deep-fake-protection.md

[jamescbury]

Came across this project idea today on a reference from the EAS team. Didn't realize how well aligned our objectives were! Thought it would make sense to claim the project - you can read about our approach here:
Zeroth.Technology: Blinky Light Thing. We have the repo closed for the moment while we clean up some of our messiness :). Will open again soon!

[jamescbury]

Just wanted to add a few more thoughts here to get the discussion going. The project description talked about using attestations for creators to verify the authenticity of their works by attesting that they came from their accounts. It discusses the "works" being live-streams, videos (assuming that means pre-recorded), images, and clips (assuming that means a clip of a pre-recorded video). We would also include audio into that mix, just to round it out.

In studying this issue more closely we feel it's necessary to split Live-Stream video/audio out from the rest. Anything that has happened in the past (video, images, clips of video, audio recordings, etc) has a state that can be locked - I.e., if it's digital we can hash it and include the hash in the attestation. I wouldn't call it trivial, but it's not that hard with all the great tools EAS has built out.

Live-stream is different. Here we care that both the content is authentic (I.e., the presenter is whom they claim to be), and contemporaneous (I.e. it is happening now (live)). It is for this that we built the blinky light thing.

We also built blinky light thing because "wearing" somebody in a video call just seems wrong...

[jamescbury]

Wanted to add a quick update here. After much user feedback and some fun demos at Devcon we have made a slight pivot from the original Blinky Light Thing. Apparently having an LED blinking in your face for extended periods of time is a bit of a migraine magnet... So we took the original concept and added an ePaper screen with a QR code. This lets us pass the UID much quicker and more reliably. However - the blinking LED was a key feature for detecting if someone had a filter applied. So we now only need to blink out the first four characters of the UID which makes the whole process much faster and less of a headache (literally). Of course new hardware means more testing and hence a delay, but we are cracking away on it.

We do plan to finish cleaning up the BLT repo (it was a fun project) and release that version for folks to play around with. The new version, we named it Vero, will follow suit shortly. Despite some of the advice we've been given, the project team feels strongly that this tech should be free to build and free to use for those inclined to do some tinkering. So we are planning to release an instructables DIY version for the hardware (we are also looking into just running it on a slightly modded M5 Stack.