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Digital forgeries are hard

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Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#71

Post by ryan-c »

rwmj wrote: post #51
ryan-c wrote: post #15

This is about Faketoshi Notamoto, right? click Yup. This guy is a pathological forger and is bad at it. Here's my write-up from when he got caught doing naughty things with ECDSA: https://rya.nc/sartre.html (as noted by another commenter, "pathological" is literal in this case)

The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him. (That and there's some billionaire behind the whole thing, which probably helps.) This article was interesting: https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bitcoin

> The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him.

"pathological"

I think it's literally a compulsion for him.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#72

Post by kelnos »

mcdonje wrote: post #64

Interesting article, but the headline seems dubious. What's the opposite of survivorship bias? Because it seems like the population of good forgeries would be hard to quantify.

I don't think the premise that digital forgeries are hard is invalidated by the possibility that there might be a good number of undetected forgeries out there. Things can be hard to do, but still done in decent quantities.

You do make a good general point, though! Good forgeries are by their nature not known to be forgeries.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#73

Post by julianeon »

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?

In this age of influencers, the title of 'Bitcoin creator' would be worth a lot of money on social media & the conference circuit.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#74

Post by hattmall »

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?

I am continually amazed when I see some large scam unravel and lo and behold the perpetrators were the same people from a previous scam of recent memory. They do it over and over because for a time it works. My current favorite and possibly all time best is the guys behind tether. Every single one of them with a dubious past linked to scams.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#75

Post by password4321 »

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…

Post your SHA256 hash as a comment on a Hacker News story just before the 14 day edit window expires!

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#76

Post by ryan-c »

ryan-c wrote: post #15

This is about Faketoshi Notamoto, right? click Yup. This guy is a pathological forger and is bad at it. Here's my write-up from when he got caught doing naughty things with ECDSA: https://rya.nc/sartre.html (as noted by another commenter, "pathological" is literal in this case)

Oh, neat, my gist linked from that post was used as evidence.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#77

Post by PoignardAzur »

hammock wrote: post #5

I'm reminded of the theory that the 2017 DNC email leak was forged to look like it had come from a Russian, when a deeper analysis suggested it had come via local thumb drive: https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-n...

IIRC the fishing link used for the hack pointed to a mainstream URL shortener; and the account that owned that shortened URL used in the fishing op was associated with other URLs dating years back used for fishing campaigns against russian journalists and dissidents.

Hence, pretty strong reasons to suspect Russian state involvment.

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#78

Post by hammock »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #77
hammock wrote: post #5

I'm reminded of the theory that the 2017 DNC email leak was forged to look like it had come from a Russian, when a deeper analysis suggested it had come via local thumb drive: https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-n...

IIRC the fishing link used for the hack pointed to a mainstream URL shortener; and the account that owned that shortened URL used in the fishing op was associated with other URLs dating years back used for fishing campaigns against russian journalists and dissidents. Hence, pretty strong reasons to suspect Russian state involvment.

Are you thinking of this story? https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-...

Those phishing emails and links are distinct from the DNC leak

Re: Digital forgeries are hard

#79

Post by nuclearnice1 »

esafak wrote: post #46

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…

Interesting. I did not know about this case.

We had a similar thing in Pakistan. In fact, same font.

https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/how-calibri-font-br...

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