119
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
119 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59197 readers
3191 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We need something to verify that media is what it claims to be. Will CCTV footage be admissable in court in the future? Maybe we should be looking into NFTs or the like to verify real recordings.
This sounds like a job for digital signatures using traditional certificate authority infrastructure, which has been around for decades. Think digitally signed emails or software installers… Seems like NFTs made society collectively forget about every other form of encryption.
Also keep in mind that you can only ever verify the source, not the truthfulness of the data (e.g. you can prove that the image was created by New York Times and hasn’t been altered since then, but you will never be able to prove that NYT themselves didn’t fake it in some way). Verifying the source is obviously still useful though, so it seems dumb that digital signatures aren’t more ubiquitous.
My guess is that they’ve been resisted for privacy reasons.
Here some big names are working on a standard for chaining digital signatures on media files: https://c2pa.org.
Their idea is that the first signature would come from the camera sensor itself, and every further modification adds to the signature chain.