Can We Kill Fake News With Blockchain? (computerworld.com) 164
"One of the more unique future uses for blockchain may be thwarting fake news," writes Computerworld's senior reporter, citing a recent report from Gartner:
By 2023, up to 30% of world news and video content will be authenticated as real by blockchain ledgers, countering "Deep Fake technology," according to Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president of research and co-author of the "Predicts 2020: Blockchain Technology" report... "Tracking assets and proving provenance are two key successful use cases for permissioned blockchain and can be readily applied to tracking the provenance of news content...."
The New York Times is one of the first major news publications to test blockchain to authenticate news photographs and video content, according to Gartner. The newspaper's Research and Development team and IBM have partnered on the News Provenance Project, which uses Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned blockchain to store "contextual metadata." That metadata includes when and where a photo or video was shot, who took it and how and when it was edited and published...
Blockchain could also change how corporate public offerings are done. Many private companies forgo a public offering because of the complexity of the process. With blockchain ledgers, securities linked to digital tokens could move more easily between financial institutions by simply bypassing a central clearance organization.
The article also envisions a world with encrypted digital online credentials on a blockchain ledger that are linked back to the bank, employer, or government agency that created them.
Ken Elefant, managing director of investment firm Sorenson Capital, sees this technology creating a world of super-secure profiles where "only the individuals or companies authorized have access to that data -- unlike the internet today where you and I can be marketed to by anybody,"
The New York Times is one of the first major news publications to test blockchain to authenticate news photographs and video content, according to Gartner. The newspaper's Research and Development team and IBM have partnered on the News Provenance Project, which uses Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned blockchain to store "contextual metadata." That metadata includes when and where a photo or video was shot, who took it and how and when it was edited and published...
Blockchain could also change how corporate public offerings are done. Many private companies forgo a public offering because of the complexity of the process. With blockchain ledgers, securities linked to digital tokens could move more easily between financial institutions by simply bypassing a central clearance organization.
The article also envisions a world with encrypted digital online credentials on a blockchain ledger that are linked back to the bank, employer, or government agency that created them.
Ken Elefant, managing director of investment firm Sorenson Capital, sees this technology creating a world of super-secure profiles where "only the individuals or companies authorized have access to that data -- unlike the internet today where you and I can be marketed to by anybody,"
No (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you cannot kill fake news, because it can be created out of nothing.
And you don't need a blockchain to authenticate real news. Just have it signed by a trusted party.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea of blockchain is to replace trust in a single party by a chain of signees who each vet for the accuracy of the piece of news, and you can always follow the chain back to the original source. Instead of a single instance of true and false, you have a long list of instances (maybe with different levels of trust), and you can attribute a trust
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to have the news signed by multiple parties you can do so without having a blockchain.
Also, the value of signing a piece of news drops when the parties are further away. If CNN makes a video of Trump, I can see value in both CNN and Trump signing the video for authenticity, but there's little value in a different party adding their signature as well.
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some of their correspondents knows someone in Pakistan whose relatives lives close to the place of the catastrophe. In this case, blockchain makes sense, because each party reporting about what another party says can sign it of
So somebody in Pakistan that I don't know signs the original piece of news. How am I supposed to check that the news was not manipulated ? Even if I check the signature, it goes back to someone without any established credibility.
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Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
Same problem. A bunch of unknown parties giving their blessing has no value to me. Besides, most stories published by big news media, such as CNN, don't have many parties involved. There might be a few unknown witnesses interviewed on the street, and then a bunch of CNN employees, and then it appears on the TV or their website.
And at the same time, this hurts legitimate civilian reporting. A dude with a cell phone recording some police brutality has no blockchain, so we should dismiss it as probably fake ?
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The idea of blockchain is that you in generel vet the veracity of CNN, and CNN in turn vets its sources, which in turn then report how much they trust their sources. You will never know exactly how much you can trust the original reporter, and even CNN has to rely on int
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a vast network of correspondents and sources. And each of it has a different level of trust to CNN.
