Verifiable information, identities on the internet

Now that it is cheap to fabricate history, how can we trust anything?

2024-10-31 — 2025-01-05

Wherein cryptographically signed provenance and adversarial digital forensics are proposed as remedies for cheaply fabricated histories, and the problem of verifying online identities is framed.

adversarial
boring
computers are awful together
confidentiality
cooperation
cryptography
democracy
economics
ethics
incentive mechanisms
mind
provenance
rhetoric
snarks
wonk

Placeholder.

We should probably have put human knowledge on adversarially cryptographically signed systems before now, but we didn’t. Now that it is cheap to fabricate history, how can we trust anything?

Obvious candidate solutions include:

Figure 1

1 Identity

2 Facts

TBC

3 Digital forensics

Adversarial post hoc verification of information. See Digital forensics.

4 Incoming