[HN Gopher] Moon Disaster
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Moon Disaster
        
       Author : plurby
       Score  : 222 points
       Date   : 2022-11-06 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (moondisaster.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (moondisaster.org)
        
       | ZeroGravitas wrote:
       | The technology has came a long way since the music video for "Up
       | with People" by Lambchop:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PxY_RPBeM
        
       | Hard_Space wrote:
       | Ugh, an embedded player with no volume control.
        
         | canadianfella wrote:
        
         | SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
         | And it doesn't work for me on Chrome for Android at all.
        
       | w_for_wumbo wrote:
       | What's amazing to me is the possibility to experience the "What-
       | if" scenario, for a second. I now have a memory of watching the
       | moon landing fail, even though this never happened, it's still a
       | real memory that I can attach thought and emotion to.
        
       | hackeraccount wrote:
       | I watched it without sound and it didn't seem to work as well.
       | Hard to say but the body language didn't read right and there
       | seemed to be artifacts.
       | 
       | I'd have to watch Nixon's resignation speech and this without
       | sound back to back.
        
         | forgotusername6 wrote:
         | Nixon's voice sounded synthesized and not very much like him.
         | To be it was still reasonably compelling with sound though
        
       | simonjgreen wrote:
       | If you haven't seen "For All Mankind" now is the time to watch
       | the first episode.
        
         | orf wrote:
         | Why? It's not particularly good.
        
           | system16 wrote:
           | I enjoyed it, although not as much as most critics. I found
           | it took a few episodes to hit its stride, and enjoyed the
           | first and second seasons. At its heart it's a character
           | drama, so if you're watching it only for the science
           | interesting moments are few and far between.
           | 
           | Later episodes fall victim to lazy "a major catastrophe is
           | about to occur, engineering team comes up with moonshot
           | solution just in the nick of time to save the day" more often
           | than I'd like. And the lesbian romance storyline seemed
           | forced. I could barely finish the third season as it really
           | went off the rails.
        
             | googlryas wrote:
             | I pretty much agree with this take.
             | 
             | The aleida character is the worst though. She somehow has
             | super powers that no one else posseses, but they never
             | articulate her thought process or how she does it. It's
             | just: entire team of rocket scientists stare at problem
             | fruitlessly. Aleida stares at problem, inspiring music
             | plays, her eyes light up and she tells you the solution.
             | And then she explains simple things like impulse vs
             | momentum to other rocket scientists, as if they didn't
             | understand it before.
        
             | fortyseven wrote:
             | That's how it rolled for me, as well. That first season was
             | perfect as a "what if" exploration. Then it like if ran out
             | of gas quick and grew much less plausible...
             | 
             | The parts I loved about it faded away, but I stuck around
             | anyway. :P
        
           | ShamelessC wrote:
           | In the spirit of your comment:
           | 
           | Because. It's actually very good.
        
             | ShamelessC wrote:
             | The show's premise is a nuanced, optimistic take on what
             | humanity might have achieved had we continued the space
             | race. It focuses on historical plausibility, a bit like The
             | West Wing. The main characters "pay the price" for this
             | early progress in the way you imagine a hero
             | astronaut/cosmonaut might - with their lives and/or
             | livelihoods.
             | 
             | I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn't shut up
             | about "wokeness" (we disagree on a few things). The show is
             | effectively an imagining of "America, made great in the
             | first place", and at least the core premise - that we lost
             | our hunger for exploration after winning the space race,
             | _used to be_ a bipartisan talking point.
             | 
             | Absolutely recommend it. Also, the imagined space shuttles
             | they get to come up with are amazing.
        
               | kybernetyk wrote:
               | The premise is intriguing. I was really looking towards
               | the show. Until I watched the first episode. Sadly the
               | show turned out to be boring.
        
