Comment by ice_nine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ice_nine | Hacker News Reader

Articles like these make me eager for advances made in the 'authenticity' market. I recently learned of a company called Truepic[0] that specializes in photo and video verification.

From the New Yorker article I read:

"Truepic, a startup in San Diego, aims at producing a new kind of photograph—a verifiable digital original. Photographs taken with its smartphone app are uploaded to its servers, where they enter a kind of cryptographic lockbox. “We make sure the image hasn’t been manipulated in transit,” Jeffrey McGregor, the company’s C.E.O., explained. “We look at geolocation data, at the nearby cell towers, at the barometric-pressure sensor on the phone, and verify that everything matches. We run the photo through a bunch of computer-vision tests.” If the image passes muster, it’s entered into the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain. From then on, it can be shared on a special Web page that verifies its authenticity. Today, Truepic’s biggest clients are insurance companies, which allow policyholders to take verified photographs of their flooded basements or broken windshields. The software has also been used by N.G.O.s to document human-rights violations, and by workers at a construction company in Kazakhstan, who take “verified selfies” as a means of clocking in and out. “Our goal is to expand into industries where there’s a ‘trust gap,’ ” McGregor said: property rentals, online dating. Eventually, he hopes to integrate his software into camera components, so that “verification can begin the moment photons enter the lens.” [1]

[0] https://truepic.com/

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-...

And so all of human society becomes one big GAN.

How do you know we aren't already... Good vs Evil, stories in holy books, generator and discriminator... We might be some funny project of some "grad student" somewhere, like what deepfakes is for us.

How does Truepic work? What's stopping me from spoofing sensor data on my client?

Probably nothing. But it solves 99% of the problems it's meant to solve. Casual insurance fraud, for example.

Preventing casual insurance fraud and guarding against deep fakes are very different problems, with a very stark contrast in terms of the effort and technical aptitude available.

Occasionally a security minded computer savy person might pull one over on the insurance company - but most clients aren't going to have the expertise or dedication to correctness. To contrast that - the pool of people who would try and produce a deep fake, especially in the political realm, have already decided to invest a good amount of investigation and effort and are likely rather technically minded.

So this would stop the script-kiddie equivalent actor in the deep fake realm, but I am more concerned about dedicated nefarious actors.

The point is to have an immutable source to compare against. If you suspect a video is faked, you can find the verified original video that was used to make the fake and compare against it.

What if the fake video is the first one to be uploaded?

That’s where they use their fancy computer vision software to determine if the source has been tampered with.

And if they can’t determine that?

I think this is sort of where we realize that Oscar Wilde was actually the democratic candidate in the 2016 election - falsely attributed quotes have gotten out of hand and even relatively reputable sources have made this mistake... I suspect the same will be true of videos soon, your trust in the accuracy of the information will be solely tied to your trust in the organization - if you don't trust NYT you won't trust videos you see there and declare them "fake news", ditto for Fox and everyone else.

This is leading society to a very dangerous place where the truth is becoming a matter of opinion.

We've been there. It led to impartial professionals who, in person, report what they witnessed, and who made a career out of being truthful and exact.

The Bard is back again!

Yes, it's an arms race. Surely this is obviously the case?

"What if the government can't determine if a 100 dollar bill is fake?"

Answer to both questions: those who have a vested interest in detecting fakes spend more money on fake-detection mechanisms.

This is why I think a dolution will involve hardware signing, and maybe some integration with a.photoediting suite

I am so tempted to reply with a BS. Because this is a super hard problem, with hundreds of edge cases making it even harder, some tried to solve it in the past, with underwhelming results.

Yes, this is utter BS, sorry.

Declaring BS on what, TruePic as a business? The general problem is very hard, but the specific problem of taking photos with smartphones is tractable. Their approach makes sense, and in some cases can be made much easier with access to platform (e.g. android, ios) device verification. This is just the beginning of the broad adoption of identity verification services.

If you're gonna call BS, just do it!

I am curious to know more about this space because it's all very new to me. What failed solutions were tried in the past? Which issues does Truepic fail to address? And is it even possible to address these failures?

Truepic doesn't solve the problem of you taking a picture of your neighbors flooded basement or broken windshield. GPS can't fix the problem as its not accurate enough, and for quite a few places is not odd if you park somewhat close to your neighbors house.

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