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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

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 .

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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.

Maybe I am just naive, but I don't see why taking a photo of a screen, projection, or print out would be hard. Wouldn't it just need even lighting and tripod?

Adding something like a LIDAR and somehow baking that data into the meta data could be fun

Then people will connect their fake image and LIDAR feed to where the CMOS is connected. Like always with half-baked digital attestation chains, laypersons will argue "Oh, but who's gonna do that?" and the reality is that even private modders and hackers are perfectly willing and capable of doing this and will jump on it right away, and if it's just for the fun to distribute a certified picture of an alien giving everyone the finger. Of course, tamper-proof designs would be possible, but they are extremely expensive.

On a side note, the best way to attack this particular camera is probably by attacking the software.

I didn’t say adding extra sensors is some kind of magic bullet. I said adding LIDAR would be fun.

Don't limit your thinking to taking photos - video also works fine. It's how The Mandalorian is produced. Instead of green screens, the actors are in front of floor-to-ceiling LED screens with live rendered CGI.

In old movies, going back to the 1930s and 40s, back-projection is usually seen when characters are driving in a car, and you can usually spot it. These days, not so much.

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

What proof is there that this camera is photographing a genuine scene?

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

If Elsie and Frances had the technology we could have a digitally signed zero knowledge proof that their photo's captured a genuine scene that included cardboard cutouts of fairies.

It was a real moment with objects that Bishop Berkeley could have kicked.

Recalling an old scandal about an office copier/scanner which was doing some OCR cleanup and changing numbers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 (2013)

Interestingly it wasn't the OCR that was the problem but the JBIG2 compression.

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.

I'll throw Mamiya 645 in there for a good medium format camera as well. Yashica is great, I own a Yashica Electro 35 and it is awesome no thought rangefinder.

With the tariffs this is no longer possible for US persons.

Do the tariffs apply on used items as well? In any case such cameras are fairly cheap nowadays

They use to fall under de-minimus? But no longer. So there are duties to pay.

Huh?

Tariffs shouldn’t prevent buying stuff, you just have to, y’know, pay a tariff on import.

In this case, a Japanese made camera will incur a 15% tariff.

Most countries, including Japan, India, Canada, and nearly the entire EU, have completely stopped shipping packages to US consumers. This is not because of the tariffs themselves, but because the US apparently has no system in place for actually handling the tariffs on goods that previously qualified for the de minimis exemption. Two months and counting with no information on when shipping might resume.

Some merchants in those countries have stopped. There isn’t a general stoppage of everything.

I just checked and you can still send goods between Japan and the US. There are still merchants selling the exact mentioned camera on eBay that will ship to the US.

Here is the exact camera mentioned, offered by a Japanese seller, that will ship to the United States: https://www.ebay.com/itm/317445808304

Can you source your claim that absolutely no courier is capable of shipping goods into the US? I can’t find anything using google, or on any courier websites.

FedEx does have information about how to correctly fill out the forms for the purposes of tariffs, but does not mention that they will not accept shipments.

I see, that was my mistake then. I was unaware that services like FedEx were still accepting packages. My personal experience was that I have been unable to ship to the US for months because the carrier I use stopped accepting packages, and was under the impression they all had given the number of countries for which this was true and the news coverage I had seen. I wonder why so many countries' postal services have stopped while some couriers like FedEx continue to operate.

There were some temporary stops, but mostly they resolved pretty quickly. I think an issue is that the US requested that tariffs be paid upfront at the sending end and a some couriers aren’t set up for that. Or that they needed time to set it up.

Many of the postal and courier systems that suspended service have since set up the systems they need, and are happily moving packages into the US, but it tends not to make the news.

Talk to the seller. I just ordered a used light meter from Japan. Shipper just wants the duties paid up-front.

> 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.

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