               | dmitriid wrote:
               | > I watched it with my dad however and he wouldn't shut
               | up about "wokeness"
               | 
               | I thought it was leaning a bit too heavily on what we
               | consider modern issues. But then it turns out that some
               | of the characters in the story where real and lived
               | through this or something close to this (I forget now,
               | but one of the women astronauts that never got to fly was
               | a real person)
        
           | mbernstein wrote:
           | The majority of people and critics reviewing it disagree with
           | you as do I :). Personal preferences aside, the recreated
           | Nixon footage and conversations are well done and quite
           | convincing, which was the point of watching it I believe.
        
         | koheripbal wrote:
         | Meh. It spent way too much on lgbt issues for an alternate
         | history / space exploration show.
         | 
         | Otherwise it was ok.
        
           | fortyseven wrote:
           | Aww, you poor thing. Life is so difficult. :(
        
       | codeflo wrote:
       | Waste of time. 4 minutes of useless filler, followed by 2 minutes
       | of bad voice synthesis. Not convincing at all, and all the padded
       | content just serves to get your hopes up.
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | I'm sure Americans are more familiar with Nixons voice and
         | appearance. It looked and sounded good to me.
        
           | aflag wrote:
           | I'm not american and I can't recall if I heard him before,
           | but the voice definitely felt a bit robotic. Also, he seemed
           | to move his head in unnatural ways (even if he has some sort
           | of nervous tick). Finally, if you look at his neck, jaw and
           | shadow movement, you'll see some weird clipping going on.
           | Granted, if I was not looking for it, I may haven't noticed.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | darkerside wrote:
       | It must be so tempting to end these things with, "Live from New
       | York, it's Saturday night!"
        
         | zxcvbn4038 wrote:
         | Pan to audience where we see Henry Kissinger clapping while
         | flanked by three supermodels on each arm.
        
           | PM_me_your_math wrote:
           | That creates a very funny visual although you forgot to
           | mention the rings, gold chain, and serpent cane.
        
             | zxcvbn4038 wrote:
             | Or perhaps the magic pimp cane from Petey Wheatstraw?
        
       | _jal wrote:
       | How British spooks have verified video:
       | 
       | http://hummingbirdclock.info/about
       | 
       | "The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the
       | country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound,
       | yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every
       | second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum
       | on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the
       | time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has
       | edited the recording."
        
       | wheelerof4te wrote:
       | Is the video of the trip to the moon with the crew's comments
       | genuine?
       | 
       | I'm too young to tell.
        
         | drivers99 wrote:
         | There was a great IMAX documentary on the 50th anniversary of
         | the mission made by searching and scanning all original
         | footage. I highly recommend it!
         | 
         | Amazon Prime Video link https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-11-Todd-
         | Douglas-Miller/dp/B07R...
        
       | Netcob wrote:
       | Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1484/
        
       | wildrhythms wrote:
       | This is amazing, though I think the voice is one of the hardest
       | problems for deepfakes. I find there is a lot of inflection and
       | tonality missing from synthesized voices. Even with a 'old TV
       | broadcast' sound filter to mask some of that stuff, I think
       | people are quite good at recognizing when a voice isn't totally
       | human :) But the visuals in this production are incredibly
       | convincing to me.
        
         | cdolan wrote:
         | If you have seen the Apollo 11 movie that was released a few
         | years ago, the footage is all very familiar (and real).
         | 
         | They spliced the content in a way that is misleading
        
         | imiric wrote:
         | This film is from 2019, and the tech has advanced substantially
         | since then.
         | 
         | E.g. have you heard the voices from https://play.ht/ ?
         | 
         | Those capture inflection and tonality quite well, and are able
         | to reproduce near-natural sounding laughter, pauses, and other
         | human qualities. I wouldn't say it's perfect just yet, but give
         | it another ~5 years and it will get there.
        
