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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

I was excited to possibly see this provided as an open source tool or at least an automated service, but the site offers a form to request dating, which looks like a manual process. That's not really making it available to everyone.

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It's super fishy. Why should I trust them to process potentially sensitive material? If you want to level the playing field, just put the collected data out in the open so anyone can download it and correlate any video they like with it, no need to upload the video to Mr. Anonymous and hope he's being truthful about his pure and noble intentions to support human rights.

I suppose you could calibrate Mr. Hum with some known-date video material, but I agree that the data should simply be made public. Further, even if the data is released, you would be assuming that Mr. Hum captured his electrical data with the correct time attached to it. So, hopefully, he's either got a Cesium clock connected to his capture device or he's using NTP, or the like. This would further assume that he has maintained this same data capture regimen continuously since he began his capture in 2016.

This definitely raises some questions and shows that its likely not something that should be left to entities outside of standards-setting agencies (that could offer some assurances and certifications).

Yeah it's kind of surprising that nobody has set up a properly open one with downloadable history. This "fill in a form" one is lame.

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