Because they know that many of our most intractable problems are primarily political, not technical. Climate disruption and peace in the Middle East for two examples. I don't expect an LLM to offer a workable plan for either. Would love to be wrong about that though.

Trump et al. being in control of US government data honestly feels like vikings have been put in charge of the Anglo-Saxon monasteries or Christian zealots in charge of the Library of Alexandria.

The idea is to be able to prove that a photo you took was captured by a camera, not generated. That would be helpful in the context of a disputed news story, a court case, etc.

Would that ever be relevant for a screenshot?

It's not massively helpful for a court case, IMO. This has been handled the same way since the invention of photography: ask the photographer to swear under oath they took the photo. (technically, laying a foundation for the evidence)

Yes in multiple ways, and there's probably more than this:

It's relevant that a screenshot doesn't have a signature, in the case that you want to remove any "proof" or tracking info from a real photo when uploading an image. Maybe I don't want people to know what brand/model of camera I use.

And it's relevant if a screenshot did have a signature if you want to "prove" that the screenshot itself hasn't been tampered with after the fact.

In the method proposed in the paper, the signature is stored in the pixels and ostensibly even survives some compression. So if you made a screenshot of a signed image, the image would still have its signature inside the screenshot, but the screenshot wouldn't have any (new) signature as a whole.

That's how I understood it at least.

I would assume you could make big enough differences in color/contrast/brightness and especially 3D rotation (similar to taking a photo of a screen) would make such a signature unreadable... but I would love to be proven wrong.

Signing the raw image data wouldn't require also signing the EXIF metadata. For privacy, you could later strip out everything except the raw image and the camera's signature and still prove that the image is unaltered.

What are you signing it with, though? A unique key that only exists on your device... so it will perfectly tie a photo to a specific camera.

Even if you didn't know who owned the camera, you could identify other pictures taken by that same camera, and information in those photos might let you figure out who owns the camera.

But you are signing it with your _private_ key, presumably. You know, the key that stays on your device and nobody knows?

That just means no one else can pretend they are you, but it also means they can know it HAS to be you.

If you sign two images with that private key, people will know for certain that you created both of them. This is the whole point of signing something. No one else can fake it because they don't have the private key, but EVERYONE can verify it because they DO have the public key. In fact, they don't even need the public key because they can extract it from the signature and the signed image.

I think he's saying the existence of a camera signature is the privacy issue maybe.

You can remove it all.

If authenticity later becomes an issue you can produce the original.

What if the camera doesn't give you an original but just a signed image?

from a signed image you can always extract just the image

I think some people are confused and think this is a watermark or something

As long as the barcode is not then used to reject delivery of ballots because a flawed federal voter verification system guesses the voters are illegitimate.

I have grave concerns about creating a single lever that will allow bad actors to steal elections.

Having to hijack a federal election commission is harder than taking over a few Republican Christian conservative districts.

Remember that is because of the FBI that black people in Georgia can vote.

To clarify, if the postal service can choose which ballots to deliver, then whoever controls the postal service has a powerful lever to suppress voters they don't like, especially those who have difficulty voting in person due to bad health, work obligations, distance to polling places, etc.

Nothing about the FEC.

Under the proposed rules, only the states would be able to determine who is eligible to vote. The postal service would not have discretion over which ones to deliver. If they failed to deliver any ballots then the tracking information for the ballots would show it right away.

That's not the story the whistleblower tells. The plan, for example, is to reject entire batches of ballots if a single ballot doesn't pass USPS's criteria.

Sure, that sounds scary. But the USPS’s criteria are all about the barcode, the envelope, etc. If the state cannot print envelopes that the USPS’s sorting machine can read then it will reject them. And if the very first one in a carton of mail is wrong, what are the odds any of the rest will be right?

> …a flawed federal voter verification system guesses the voters are illegitimate.

FWIW, the states don’t even know who is a citizen without verifying the registered voter’s information with the federal government. The federal government does not have to guess, since they are the source of truth.

You should have told them the required phone was missing from the box.

Funny I think of Perl as Bash with slightly saner syntax plus robust regexp. (said with love)

This is also fair.

Censorship of things I don't like or don't care about doesn't count. /s

I boycotted with the API nonsense a few years ago and noticed I didn't miss it that much. Haven't really been back since. When a web search leads me back, it seems to have gone downhill with lots of low effort and bot-ish posts.

I pulled back significantly on reddit in that period too. Now I probably look at it 10% tops of what I used to. After being away from it and trying to enjoy looking at it these days... It's not the same as it was and simply not very good now. Most of the good communities died off, closed or got too big, the biggest communities are too big and the quality of posts+comments has plummeted. It feels either overrun with bots or it's the alternative: idiots that post so poorly they appear to be bots.

It was fun while it lasted, but with everything going on it often feels nicer to just not look at the internet and do something else. Rage baiting, copy cat posts and spam have become so common on Insta even that's become harder to enjoy.

It's been wild to see the Dead Internet Theory mature in real time after reading about it like... 15 years or more ago.

Reddit is gone. You can view it without an account. You get blocked by a popup that forces you to register. Its basically facebook at this time.

Hengist and Horsa