           | Vespasian wrote:
           | Wow.
           | 
           | and they are multilingual as well.
           | 
           | For me it was the first time to (afaik) to hear tts of this
           | Quality in my native language (which is a major one)
        
       | fortran77 wrote:
       | Of course today, half the population would start thinking this
       | was some vast conspiracy (the astronauts were just sent to a
       | soundstage in arizona) and the other half would be tweeting "I
       | don't care about 3 overprivileged men"
        
         | ZeroGravitas wrote:
         | _Whitey on the Moon_ poem by Gil Scott Heron (1970):
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwkXZ0SmTs
        
       | IAmGraydon wrote:
       | All of the comments on how easy this was to spot are laughable.
       | Of course it was easy to spot. The moon landing DID in fact
       | happen and we all know it. Let's see you try again when you have
       | no idea you could be looking at a deepfake.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | vivegi wrote:
       | One could easily spot the weird "micronodding" in the video and
       | the audio wasn't super great either.
        
       | mariuolo wrote:
       | Nixon's voice sounds too gravelly.
        
       | temptemptemp111 wrote:
        
       | doodlebugging wrote:
       | The audio and video of Nixon was obviously fake. I knew the text
       | of the speech was real since it was released years ago and though
       | I couldn't remember all of it, I do remember how he tried to set
       | the narrative of heroes lost.
       | 
       | I was a kid back then and I watched the TV broadcasts as they
       | happened or as they were first reported so I was already familiar
       | with those short videos though I originally saw them all on a
       | black and white television. I have seen the same footage in color
       | a number of times over the years since.
       | 
       | Growing up during this time period there was a sense of wonder,
       | awe, hope, and we could look forward to even more missions and
       | discoveries. It was a great time to be an American and there was
       | some enhanced prestige associated with being a Texan since a lot
       | of this happened because NASA was in Houston. Texas schools
       | focused on science, technology, mathematics, and kids fitness was
       | still encouraged through programs like the President's Physical
       | Fitness tests. Even today I weigh only 30 lbs (13.6 kg, 2.14
       | stone) more than I weighed when I graduated high school. That
       | part of the message stuck with me.
       | 
       | The video had too many repeat sections that were obvious fakes
       | since it was too jerky. Live video and audio never sounded or
       | looked that bad even when you were watching with a tuned rabbit
       | ear antenna.
       | 
       | I have a feeling that the audio portion of the astronaut dialog
       | designed to lead the viewer to believe that they had seen bad
       | things happen was fake too and it used manipulated footage to
       | build the mental image.
       | 
       | It was good seeing Walter Cronkite again. We watched Chet Huntley
       | and David Brinkley a lot too. I think they were NBC news.
       | Journalism has sure fallen on hard times over the last 40 years
       | after we (the hearts and minds of the American people) were sold
       | out to corporate pigs by a change in regulations that allowed one
       | corporate entity to control all forms of media available locally.
       | Independent local newsrooms could not compete with a well-funded
       | national operation that could pump news stories into your homes
       | over television, radio, and through a competing newspaper. Local
       | newspapers sold out to national interests who used (and still
       | use) partisan editorial control to sell their narrative. If you
       | are under 40 your news has been a feed of carefully curated
       | stories delivered by pretty faces intended to keep you engaged.
       | Using those pretty faces to create a facade of attractive people
       | with nearly plastic features evidently works. One network in
       | particular uses so much makeup even on the male personnel that
       | could all be wearing silicone masks during the broadcasts. This
       | is intended to distract you from the message and to keep you
       | watching their channel. Remember that Huntley, Cronkite, and
       | other journalists on television every night weren't chosen for
       | their looks. They were pretty ordinary looking men who would
       | probably be a 5/10 where today's anchors are gussied up to try to
       | hit an 8/10 appearance. You won't see any two-baggers on TV
       | nowadays.
       | 
       | Unfortunately, all this new deep fake technology will be
       | convincing enough to fool a lot of people. Propaganda is a huge
       | problem today in all media forms without resorting to totally
       | faked broadcasts delivering invented "truths". Our educational
       | system is failing the people of the United States in many areas
       | as religion goes back into classrooms, charter schools rob the
       | public school systems, and private schools increasingly become a
       | pathway for wealthier parents to pass their own political,
       | religious, or social beliefs on to their kids with the assistance
       | of others in their social circles. It is a tool for siloing the
       | next generation so that they have none of the normal social
       | interactions with people from different backgrounds that they
       | would have had in a public school setting. This helps the older
       | generation maintain social problems like racism, homophobia
       | (through some religious-based private schools), women's place in
       | society, etc.
       | 
       | A long time ago I thought we were getting close to solving
       | problems like racism. As an older adult I see that we lost our
       | way, not because it is intractable but because we were
       | intentionally led back to the well-traveled path by bad actors
       | after we had initially collectively chosen the less-traveled
       | branch which offered a solution. Picking the less-traveled branch
       | of the trail required us to be courageous, to be open-minded,
       | empathetic, and civil to each other. Instead, while navigating
       | this difficult path we chose leaders who did not deserve our
       | confidence and who consistently, and intentionally in some cases,
       | failed us eventually steering us back on to the original track
       | where we are today.
       | 
       | Since life moves in cycles we will always encounter those
       | branches in the trail that present opportunity and require
       | courage. Thus there can always be hope that we will either
       | willing choose to trace an alternate cycle or accidentally
       | stumble onto the less-worn path and decide that it is more
       | interesting and then decide collectively that we should continue
       | that adventure.
       | 
       | And so it goes...
        
