While the curation of the news allowed the US to cherry pick only the "good stuff", it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson.
A-10 "Warthog", only flown by the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
But out of context, it could have fooled me too.
Unless it's been modded you'll find the Arma games have an absurd level of accuracy in their physics, they have the correct speed of bullets down to decimal points and other real world interactions like gravity and air resistance.
The entire engine is built around simulating the real world as far as technically feasible and the other half of the game studio uses it to sell war simulations to militaries around the world.
Arma 3 is a mess, even before taking apart their idea of future war (combat mission black sea did way better there)
At least mods fix most of the unit issues, albeit the game as it is just don't work as a milsim because any consideration between doctrine and taor and toe gets thrown out on the name of cool
I was more talking about the physics, I doubt there's any other game on the planet that takes it's so far wrt emulating the real world.
I think what gives it away is that it's too crisp. Look at other combat footage, even from today's events. It's grainy (especially night footage), blurry, seldom very clear and definitely not as crisp. Even the sound is worse in real footage and often arrives at the "wrong" moment, not matching exactly what you're seeing.
This one is too perfect to be true.
Ironic.
For those who don’t know, the incredible team at Bellingcat are the same ones who hunted down the FSB hit squad sent after navalny.
Aren't they basically CIA/NSA? I mean, I love their content and find it fascinating but I find it very hard to believe it isn't sanctioned/released/funded from the very highest levels. You don't get that sort of quality out of somebody's garage.
I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's enough money in it that someone has to be working on the problem.
E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time of capture in a verifiable manner
My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication seems very difficult indeed.
I especially liked the phrase “chain of blame”
The issue of authenticity is getting some third party to attest that video happened at a particular date and time - at least part of that solution could be getting the various low orbit constellations to provide a simple timestamping service for hashes. Since the orbits are known, and position can be triangulated, any 3 satellites signatures would at least prove you transmitted a particular hash for attestation at a given date and time.
This obviously doesn't help with someone traveling there and sending junk, or using local repeaters to send junk, but it ups the difficulty level a notch.
*after a given date and time
There's nothing stopping people forging the data later with already broadcast cryptographic signatures
But low-orbit satellite internet is designed for 2 way communications, and probably already has the equipment on board to calculate checksums (or at the very least is a sufficiently trusted third party).
So we develop a protocol we can run on miniaturizable boxes which can be served point-to-point with the constellation members to at least prove transmission origin providence.
Assuming that though, you send a hash of your content up to the system, which geolocates it (based on physical reception), adds a timestamp and geolocation into the metadata, and returns the signed information, using the central party's key.
You also could run a similar method on cellular networks by using towers as the signing node and the telecom as the centralized entity.
Because realistically, it's not Byzantine Generals. What you want is (a) timestamp verified by a trusted party, (b) geolocation verified by a trusted party, (c) content hashed/signed to prevent subsequent modification, (d) prevention of replay forging of (a) or (b), & (e) most of the infrastructure not physically accessible by users (e.g. signing chip embedded in a camera).
The camera sensor is not a trusted input. Nothing can prevent somebody pointing their camera at a high resolution screen displaying a manipulated image. Or a staged scene. No image signing mechanism can prevent this kind of attack.
There are manipulation detection techniques, but they are imperfect. And even if you verify the image is an unmodified camera original, you still have to analyse the context surrounding the image (what is portrayed in the image, does it line up with other reports, who is the photographer etc.) to determine if it is actually a true.
It is trivial to digitally sign text, but a signature on a string doesn't mean that string is telling the truth. It just means someone signed it.
Highly recommend http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ for in depth digital image forensics content.
The horrifying part is that I honestly don't think any of the governments involved (except possibly Ukraine's, and good for them) have considered the full implications of this.
It also lets professional journalists cover up atrocities. Speaking of the Ukraine, Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine. He was celebrated and even won a Pulitzer Prize.
Outside of Russian propaganda, it's just “Ukraine” not “the Ukraine”.
> Walter Duranty was a journalist for the New York Times who covered up Stalin’s genocide of over 3 million people in what is now the Ukraine.
It was Ukraine then, too.
That is false.
You're right about the layperson, but that's a low bar, the p50 of the population.
What measures did you take to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia on this point? This seems to be one of those things that everyone takes to be true, but which I have frequently found to be false on manual inspection. Here are examples where I tested this by chasing to the primary source in areas not of my expertise:
- California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill.
- Indian Railways budget reporting. This was Bloomberg, and it was re-reported elsewhere. The numbers were wrong. This informed decisions I made in the next case.
- SuperMicro spychips. Bloomberg again, but rebroadcast by other media outlets. This was one of my directional trades. I bought SMCI calls off the fact that Bloomberg was poorly informed and that reporters were mostly low-grade GPT-3 copy-machines off each other.
In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news.
