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Digital forgeries are hard

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Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#41

Post by blipvert »

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…

If only there was some sort of globally distributed, cryptographically verified database of some sort that could be used for this purpose …

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#42

Post by breck »

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?

The active steps to disguise the truth are hard to understand. Maybe some sort of brain damage? Or maybe a pathological disorder that I don't understand.

However, if I try to assume a good intent, here's what I come up with:

CW knows he is not Satoshi and his case is laughable. However, by chance he happens to be in a unique position (relative to everyone else) where as long as he pushes his case, he keeps attention on the mystery of Satoshi . Maybe that is his goal all along, and his calculations show that he increases the odds of the true creator being revealed by pushing his false claims.

I mean, the anonymity of Satoshi is puzzling. BitCoin is the only major modern invention with an anonymous creator, AFAIK. I guess the most bothering aspect of the whole thing is not that I don't know who Satoshi is, it's that I know there are people out there who do know (maybe in the dozens, hundreds, or low thousands). It's annoying that there are state secrets like that. So if that is CW's intent behind all his puzzling immature actions, then there's an interesting argument to consider that his actions might have a positive ends.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#43

Post by upofadown »

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.

If you can prove the existence of the encrypted thing before some point in time than you could prove the existence of the unencrypted thing before some point in time.

There isn't any way to do this without one or more trusted third parties. Traditionally that would involve someone like a public notary or a lawyer.

I was amused to find that there is a service that cryptographically timestamps things over email via PGP that has been running since 1995:

* https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#44

Post by fragmede »

BoppreH wrote: post #20
sp1rit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 minefiel…

Why would you trust only one Blockchain explorer? You'd trust the blockchain by using several explorers, and by confirming that they all agree on the same value, to assuage any fears you have about any one particular blockchain explorer lying to you. Write your own, even, if your level of confidence needs to be that high.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#45

Post by fragmede »

blipvert wrote: post #41
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…

If only there was some sort of globally distributed, cryptographically verified database of some sort that could be used for this purpose …

We'd first have to admit that Bitcoin isn't a total scam and might actually be useful for something, and we can't have that now, can we?

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#46

Post by esafak »

A more serious case of this took place in Turkey two decades ago, and involved the jailing of a significant fraction of the military leadership. So it amounted to a judicial coup against the military. The son-in-law of one of the generals (Cetin Dogan) analyzed a piece of the evidence, a Word document ostensibly dated 2003, and proved that it contained anachronisms dating it to at least 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(alleged_coup_pla...

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#47

Post by [deleted] »

weinzierl wrote: post #29
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…

There used to be a service that published your hashes in the New York Times. Satoshi must have known about it because it is mentioned in the Bitcoin paper.

[deleted]

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#48

Post by rideontime »

Analemma_ wrote: post #16
toyg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

From watching the trial, it does seem to be an innate behavior for him, effortlessly spinning "plausible" stories to account for everything he's challenged on, that would sound convincing to somebody without the technical knowledge to understand what he's talking about.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#49

Post by mjg59 »

nullc wrote: post #30

This is a great point that hasn't been aired enough. I'm thrilled to see outsiders reading the expert reports-- which are themselves fascinating reading. I'm one of Wright's defendants and have spent the last several years of my life trapped in this involuntary puzzle hunt. Often people read the conclusions on the documents and say "man this guy Wright is a total idiot"-- and while I don't disagree with the sentiment…

Thanks! The quality of the expert witness statements is astonishing, and the sheer scale of the work carried out in a relatively short period of time is something I just can't imagine. Do you know if there's any likelihood of the opposition's expert witness statements (or Craig's remaining witness statements) being made public?

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#50

Post by rideontime »

nullc wrote: post #30

This is a great point that hasn't been aired enough. I'm thrilled to see outsiders reading the expert reports-- which are themselves fascinating reading. I'm one of Wright's defendants and have spent the last several years of my life trapped in this involuntary puzzle hunt. Often people read the conclusions on the documents and say "man this guy Wright is a total idiot"-- and while I don't disagree with the sentiment…

Did you get to see any of Ramona's box of last-minute handwritten evidence? While I'm glad you didn't have to deal with it and drag things out further, I'd love to see more entertainingly obvious forgeries, like the notepad dated '07 that wasn't printed until 2012.
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