         | Rimintil wrote:
         | > Journalism has sure fallen on hard times over the last 40
         | years
         | 
         | Consider watching Frontline on PBS. While not the same format,
         | the journalism is well done.
        
           | doodlebugging wrote:
           | That is one of my trusted sources. I love their in-depth
           | reporting. I've supported PBS for decades. They have a lot of
           | great content.
           | 
           | Thanks for reading.
        
         | czep wrote:
         | There are too many insightful and thoughtful points in your
         | comment for a single upvote to repay, so I must thank you with
         | a reply. Becoming so demoralized with the present media and
         | political landscape, it is comforting to find that there still
         | remain semblances of reason for which I may again briefly
         | restore some measure of sanity. Thank you.
        
           | doodlebugging wrote:
           | Thank you for reading all of that. I read a lot and tend to
           | be long-winded when I write and I know that a lot of people's
           | attention spans are pretty short. I'm glad you found
           | something of value in the words. That was my hope.
           | 
           | You're welcome.
        
       | sakarisson wrote:
       | Very nicely directed and edited video!
       | 
       | Though I must say that if the intention of the video was to make
       | me doubt abilities to spot deep fakes, it didn't manage to
       | achieve its goal. Both Nixon's face movements and voice felt
       | highly unnatural and robotic to me. Although I'm sure it won't be
       | many years until the results of such experiments will be come
       | indistinguishable, we are not quite there yet.
        
         | driverdan wrote:
         | His face movements were excellent, they were much like Nixon's
         | real mannerisms. The problem was the edges of his face were
         | pretty bad. The voice was also bad, with obvious ghosting and
         | glitches.
         | 
         | That said as someone else pointed out this was done in 2019. If
         | this was made today the face edges would be much better and
         | audio clearer. I'd love to see this remade now.
        
         | zxcvbn4038 wrote:
         | No, that was just Nixon. ;)
        
           | rainbowzootsuit wrote:
           | Wait until they do Mark Zuckerberg; he already dwells in the
           | uncanny valley.
        
             | soulofmischief wrote:
             | Zuck's been done.
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM&t=255
        
       | mabbo wrote:
       | It's not perfect. But it's crawling up the other side of the
       | uncanny valley.
       | 
       | Imagine where this tech will be in five years.
        
         | unyttigfjelltol wrote:
         | Eh, you mean in 2023?
        
       | jtvjan wrote:
       | An animator used the voice cloning tech to make a "leaked
       | episode" of a cartoon that ended years ago:
       | https://youtu.be/shp9jzJ4MOw
       | 
       | It's funny how both that and this used "low sound quality" to
       | mask the imperfections in the cloned voice. But I suppose it's
       | only a matter of time before that's no longer necessary.
        
         | foobarbecue wrote:
         | Much as everyone supposes it's just a matter of time before
         | cars are truly driverless.
        