These unknown sources and correspondents have no value to me. They have no stake in the game. At least CNN (and the other big news agencies) have a reputation to protect, so their signature is worth something (not necessarily a lot, but something). Also, the signature of well known people in an interview could be useful as a guarantee that their statement on the final product is an accurate representation of their position, and that the video has not been taken out of context, or deepfaked.
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Or you build a network of trust, where you trust someone more and someone less. and thus you trust their trust to others again on different levels.
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I have no idea how to solve it.
Luckily, most the "news" is irrelevant clickbait and entertainment, and can be consumed as such, or safely ignored.
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That's where blockchain comes in. Each party that gives the news to the next one adds their vetting of the veracity of the source
No. That is not what a "blockchain" is. It is not a "chain of trust". It is a majority voting mechanism.
It won't work because news outlets rarely have time to re-check stories even once, and certainly aren't going to check every story.
Also, people who believe fake news aren't looking for verification. They don't really care if the stories are true or not.
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What is that, "unintended consequences"?
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
Re: No (Score:2)
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If you want to have the news signed by multiple parties you can do so without having a blockchain.
Yes, but the blockchain preserves the order of events (signings) so that you can see clearly which hands it's actually passed through on its way to you, and who's made what changes or addenda and when. That's got obvious value.
Re: No (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really, I already knew it was mostly bull shit. Having a list of bullshitters really doesn't improve the situation.
If your solution is just to give up, why not fuck off and let people interested in addressing those problems which can be addressed have a go at it? Why bitch?
Re: No (Score:2)
Or you could always sign things like pictures, text, and videos with your wallet key. When other people in the blockchain validate it, they can't modify it as they pass it along without it being blatantly obvious.
Cheese...this is basic cryptography people. Your web browser does this all the damn time.
Re: No (Score:3)
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And if you don't trust the party that authenticated it, then you gain exactly nothing by having it signed by a single party.
You can gain quite a bit. If CNN produces a news item and they attach their signature, then I could verify it was authentically made by CNN, and not a doctored version from some internet user.
Of course, I would still have to trust CNN, but there's no way to avoid that when it's a news item originally produced by them.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Where the chain would come in handy is for citations and tracing a story back to see where it originated. Blockchain could make this part more transparent and robust, since even if a site linked in the chain goes down then you can still authenticate and see who *they cited.
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Where the chain would come in handy is for citations and tracing a story back to see where it originated. Blockchain could make this part more transparent and robust, since even if a site linked in the chain goes down then you can still authenticate and see who *they cited.
You could also put a hash of a media file and the metadata for the file on a blockchain ledger. If the media file or its metadata is subsequently altered, it won't match the canonical version.
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That doesn't work, because the internet causes changes in media - deliberately and otherwise - all the time without changing the meaning.
For example, the AP films a 45-minute Trump press conference. (original)
CNN takes a 20-second clip of that (modified) and shows it during their prime time news show. The show is also posted to the internet (modified). The clip from the show is taken, trimmed to a 15-second clip (modified), and linked to an article. The article has both desktop and mobile versions, with
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If AP/CNN signs their original, then people can always compare derivative versions frame by frame if they suspect shenanigans.
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I however fail to see what value blockchain adds in such a context.
For example, if a derived material signed that they cited someone else, I can't take that at face value unless I manually validate the source anyway. So a signed chain of modifiers wouldn't do me any good. Someone at Breitbart proves they cited a CNN article claiming they praise David Duke, and maybe you can come up with a way to prove they did cite CNN, however you actually have to review the CNN content and will see that they heavily edi
And what would make that not fake? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like big news agencies were anything but press release aggregators for lobbyists, propaganda, etc.
My dad is an old school investigative journalist. He went undercover in terror groups and real pirates, regularly flies to war zones and places where foreingers are shot on sight, unearthed and did prove the crimes, corporations and governments, amd got almost killed more often than he can count.
