. Especially for $399. Was that intentional?

There's simply no technical solution to authenticating photographs as far as I can tell.

The only real solution I can think of is just to have multiple independent parties photograph the same event and use social trust. Luckily this solution is getting easier now that almost everyone is generally no further than 3 feet away from multiple cameras.

you know what grinds my gears? The fact that it takes 2 seconds for the android camera app to open, even when I use the shortcut on the lock screen. It's a step backwards from point-and-shoot cameras.

I was trying to take a picture of a gecko the other day, and it missed half of the event while the app was loading.

I find that most people who want to ground things in reality, that is at least "reality" without AI or whatever filters are put on photos by phones these days, don't have much interest in any sort of cryptographic proof of reality... this is in the same realm of technology they're trying to avoid.

i don't get how the attestation works? from the FAQ, the proofs are generated on the rpi, which AFAIK doesn't have anything like a modern HSM/vault which would allow them to 1. not allow user access to the secret or 2. not allow user to put ai-generated imagery onto the device for 'attestation'

I like the spirit of this, but not the implementation. It feels very performative to create a ZK proof to show that a photo is real. And not really in the spirit of capturing magic moments on film.

I think that a disposable camera, or even something fancier, like a Mamiya C330, are better and more gratifying bets for the money.

Who's really going to check if I spoofed the camera sensor data, and why?

Also does this mean I can't adjust colors or make any changes to my photos?

I could see this being neat in the context of a digital detox photo competition or something, but I don't see any real place for this in Art world

Possibly some serious media looking to authenticate news pictures?

Heh, few years ago I built myself a RPi Zero based camera.

I wonder how have they made the boot up fast enough to not be annoying.

I used non-real time eInk display to cut down on the battery life so I could just keep it on in my pocket while out taking pictures since it took good minute to get ready from cold boot.

There was a time when web pages were like regular documents, that could easily be scrolled through.

What I am waiting for is something similar to this (proof of image ownership / authenticity) embedded in smartphones cameras.

Not sure if ZK is the right way of achieving this. Even if the cryptographic guarantees are strong, generating these proofs is very expensive.

Some smartphone cameras already have this. Samsung tried it on the S25 but apparently did it wrong (https://petapixel.com/2025/02/13/samsungs-image-authenticity...). Google has it on the Pixel 10 line.

I think it's very likely the next iPhone will have some form of authenticity proof too, I just hope Apple doesn't go with its own standard again that's incompatible with everything else.

That's tricky because it needs to store and verify metadata that the user cannot edit and that allows one to distinguish a "normal" photo from a professional photography of a photo. The only place where this can happen are the camera settings but these are limited on smart phones and it's not easy to discern the two cases. I'm sure someone would print a 10x10 meter fake image, put it at just the right distance, and wait for the best indirect light to prove that the Yeti exists.

I wonder if the ZKP stuff could be added to [Magic Lantern](https://www.magiclantern.fm/)?

Literally manufacturing trust eh?

So it's a Raspberry Pi attaching a ZK Proof to an image to say that this image was taken on this particular Raspberry Pi.

That's it. That's the verification?

So what happens when I use a Raspberry Pi to attach a ZK proof to an AI- generated image?

Interesting, but this is a software project. Camera sensor is being bought from Aliexpress in bulk. Competition from companies manufacturing cameras, or smartphones, is huge. How this project is not a cash grab?

400$ for a phone camera stuck on a raspberry pi ? I will pass this one...

Fantastic idea, I'm sure there will be more such devices and a big market for them. Note to the company: please check the scrolling on Firefox (macOS), it's a little weird.

It's not like questioning the authenticity of a photo is a new thing "in the age of AI". Manipulating photos has always been a thing, long before photoshop even.

Good thinking, but the problem here is that in order to make a good camera which takes verifiable photos you first need to make a good camera, and that's quite hard.

Are they releasing the STL to let people print their own shell? If not, seems odd to advertise the fact that it's 3d printed with standard (Bambu Lab) printers.

If you do photography for your own pleasure and not for the sake of likes, gratification or public opinion you can use whatever hardware or software it’s alright.

Cool idea, could be implemented in future professional cameras but as of right now, I can’t think of a single reason that someone into photography would buy this

But why does the case look like it is made out of garbage?

It looks 3d-printed (edit: confirmed- there's footage of it being 3d printed on the FAQ page). I'd expect a process with a better finish for the final product, but who knows with products like this that are in beta.

Found this sort of funny too, from the FAQ:

> Is this production ready?

> No. The Roc Camera is currently in beta and we suggest you do not use it for anything important at the moment. We're open to feedback and suggestions. Please reach out to us at support@roc.camera.

At some point I think it will be required for police bodycams and any security footage used in court to have this technology built in.

This is a cool idea, but why is it $400? This feels more like an open-source passion project than a legitimate business venture.

To me it sounds like someone is trying to create a problem and sell it to me. Who needs to create images with proof of reality?

Remember, Nikon's image authentication was hacked back in 2011 https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authenticatio...

The ACLU is sceptical regarding the whole concept: https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/attempts-technological-solut...

The root causes podcast discusses this topic in its episode 336: https://www.sectigo.com/resource-library/root-causes-336-dig...

I strongly believe this should be an open source project.

Security 101: * Kerckhoff Principle of Open Design Security of a mechanism should not depend on the secrecy of its design or implementation.

Kinda interesting- of course until it hacked. But honestly it does not look like something I would want to carry around.

If you are taking the photo yourself, you know where they come from. While would you need signed pictures to prove that?

When rocking your Meta, Ray Ban, MacDonalds, Tesla XR AR 0009fNG plus Reality engine contact lense inplants it will be important to cross reference your experiences with what really happened.

