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Comment by eivarv | Hacker News Reader

I hope we just do the rational thing, and rather stop treating video as if its some perfect representation of reality that's inherently trustworthy.

We've had to confront similar issues with other media earlier in history, after all.

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Yet without video many terrible crimes would go unpunished. What else do you propose?

Cryptographic chain of custody from CCD to MPG, with public keys for video recording HW burned in at the factory. I don't know if that's at all feasible. Possibly only for security cameras.

No, god damn it. As soon as the cat's out of the bag, it'll forever be an arms race (there'll be attack vectors, etc.).

Let's not just establish a new proxy for implicit trust here.

What qualifies as evidence, then? Trust is important, but it can only exist long-term if there's a way to detect lies/betrayal. Anyway, I expect market forces to steamroll both of our opinions.

I don't know – but as far as I see it, that's irrelevant in pointing out that video (in and of itself) should not be trusted by virtue of being video.

The fact that you can't imagine – and I don't provide – any alternative proposition does not make implicitly trusting video a good proposition.

But, yeah, I suspect reality will probably disappoint us both...

Uh, right, implicitly trusting video because it's video is definitely dumb. I don't think that's what I'm proposing. Trusting cryptography, as long as you're explicit about what you're doing and how it can fail, is at least not immediately foolish.

It has nothing to do with the medium of video, but with establishing trust.

We'll need to deal with video the same way we do with images, audio, and eye witness accounts. The way to do that is to establish a measure of trust in some quantifiable or methodological way, rather than just trusting the medium.

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