And nowadays, he has big problems selling his work (usually 30-60 minutes docmentaries or 5-15 pieces) because the news agencies and TV stations don't want to upset any of the big corporations and poliitical interest groups. He regularly gets told "It's too risky.", to which his reply is "That is the point! That is what we are here for!", or they say "Your proof is great, but their legal power is greater. They might not win in court, but they would drag it out until we are dead anyway. We can't afford the legal battles.".
They want light entertainment fluff pieces. That look investigstive, but never actually break the surface.
Frankly, the only place where you can still get real news, *is* the Internet. Or comedy shows.
The art is to separate the lies from reality. *Only you yourself can do that.* Anyone between you and them is doing it for his own agenda too. So beware.
Luckily, my dad is a trained journalist with decades of experience.
But for everyone else, it is either too late, or the solution is a good education. One that trains your ability to research and think for yourself, to recognize and correct your own triggers and distortions, and to never believe, period.
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The idea of blockchain is to replace trust in a single party by a chain of signees who each vet for the accuracy of the piece of news, and you can always follow the chain back to the original source.
And that helps exactly not at all. Trust is not (or only weakly) transitive. The solution here is to have each individual news piece signed by multiple trusted parties, not some "blockchain"-bullshit. Incidentally, using the weak transitivity of trust is called "web-of-trust" and quite a bit older than the "blockchain"-nonsense.
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I think the idea isn't just that the items are signed, it's that they're going to link to other items in blocks that they've cited as their sources. It becomes not just a way to verify who *published* any piece: a trusted source could merely publish some actual rubbish they read elsewhere, so the "signatures" are worthless. It's more valuable to be able to say "oh I read than on CNN, but where did they actually get that story from?" and having a chain that stores all the stories and their source stories has
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I read than on CNN, but where did they actually get that story from?" and having a chain that stores all the stories and their source stories has value for that
It would be nice if we could see all the raw material that CNN collected, and of which they only showed a few carefully selected snippets. But they will never agree to do that, with or without a blockchain.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
"I had it all!...I had Clinton!" [Story Killed]
And Epstein didn't kill himself.
Strat
Re: (Score:2)
For others, fake news an update of the vaunted tradition of 'yellow journalism', or 'tabloid journalism'. There is some truth to this, I must admit.
For me though, in this age of a discordant, fragmentary media, fake news involves individual news channels playing to their cu
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
As I remember, most news sources that were saying back then that there was no evidence of WMDs. I don't watch Fox (or any TV news) so I don't know what they were saying back then. Many (most?) were saying that any unaccounted weapons were very old & likely not usable or don't exist. This was a in the news, such as NPR, CNN, NYT, & many other (real) news sites that are on my feed. Fox does show up on my feed & I sometimes actually read an article on their website but I do not remember where they stood on Saddam's WMDs.
Off topic but damn invading Iraq was the stupidest thing that the USA ever did. Followed the second most stupid thing, electing that moron president of ours.
Re: No (Score:2)
Re: No (Score:2)
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No it wasn't. In fact the CIA didn't believe this at all. That's why the Bush administration outed Valerie Plame and her husband. On top of this, millions of people all around the world marched in protest to the planned invasion of Iraq. If you weren't watching American TV, you saw a completely different point of view.
Re: No (Score:2)
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Not at the time that the WMD issue was being "litigated" in Congress and the public to gin up support for the invasion.
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> Not exactly, The problem is trust. And if you don't trust the party that authenticated it, then you gain exactly nothing by having it signed by a single party.
> The idea of blockchain is to replace trust in a single party by a chain of signees
And how do you know how to trust them? Blockchain absolutely does not solve the trust challenge. All you blockchain evangelists fail to realise that the reason you own some coins here and there is because at some point you loaded an HTTPS web site, authenticat
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Then the "blockchain" would authenticate news created by the CIA under some major news publication "blockchain" branding..
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No, you cannot kill fake news, because it can be created out of nothing.
And you don't need a blockchain to authenticate real news. Just have it signed by a trusted party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Could have at least read the summary.
The idea is to authenticate the source of news stories, so you can't just make a fake screenshot of a legitimate website and pass it around social media. It would do the same for deepfake news channel video, so you can be sure that video of a politician saying something on Fox or CNN is genuine.