So, yes, better than the layperson, but not better than the average techie I know. And this yields a data pipeline problem: if you have a lossy compressor in your pipeline, the loss cost can overwhelm the compression advantage. I think for anyone reasonably intelligent, news has passed that point.
First, past wars involved journalists directly embedded into forward units. If they said 7 rockets were fired into City X because they were present and witnessed it, then what they were reporting was correct. It doesn't require expertise in anything to correctly report that. The vetting was on the part of the news organizations themselves, not hiring war correspondents who were blatantly making things up. Now that everyone has access to publish their claims to directly witness something, there is no longer any sort of filter on whether they're even actually there.
So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization, you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating the video. If your source of videos is TikTok, you no longer have much in the way of assurance that what you're seeing is even real video footage.
The second part is what you're talking about, whether the "expert" opinions of pundits writing in professional news outlets are any better at interpreting events than a layperson. This is much more of an open question.
I agree with this, but specifically this. i.e. drop any of the nouns and adjectives in the first clause and the second clause changes.
Professional journalists are reliable eyewitnesses and can be trusted to transmit their eyewitness expertise, factoring out any active conspiracy. They are not, however, skilled at obtaining facts except through witnessing, i.e. I trust their first-party accounts but not their third-party accounts. They are easily misled, but it can't be helped: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
> California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill.
I am however quite curious about this one. I followed this closely and did not see the bias you claim. What was it that all the journalists got wrong about the 7/8s rule?
If you would mind explaining what you understand the rule to be, which sections of the proposition text helped you reach that conclusion, and how confident you are in that interpretation, I will happily describe my side of this.
> You seem to be suffering from the belief that techies are smarter than everyone else, which is not only offensive but just wrong.
Ah, no. I stick by what I said, which is not what you seem to have read. But I'll quote it here anyway:
> In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news.
Imagine that I used those words intentionally and also purposely avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that. And since I didn't explain "outperform", we will interpret it as "model the world in a more accurate way".
Usually the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. What did the journalists say and how was it wrong? You said they all got it wrong, but do you have an example? What is the "right" interpretation and what in the bill text makes you think that?
> Imagine that I used those words intentionally and avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that.
"it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news."
That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.
IIRC, the comment to which I replied reflected a pretty common understanding of the issue and was in some of the reporting on prop 22.
> That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.
Nope, people say "smart" for innate talent. I make no claim to that. I'm only making a claim to outcome. I think they lack skill (a trainable thing) in comparison, yes.
And if you don’t actually have the evidence to back up your claims just say so. You don’t have to hide behind this faux intellectualism or whatever you call bragging about your consulting rate.
I’m not sure what my opinion on the 7/8ths matter has anything to do with anything. You claimed the journalists got it wrong, and I asked how.
And it's obvious why I'm asking you to put in some work: the standard on this board is to go "citation needed" and then not contribute equal work. So I want either an expression of good faith from you by you doing equivalent work or by you paying me.
And come on, you live in the Bay. You know that's (to my embarrassment) not bragging.
I'm upset because you said that someone who knows how to make a website is better at journalism that someone who studied journalism in school and has spent years honing their craft. I've worked with journalists -- the real ones who write for reputable publications, not the ones who write for the blog of the week. I have friends who are journalists. I've sat side by side with them. Their primary skill is separating truth from fiction, and you just said that someone who can construct a URL is better at it. It's an insult to them and a reflection of how poorly informed you are.
> So I want either an expression of good faith from you
Lol, where is your good faith? You made a claim, I asked you for a link to evidence of said claim. If it existed, it should take you no longer than 60 seconds to find one example. I didn't ask for an essay, I asked for a single link to a single example and a single sentence as to why it's wrong. Should be pretty easy for you if it exists.
But sure, you can win your petty game of "who will provide evidence first". The 7/8ths rule was bad because it requires 7/8s of the legislature to change provisions in the law, which is basically impossible, so it's meaningless. Sure, most propositions require a new proposition to change, but adding the 7/8ths provision is just a red herring to make it looks like they are being so generous.
But fine, I can do equivalent evidence: Journalists claimed it required 7/8ths to overturn. They were, of course, wrong. Because they were just reporting based off each other. There’s your equivalent “evidence”, I suppose.
I’m kidding, I can do better. Behold, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/uber-ly...
> Prop 22 sought to invalidate AB5′s impact on Uber and Lyft drivers, and it included a provision saying a seven-eighths legislative supermajority would be required to overturn it. Its passage effectively rendered AB5 moot.
Now, you can ask your journo friends (who are 4-year-college-trained experts at separating truth from fiction) what’s wrong with this. Compare with bill text as an exercise, if you’d like. Should be easy for the master truth seekers.
Is your concern that they used the word overturn instead of modify? That's pedantic at best.
AHAHAHAHAHA *inhales* AHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!
This is some fantastic post-irony.