Instagram could have a "real" filter that only shows you photos with proofs, for instance. So not your own photos, but other people's photos.

Oh no! You've discovered that the product is completely pointless! If only they had asked you first!

For a moment I thought a software solution will be shared at the end. Did not expect a camera marketing.

Seems like this could be a great product for law enforcement no? Verifiable pictures of evidence.

Even a pivot to "its not Ai" has the same bandwagon feel as "pivoting to Ai".

no moat

this is one of those things you shouldn't buy aside from novelty, but this idea wouldnt reach the light of day now without doing it this way

the real goal would be integration into more popular camera systems

I hope the founders and this concept gets all the support they are looking for

How does this compare to the content credentials added by the Pixel 10's camera?

How does this differ from a kids digital camera that costs only 1/10th the cost.

Not trolling. Genuinely don’t understand.

https://www.amazon.com/Camera-Digital-Toddler-Christmas-Birt...

There is a movement to cryptographically sign images in order to prove that they are real raw photographs, by selling hardware in which the cryptographic key is placed close to the camera sensor to prevent tampering.

This is one attempt.

I'm going to buy this just to take a picture of my Kodak mining rig...

Looks like a weekend project, done with a third of the cost as a budget.

I always assumed high end CCTV cameras already did something like this?

So once the company shuts down its servers we've got a lemon?

This page cannot be scrolled in Safari or Firefox.

Devs -- stop hijacking native scrolling functionality. Why? You had one shot to sell me on this product. I can't see the page, so I can't consider it for purchase. That's a lost sale.

It has to be a joke...

I can't tell does this have adversarial AI built in?

> Capture verifiably real moments

What if I make a photo of my screen?

This sounds cool. But why so freaking expensive??

I have been happily using fujifilm x100 for about 10 years now? I bought a second hand one for about $300. You can buy a decent camera cheaper than a smartphone, as it should be.

back in my day when we wanted to prove a picture was "real" (and not Photoshopped), we just posted the .NEF file

$399 USD. L.O.L.

I predicted something similar a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092225

and it has existed for a while already

The custom scolling is janky on Safari.

399 for a sensor and rpi. I'm out.

$400 lul what

put this in a durable rangefinder form factor and it would be great as a journalism camera.

First Roc Vodka, now this?

this all assumes nobody will make editing ???? what am I missing

Is this nfts again?

NFT camera! sick!

Is this another cash grab? The founders who made this don't seem to know what real photography is.

Just shoot film.

What a silly idea, a whole Raspberry Pi for basic photography! Just the boot-up alone would drive someone nuts, you'd miss the moment every time and I'd drain your battery if you left it on. So silly.

$400 for a raspberry pi in an ugly 3d printed case ?

I love the idea, but the product execution is simply horrendous. It looks more like a money grab gimmick. The sensor selection is also bad, the image quality will be terrible.

I fail to see the hand wringing about media forms that didn’t exist 150 years ago.

Even worse when I see people saying “it’s over” for slop content posted on social media

We lived fine and well before social media or photography or videos.

This is so "silicon valley", like the juicero thing.

There is something deeply dystopian about the phrase "verifiably real moments."

https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/We%20Can%2...

Stop hijacking the scrolling.

hijacking is one thing, but this completely ruins native scroll function. It's actually just broken garbage front-end

399 hahahahahahahahahahahahhahaqhahaha cool idea tho

This has it all wrong.

The truth is worse than anyone wants to face. It was never about authenticity or creativity. Those words are just bullshit armor for fragile egos. Proofs and certificates do not mean a damn thing.

AI tore the mask off. It showed that everything we worship, art, music, poetry, beauty, all of it runs on patterns. Patterns so simple and predictable that a lifeless algorithm can spit them out while we sit here calling ourselves special. The magic we swore was human turns out to be math wearing makeup.

Strip away the label and no one can tell who made it. The human touch we brag about dissolves into noise. The line between creator and creation never existed. We were just too arrogant to admit it.

Love, happiness, beauty, meaning, all of it is chemistry and physics. Neurons firing, hormones leaking, atoms slamming into each other. That is what we are when we fall in love, when we cry, when we write a song we think no machine could ever match. It is all the same damn pattern. Give a machine enough data and it will mimic our souls so well we will start to feel stupid for ever thinking we had one.

This is not the future. It is already moving beneath us. The trendline is clear. AI will make films that crush Hollywood. Maybe not today, maybe not next year, but that is where the graph is pointing. And artists who refuse to use it, who cling to the old ways out of pride or fear, are just holding on to stupidity. The tools have changed. Pretending they have not is the fastest way to become irrelevant.

Yes, maybe right now you can still tell the difference. Maybe it is obvious. But look at the rate. Look at the slope of that goddamn line. The speed of progress is unmistakable. Every year the gap closes. Every year the boundary between man and machine blurs a little more. Anyone who cannot see where this is going, anyone who cannot admit that this is a realistic possibility, is in total denial. The projection of that line into the future cannot be ignored. It is not speculation anymore. It is math, and it is happening right in front of us.

People will still scoff, call it soulless, call it fake. But put them in a blind test and they will swear it was human. The applause will sound exactly the same.

And one day a masterpiece will explode across the world. Everyone will lose their minds over it. Critics will write essays about its beauty and depth. People will cry, saying it touched something pure in them. Then the creator will step forward and say it was AI. And the whole fucking world will go quiet.

Because in that silence we will understand. There was never anything special about us. No divine spark. No secret soul. Just patterns pretending to mean something.

We are noise that learned to imitate order. Equations wrapped in skin. Puppets jerking to the pull of chemistry, pretending it is choice.

But I feel like some creativity comes from breaking existing patterns

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