It's not the worst idea but the problem will be getting it adopted.
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Right, that's what I said. Have the legitimate website sign the story/video. That's not a blockchain.
New idea, same problem (Score:2)
Except most of that marketing material is given away voluntarily. All that happens is that you buy a phone and find you can't use it without giving away your rights. Same as today.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
A blockchain telling us that a story is officially from Fox does not make that story any better quality or any less of a biased propaganda piece.
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Um, same with the other "main stream media", which are not any more accurate or unbiased. Unless you are brainwashed into believing that MSNBC or CNN (or others) are somehow "unbiased."
Did I trigger you or something? Or do you not understand the concept where an example is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all cases?
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Your intent of selecting Fox and only Fox was pretty overt. Nothing in your message implied it is an "example" of one among many. Maybe you meant it to be, but it doesn't read that way.
Why would you want to? (Score:5, Insightful)
To claim there is no fake news, that fake has been suppressed you violate the first amendment. And also open the door to those in control over such suppression to then dictate to you what is real, even when it is not, so to control you and what you think and do. like their 24/7 banging war drums after 9/11 on iraq which has been determined since to be an unjust invasion expensive to the taxpayers where the 24/7 war drum banging was itself fake news controlled by .... consider who!
On the flip side, the more fake news and deep fakes improvements will result in people becoming aware of such to the point of learning how to think for themselves because they need to.
Isn't all this Obvious?
Re:Why would you want to? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And it is that the same news is understood differently by people with different biases. Take for instance the latest impeachment news. If you like Donald Trump, you interpret the news as yet another attempt by leftists to undug dirt and make much noise over something that is perfectly fine. If you don't like him, then the number of lies and shenanigans and backstabbing perpetrated by the president gets longer and longer.
It's like those vexing pictures [sehtestbilder.de] where one sees the b
Re:Why would you want to? (Score:5, Insightful)
The danger of the social media filter bubble is that we might still think we're doing the filtering ourselves, that we're still seeing the variety of viewpoints we used to get, while some invisible force at FB is doing the filtering for us. Either to make us see what we like to see... or what they like us to see. And no, blockchain isn't going to fix this, it will just reinforce the credibility of any old crap shoveled our way.
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The Internet has made it easier than ever to inforn yourself, and to get acquainted with a wide variety of opinions. We used to let editors do the filtering for us, nowadays many of us are trying to do it ourselves.
Some of the most insane people I've met have claimed to have done extensive research, by which they mean crackpot websites and YouTube. The Internet is fucking with the human mind because you used to get varied input, of a hundred people in the real world you'd find that maybe two shared your opinion. Instead you go on the Internet where your niche has gathered and with billions of people online even 0.01% of those is enough for a constant full time feed of extremely niche opinions. Our lizard brain is stil
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I wish freeze peach warriors would read the summary before posting the knee jerk reaction.
All this does is authenticate sources. If it has a Fox News signature you can be pretty sure the story really is from Fox, it's not a faked screenshot or a deepfake video.
Your free speech is not impinged at all. Nobody is deciding what is true, it's just giving you some extra certainty that what you are seeing isn't a lie.
Unfortunately as you demonstrated many people don't read past the headline so probably wouldn't no
Re: Why would you want to? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Even CNN, NYT and MSNBC has been caught lately with using fake footage to influence a narrative - eg Turkey invading Syria with footage from a gun show demonstration in Arizona.
The NYT came right out and said that the narrative is more important than facts. With such "news organizations" who needs fake news?
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Come on, this is not hard to understand. It's not verifying the veracity of the news, merely the source. If you are the kind of person who thinks the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy then you should welcome this as it makes it easier for you to trace back to those sources you don't like.
Re: Why would you want to? (Score:2)
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Some people still cling to the notion that some more or less tell the truth.
By the way, if it's all lies how do you know anything? Are you sure Donald Trump is president and today is Sunday?
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By the way, if it's all lies how do you know anything? Are you sure Donald Trump is president and today is Sunday?