           | bergenty wrote:
           | Waymo is already doing this in multiple cities. What's your
           | point?
        
           | fuckelonmusk wrote:
        
       | AirStreamer27 wrote:
       | This was painfully easy. If you want to fool people into
       | believing deepfakes, you'll need to do a better job
        
       | jethkl wrote:
       | This project is from 2019. The tools to do this are now more
       | widely available and the realism has advanced considerably since
       | then. This project was an early example that illustrated to a
       | wide audience that audio and video are no longer reliable sources
       | of truth. By comparison, the techniques used in Forrest Gump
       | (1994) look crude.
        
         | voidz wrote:
         | Isn't it amazing how much things improve in so little time.
         | Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially faster.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | lagrange77 wrote:
           | Yeah it's really amazing.
           | 
           | > Things used to go so slow, now they go exponentially
           | faster.
           | 
           | Going slow at the beginning is actually part of exponentials.
        
             | couchand wrote:
             | Well it's only the beginning and slow relative to what
             | comes after. Relative to what came before, it's much later
             | and faster!
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks
           | where decades happen"
        
             | HPMOR wrote:
             | As a corollary, it takes decades where nothing observable
             | happens to have the weeks where decades happen.
        
       | junon wrote:
       | Err, what? The site says it's both real and fake. It glitched and
       | let me press both to see the answers.
       | 
       | On "fake" it says "nice try, but real". On "real" it says "nice
       | try, but it's fake, we edited the mouth".
       | 
       | So... which is it? Did I miss something?
        
         | fourthark wrote:
         | The text and Apollo footage were real; Nixon's face and voice
         | were fake.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | robinsonb5 wrote:
       | Every few years I re-watch the Running Man - and it gets scarier
       | every time. Last time I watched it we only nearly had the video
       | forgery technology from the movie (in civilian hands, at least).
       | Now it actually exists.
        
       | photochemsyn wrote:
       | What are some ways to verify video integrity?
       | 
       | 1) Multiple camera angles. A simultaneous left / front / right
       | view of a person speaking would be much harder to fake.
       | 
       | 2) Higher-resolution video and high-quality audio are harder to
       | fake, although this might not be a problem for entities with
       | sufficient resources and motivation.
       | 
       | 3) Attribution to a real person. While this raises problems for
       | people who want to remain anonymous due to very reasonable fears
       | of retaliation, it also makes it harder to push fakes out to
       | social media.
       | 
       | Note many fake 'breaking news' videos are just stiched together
       | old footage, no AI deepfake required. This has been noticeable
       | across multiple platforms wrt Ukraine, for example:
       | 
       | https://www.bbc.com/news/60867414
        
         | ZeroGravitas wrote:
         | The founder of Bellingcat discusses this in his recent book.
         | 
         | He mentions things like "where/when did this happen", where
         | were the people/things in the video at that time, which source
         | did this arise from. Basically there's a whole web of context
         | to any event, which is why the breaking news is the best place
         | for this, but the long term viability is much harder.
         | 
         | He also mentions some NYT tech for timestamping their videos as
         | they record them and to detect manipulation.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Can you say more about this tech? I'm curious now :)
        
             | ZeroGravitas wrote:
             | https://www.newsprovenanceproject.com/
             | 
             | Mentioned on page 206, "The Perils and Opportunities of
             | Artificial Intelligence" of the book.
             | 
             | https://c2pa.org/ seems to be the latest iteration of it.
             | 
             | > What is the Coalition for Content Provenance and
             | Authenticity (C2PA)?
             | 
             | > The C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project to
             | collectively build an end-to-end open technical standard to
             | provide publishers, creators, and consumers with opt-in,
             | flexible ways to understand the authenticity and provenance
             | of different types of media. C2PA opposes efforts to make
             | content provenance measures mandatory.
        
         | jchanimal wrote:
         | Starling Lab focuses on data integrity for video evidence. It's
         | worth checking out their recent efforts here:
         | https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2022/06/33571-starling-lab-and-hala...
        
