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Digital forgeries are hard

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Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#11

Post by mananaysiempre »

BoppreH wrote: post #6

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access…

Don’t know how convincing it’d be in court, but Open Timestamps[1], a free service that operates by publishing Merkle tree hashes to the Bitcoin ledger and can give you independently-verifiable proofs after a while, still exists even if it doesn’t seem to be under active development. (I think Keybase tried something like that some time ago as well, they already had most of the parts in place, but then they decided to use their own something-or-other-coin and I stopped paying attention.)

[1] https://opentimestamps.org/

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#12

Post by sp1rit »

BoppreH wrote: post #6

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access…

> Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge?

I feel like the best you can do is either to publish a cryptographically secure hash or to publish something encrypted and share the key/password when you want to reveal the secret.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#13

Post by SmooL »

BoppreH wrote: post #6

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access…

This is/could be a legitimate use of blockchain, e.g. see https://gwern.net/timestamping

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#14

Post by toyg »

alilleybrinker wrote: post #7

(Assuming this is the same case; I haven't been following Craig Wright closely) It looks like the case was very swiftly decided against Wright. Here's reporting from The Guardian about it today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australia...

I always wonder about people like Wright... how does such a brain work? Why would one invest so much of his life and reputation on brazen lies and forgeries? He's been caught so many times, surely nobody can take him seriously anymore, it's over, time to move on - but here he is, forging emails and logs, digging deeper and deeper, turning his life more and more into a farce. Why?

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#16

Post by Analemma_ »

toyg wrote: post #14
alilleybrinker wrote: post #7

(Assuming this is the same case; I haven't been following Craig Wright closely) It looks like the case was very swiftly decided against Wright. Here's reporting from The Guardian about it today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australia...

I always wonder about people like Wright... how does such a brain work? Why would one invest so much of his life and reputation on brazen lies and forgeries? He's been caught so many times, surely nobody can take him seriously anymore, it's over, time to move on - but here he is, forging emails and logs, digging deeper and deeper, turning his life more and more into a farce. Why?

There's pretty broad consensus that Craig Wright is a pathological liar. And I'm not using that as an idiom for "dishonest person", I mean it in the psychiatric term of art sense [0]: he probably has an actual compulsion to lie stemming from some kind of psychological damage, which doesn't stop even when he's caught red-handed (he just invents new even more outrageous lies, even when that's nakedly against his own self-interest). This is confirmed not just by all his behavior re: Bitcoin, but his own mother said at one point he has been like this his whole life. It's. In earlier days of Bitcoin it was causing actual problems, but these days everyone treats him as a carnival amusement and nothing more.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#17

Post by [deleted] »

toyg wrote: post #14
alilleybrinker wrote: post #7

(Assuming this is the same case; I haven't been following Craig Wright closely) It looks like the case was very swiftly decided against Wright. Here's reporting from The Guardian about it today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australia...

I always wonder about people like Wright... how does such a brain work? Why would one invest so much of his life and reputation on brazen lies and forgeries? He's been caught so many times, surely nobody can take him seriously anymore, it's over, time to move on - but here he is, forging emails and logs, digging deeper and deeper, turning his life more and more into a farce. Why?

[deleted]

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#19

Post by [deleted] »

BoppreH wrote: post #6

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access…

[deleted]

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#20

Post by BoppreH »

sp1rit wrote: post #12
BoppreH wrote: post #6

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access…

> Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge? I feel like the best you can do is either to publish a cryptographically secure hash or to publish something encrypted and share the key/password when you want to reveal the secret.

But publish it where, though? It has to be:

- Publicly accessible.

- Timestamped.

- Immutable (or at least with edits marked as such).

- Widely trusted (or too big to be bribed in small cases, e.g., Google).

- And keep those features for many years.

Twitter was surprisingly good at that in the past, but no more. Blockchains, as mentioned in other comments, give excellent immutability; but the field is such a minefield that I'd struggle to find a trustworthy blockchain explorer.

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