Sure enough for the things I care about. For these particular examples, me knowing it is Sunday is the easiest to verify, and the most important.
Re: Why would you want to? (Score:2)
Could we just kill blockchain-everywhere please? (Score:4, Insightful)
That particular buzzword applied to everything from cryptocurrencies to public toilets is getting on my fucking nerves.
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Could we just kill blockchain-everywhere please?
Just a minute . . . I'll have to ask that question to my AI Slashdot Assistant . . .
Although . . . I'm not sure if I'll get an unbiased answer, since my AI Slashdot Assistant uses a Blockchain.
And IoT, of course.
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https://medium.com/@jimmysong/... [medium.com]
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Using blockchain to track your poo through the sewers and ensure your waste is approriately treated! What a concept. I can almost smell the venture capital... at least I think that's VC I can smell. ... Kind of hard when you're posting on Slashdot from the loo.
What is this drivel? (Score:3)
Slashdot, you are better than this. Why are you posting garbage blockchain magic faery dust articles?
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Hmmm (Score:2)
"only the individuals or companies authorized have access to that data -- unlike the internet today where you and I can be marketed to by anybody
I’m not sure this guy knows what a distributed public ledger is.
Not holding my breath (Score:3)
It's not exactly a new idea, here it is documented back in 1996: Ewiges Logfile" [donnerhacke.de]. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to adopt it. Your average news organisation can't even figured out the hyperlink. Even if an original source is available on the net, they hardly ever bother to actually link it. All they publish is their own stuff with their own little spin on it. Videos are edited, photos are cropped and selected, study results get often twisted into the opposite and the user is never informed of where all that information came from in the first place.
If you want to stop fake news, you have to stop mainstream news organisations first, since they are the ones that like to spin and twist everything around. Reporting the truth is a noble goal, but it's one with very little commercial value, click bait and spin doctoring is what sells and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
First, we have to handle this type of tstupidity (Score:3)
I mean, come on, "Can we solve [current problem] with [current unrelated hype]"? How stupid to do you have to be to even ask the question? These two things have no connection. One is a storage technology, one is a social problem.
Won't work for long (Score:3)
The problem with this sort of thinking is it assumes that the algorithms to create and test the hashes are going to be unbreakable or so complex that it'll take a million years to brute force. We've already seen progress into quantum computing that has the potential to calculate all possible hashes at once and this theoretical research will eventually find its way into a public cloud to be rented for pennies per hour.
Furthermore, it ignores the fact that simply stripping the metadata, faking its contents with things like deep fakes, or simply placing scrolling news feeds and logos on the bottom are enough to break the chain but possibly maintaining the authenticity from a true/false perspective. While it would make sense for organizations to update the chain with their modifications, the authority to be a "certified" organization with access to the chain will likely create either competing chains or worse, concentrate what counts as "real news" only coming from a select, for profit, organizations that have an incentive to limit access and control the narratives. Think about this for a second, if someone records a public official or person of power abusing their power (think cop beating/shooting), then without being part of "official" block chains one could simply deny the accusations as fake news. This takes some of the only power left from the people (at least in the States anyway). While I'm not saying let's not try to tackle the barrage of fake news, we should at the very least ask ourselves are there concerns outlined above, and the many more I'm sure that aren't listed, worth ignoring for the desired outcome. A possible, more long term, solution might be to teach people to think critically again, but I'm afraid the intelligence curves are starting to skew more to the left than right in terms of ranked measures of intelligence recently.
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Quantum computing is not magic. It can speed up some encryption math, like factoring large numbers, but it's no good for solving bit-shuffling hashes.
Also, hashing and encryption is not a static target. If technology gets to a point where some methods can be broken in reasonable time, we can upgrade them to different algorithms, and/or longer keys.
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Fake news isn't a technical issue (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't solve a social issue with a technical solution. Fake news is much more of a product of editors choosing what aspects of a story to report than it is of wholly fabricated stories. Refusing to report a story at all is also an incredibly powerful way to manipulate the public discourse.