         | samatman wrote:
         | Video integrity is an idea we have to let go of. Audio is
         | robustly fakeable at this point, video is coming up to the
         | threshold fast.
         | 
         | What we can have is attestation and reputation, then
         | provenance.
         | 
         | It starts with a container format that allows signatures of
         | both the entire video with audio, audio only, and video only,
         | along with reasonable segments (three seconds?) of each of
         | these.
         | 
         | Excerpts of any of these can be transcluded into another such
         | container. The editor can transform it in any way, the
         | resulting display doesn't have to match the particulars of the
         | excerpt (captioning, noise filtering, color correction) but the
         | excerpt is itself included, or at least the signature.
         | 
         | It would be useful for some people to have cameras which do
         | this at the moment of recording, along with GPS, cell location
         | data, and so on, to get really bulletproof documentary footage.
         | 
         | I don't want that built into my phone, necessarily. As a
         | container format and ffmpeg style tool, this would support
         | anonymous attestation which can be demonstrated by the
         | keyholder at any future time. As a built-in subpoena-able
         | feature of my phone or mirrorless camera? Hmm, probably don't
         | want that. If it snitches proactively, not a chance in hell.
        
           | HPsquared wrote:
           | Even just a verifiable time stamp would be a big win.
        
           | initplus wrote:
           | Building attestation into hardware sounds like a good idea in
           | theory, but doesn't actually work. All it tells you is "this
           | is what the camera saw", it doesn't actually tell you that
           | what the camera saw was real. You can just point your camera
           | at a high resolution screen playing a doctored video, and so
           | sign whatever doctored content you like. Or take a video of a
           | real faked scene with actors.
        
         | sillysaurusx wrote:
         | Unfortunately, while those are good ideas, they're also cat and
         | mouse games. It's a bit like saying that client side anti-cheat
         | software makes it harder to cheat in videogames. It does, but
         | you're looking for an unbeatable test, which doesn't exist.
         | 
         | Nothing exemplified this problem more than the recent Twitter
         | takeover. On tiktok, fake news was running rampant, and I saw
         | it happen in real time. At one point someone said that a
         | Twitter employee banned Elon on his way out, while showing a
         | screenshot of the "eIon musk" fake account:
         | https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRx6G9mG/
         | 
         | There were also actual deepfakes of Elon's voice that fooled
         | me. I wish I saved it, since it's highly relevant to this
         | thread. But it only became clear it was a fake when it started
         | saying ridiculous things. They even had a video of Elon
         | talking, and they didn't have to bother syncing his lips with
         | the audio. Viral clips just need a veneer of authenticity to
         | short circuit our monkey brains.
         | 
         | It wasn't till I fell for that deepfake that I started
         | realizing how much of a problem we might be facing. The next
         | few presidential candidates might need to put out statements
         | saying "X wasn't true," while the majority of people already
         | believe X because they saw it happen live on tiktok.
        
           | pjc50 wrote:
           | There's been a phenomenon of verified accounts basically
           | doing ""suicide by cop"": changing their display name and
           | profile pic to match Elon Musk and then doing a bunch of joke
           | tweets as him, which are great fun until they are caught and
           | banned.
        
           | hotpotamus wrote:
           | Ah, then I was got by that fake twitter ban joke and didn't
           | realize it till now. In my defense, it's a cute little
           | meaningless stunt that I'd like to imagine myself doing in
           | similar circumstances, though upon a bit of thought it seems
           | unlikely since it could cost you a severance that might be
           | pretty valuable - there a plenty of strings attached to those
           | to keep the severees in line.
        
           | photochemsyn wrote:
           | Yeah, that's all true. This might lead to a revival of
           | professional journalism and actual reporting, however - i.e.
           | if a known reporter with a good track record writes, 'today
           | this presidential candidate said X, and I heard it myself',
           | then that might become a more reliable information source
           | than any audio or video clip.
        
             | tomalpha wrote:
             | Ah, but what happens when a deepfake video of that
             | professional journalist starts going round saying 'today
             | this presidential candidate said X, and I heard it myself'
             | that matches the previous deepfake?
             | 
             | I guess the counter (which I think you're pointing out) to
             | that is to publish _text_ to a known-trusted website rather
             | than a video, but I wonder how many folks who get their
             | "news" from TikTok would read it.
        
               | ricardonunez wrote:
               | That's when real verified accounts gain value but since
               | now anybody can be verified, it is going to become a
               | problem.
        
               | necovek wrote:
               | Uhm, I am not sure I get the relationship: if anyone can
               | get verified, that's only a win.
               | 
               | By "verified", I assume Twitter has _verified_ that their
               | identity on Twitter matches their real life identity, and
               | I don 't see a problem with anyone having an ability to
               | claim that. What's wrong with Jane Random being verified
               | that she _is_ Jane Random?
               | 
               | If people are basing their trust not on someone's
               | identity and history, but on their celebrity (blue mark
               | so far), that's where the problem is.
        
               | Hextinium wrote:
               | The problem arises where an account gets verified as one
               | thing and then changes to become another, this happens
               | all the time with trolls who can make/buy/extort verified
               | accounts.
               | 
               | They then spoof being the real person, and verification
               | then means absolutely nothing cause they are functionally
               | identical to a bypasser.
               | 
               | By having verification be really hard to get, trolls have
               | a lot harder time getting accounts and the problem is
               | smaller in scope.
        
             | pjc50 wrote:
             | All the evidence points towwards the opposite: it's more
             | profitable to simply provide entertaining lies. Does nobody
             | remember the Alex Jones fiasco?
        
               | formerkrogemp wrote:
               | It's very much a stretch to compare Alex Jones to normal
               | journalists, as much as most people seem to dislike
               | journalists on this site.
        
         | mrshadowgoose wrote:
         | It would require hardware changes, but we already have all the
         | required cryptographic primitives to mostly mitigate these
         | concerns.
         | 
         | Trusted timestamping can attest that a given piece of media was
         | not created after a given instance in time.
         | 
         | Trusted hardware running trusted code, combined with remote
         | attestation, can offer a high-degree of assurance that a given
         | video clip is not a product of CGI/ML.
         | 
         | Digital signatures by the entity responsible for a video clip's
         | capture/creation mitigates the creation of media not sanctioned
         | by that entity. Subjects in a particular piece of media could
         | additionally apply their digital signatures to further increase
         | trust in its authenticity. (This is effectively a
         | cryptographically enforced version of your third point.)
         | 
         | This isn't a silver bullet, and suffers all the pitfalls
         | normally encountered in the implementation of cryptographic
         | schemes.
        
           | couchand wrote:
           | Trusted by whom?
        
             | mrshadowgoose wrote:
             | Trusted by whatever certification entities (ideally
             | multiple ones, from non-aligned states) decide to deem a
             | certain piece of hardware as "trusted". And then by
             | extension, by any individual that trusts those particular
             | certification authorities.
             | 
             | Yes, I'm aware this leaves the door open for subversion of
             | certification authorities by nation-states. It's still
             | better than the nothing we have today.
        
           | nullc wrote:
           | I can just project a video into a camera's lens...
        
             | mrshadowgoose wrote:
             | Sure, and if you eventually get caught, nobody would trust
             | anything that you've digitally signed.
        
               | nullc wrote:
               | You can say that just as well about a world without the
               | camera hocus pocus part.
        
             | pjc50 wrote:
             | Fun fact: the original Apollo TV broadcast from the surface
             | of the moon was "slow scan", with a different resolution
             | and framerate to broadcast TV. The conversion process was
             | to display it on a suitable slow-scan TV (long retention
             | phosphor) and .. point a terrestrial camera at the TV.
        
         | pfoof wrote:
         | >Multiple camera angles. A simultaneous left / front / right
         | view of a person speaking
         | 
         | With enough training data and modified network this can also be
         | done.
        
       | permo-w wrote:
       | one thing I'll say is that that speech was really well-written.
       | if GPT-3 could do that, the profession of speech-writing would be
       | on its way out
        
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