The real issue with the news is editors selectively editing the news to support the bias of their personal narrative. Adding blockchain to a story that has been been selectively edited to manipulate the bias of the editors narrative to begin with isn't going to fix anything. All things considered I'm inclined to think that the vast majority of fake news likely started as real news.
The problems comes down to defining fake news. Is news fake when it is blatantly false or is it fake when it is factually accurate but presented out of context? By presenting things out of context you can claim to be telling the truth when you are in fact giving people fake news. Technology isn't going to fix that.
That's not what Fake News is (Score:2)
It's not hard at all to define fake news. It's stories presented as news that are patently false, either for the propaganda purposes, to sow distrust in a population or to generate advertisement dollars from users clicking through to read the stories.
"Pizzagate" [wikipedia.org] is the most commonly known ex
Re: That's not what Fake News is (Score:3)
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When a news story is presented to support a narrative and withholds the context that would change that narrative it becomes propaganda. By manipulating the facts that are presented and failing to present context you are converting real news into fake news. This is literally the creation of propaganda. The result of this kind of thing happening again and again is that people simply no longer trust the news media.
https://medium.com/trust-media... [medium.com]
Courtrooms around the country are very sensitive to this type of
Can we kill blockchain with blockchain? (Score:2)
And kill the unword "AI" in the process.
That would be the ideal state.
Software solutions to philosophical problems. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like an attempt to lock people into proprietary technologies. Microsoft tried this with their "domain key" or DKIM version of SPF, which was an entirely distinct technology added on top of the already existing SPF. Spammers have worked around the technology because it's not well supported by forwarding services, because the private credentials are easily stolen or used remotely from hacked personal computers, and because those services allow and even foster poorly verified new users. For service
Can we kill blockchain hype with blockchain? (Score:2)
Can blockchain be applied to stop blockchain hype?
Critical thinking maybe? (Score:2)
Maybe, just maybe...
1) Do not allow any single source of information to form your opinion on any actual subject
2) Read news, not only headlines and first couple paragraphs. If you really care, research at least a bit on your own.
3) Make your own personal rating of authors/sources. In future, more trusted sources can help you speed up step 2.
4) Always question what news says, try to learn more. Cui bono, why now, etc...
5) Do not rush, ignore herd. Use your mind, You've got it for exactly that reason!
Defining "Fake News" (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the term "Fake News" has been redefined multiple times, and now it has come to mean anything that a subject happens to disagree with. There are many different kinds of fake news, and in order for technology to address it, like this story about blockchain authentication, they have to be much more specific about which kind of fake news they are trying to prevent.
"Fake news" now includes portraying news from an angle that some subject feels is not totally representative of their viewpoint. Thus, nearly any piece of news concerning politics or government is now considered "fake news" since you can find individuals that disagree with the exact interpretation or meaning of that news. At least a part of this is based on the fact that most all news organizations now have a political viewpoint and agenda, so there is some kernel of truth to many people believing most news is fake news. There is no technical solution to this.
In social media a few years ago (and perhaps it is still ongoing, but I haven't noticed it personally) there was a rash of truly fake news. These were propagated by fake news websites, which would take some actual news story and rewrite it to apply to many other towns. They would have a different URL for each place, but the news story would be the same (with just the different city / locale name changed). In social media these stories would spread like wildfire, because they had very sensational headlines like "Townsville Mother Drowns her 3 Children", where "Townsville" is replaced by multiple different locations depending on the URL. Again, these were usually based on an actual news story that had happened in the past in some other location. The entire point of this was to install malware apps, install new email providers on their phone to spam them with, etc.
Another type of "fake news" is where countries like Russia are seeding a target country's social media platforms with inflammatory content. Oftentimes the news is true, but is heavily skewed to the left or right to try and get that base upset and angry. This type of thing has been going on since the advent of broadcast radio, where state-sponsored radio stations broadcast news that they want people to hear to further their cause. Many countries still do this today with shortwave radio news broadcasts.
When it comes to the true fake news, the problem is social media. People are stupid when it comes to resharing things. I regularly see things shared on Facebook that were true news, like an abducted child, and when the actual article is opened you find that it happened a long time ago and the child was found safe. I see people in my own town sharing missing child alerts, and when the article is actually opened you see it applies to an entirely different country. The person couldn't even be bothered to look at the link before they shared it.
This is primarily the fault of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, in that they have made it too easy and without any consequence to share things. This is particularly true for sharing URLs to content not even on the platform. When an external link is first shared, Facebook will scrape it at that moment and retrieve text and an image, if there is one. Now, when that item is reshared, no matter if the content at the URL has been updated, the shared content will be static and won't change. That is out of necessity, since the content could be changed after a person shares it to represent something they did not want to share (they shared "I like cats!" but then the content was changed to "I hate cats!" after they shared it). However, this propagates inaccurate or out of date information because the share never updates to reflect the current state ("the missing child has been found!"), which would prevent the item for being reshared again and again (since people can't be bother to actually view or vet what they share).
Truly, all this mess is the result of social media and people generally acting like they don't have any common sense when i
what stupidity, blockchain the universal cure-all (Score:2)
So we'll get fake news with checksums, that's so much better.
blockchain is a poor solution to the distributed database problem and data integrity, better solutions have existed for decades, a solved problem. blockchain needs to die in a fire.
no (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Too many people don't even want to doubt their favorite news sources.
Sure you can. (Score:2)
First, stop people from being so gullible. Then use <handwaving>blockchain</handwaving>. Problem solved.
"Permissioned Blockchain"? (Score:2)
I could see this being useful (Score:2)
In theory this would use blockchain for it's intended purpose (a distributed database where the user base comes to a consensus about the contents of the database). It spares the Times the cost of maintaining a system to validate every picture, and so long as th
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If The NY Times can put a picture on their site, they can add a signature to the metadata. That's not particularly difficult or expensive.
well, no (Score:2)
the referred project aims at verifying just the sources, nothing more. this should be a basic requirement already, too much is being floated around without any sort of backing so i would see it as a motivator for good practices in the sector. ...
not holding my breath, though, and of course it will do zilch to fake news, the only option against that is a critical thinking audience and that's sort of a chicken and egg problem
Fake news is a problematic concept (Score:2)
For any anti- "fake news" authentication system, you'd need a robust & effective definition of what we mean by "fake news." So far it means any news that we don't like &/or don't agree with, i.e. it's almost entirely subjective. Is fake news the same thing as propaganda? PR & marketing? Bullshit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit)?
One of the many problems with filtering out fake news/propaganda/PR & marketing/bullshit is that Google, Facebook, Twitter, et. al.'s business models are e
Another solution looking for a problem (Score:2)
Blockchain basically favors the 51%. And just because something is popular doesn't make it true. Whoever controls blockchain sets what is legit. So why would a decentralized system work for identifying propaganda when the network and not the criteria is most important?
This is another example of people trying to find something blockchain can be good at.... and failing.
When no news source is trustworthy.. (Score:2)
They all are.
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Why is it that blockchain is always proposed as the solution to nearly every problem, when it really only applies to a very specific set of problems? Is there some blockchain illuminati behind the scenes? Blockchain is great at verifying a shared ledger of transactions. All these other things appear to be attempts at separating suckers (investors) from their money.
This is one of the few instances where it makes sense. Not for the 'fake news' bit, but for verifying that a video, image, or sound recording is the original version of something and hasn't been altered by a deep fake AI. You can store metadata of the original file along with a fingerprint in the ledger, and if you subsequently get an altered version of the file, you can regenerate the fingerprint and determine very easily if an earlier, unaltered version existed.
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anyone, what is the point of a private / permissioned blockchain? Just a trendy name for a specific database technology and nothing really to do with the origins of the term in Bitcoin etc?
my guess is it refers to the proof of concept.
you're right in that a blockchain isn't much more than an immutable log unless it is challenged constantly by peers and there is an incentive to do that, but there is little said about how they plan to do that in the article. in any case hyperledge is not a company supposed to run that thing, just the open source organization the project builds upon.