• 41 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2023

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  • Is there some Linux equivalent to “ctrl + alt + del?” I get that killing a process from the terminal is preferred, but one of the few things I like about windows is if the GUI freezes up, I can pretty much always kill the process by pressing ctrl+alt+del and finding it in task manager. Using Linux if I don’t already have the terminal open there are plenty of times I’m just force restarting the computer because I don’t know what else to do.


  • I didn’t come up with the advice, just relating what I’ve read a few times. So maybe that’s not representative of the current advice.

    That said, moving downhill isn’t really random. Gravity is a universal rule, and water moves downhill. Humans for our entire existence have needed water for survival, and eventually for agriculture. So we tend to gather around it.

    I’ve also read if you’re lost advice to stay where you are, but that’s in a scenario where you expect people to know where you are and to come looking for you. Probably a tough call to make in this case, plus the guy had his dog with him.

    Specifics of this situation aside, I don’t think 20 miles is that hard of a push. I’d expect to be able to do that in a day or two.






  • You’re right, cameras can be tricked. As Descartes pointed out there’s very little we can truly be sure of, besides that we ourselves exist. And I think deepfakes are going to be a pretty challenging development in being confident about lots of things.

    I could imagine something like photographers with a news agency using cameras that generate cryptographically signed photos, to ward off claims that newsworthy events are fake. It would place a higher burden on naysayers, and it would also become a story in itself if it could be shown that a signed photo had been faked. It would become a cause for further investigation, it would threaten a news agency’s reputation.

    Going further I think one way we might trust people we aren’t personally standing in front of would be a cryptographic circle of trust. I “sign” that I know and trust my close circle of friends and they all do the same. When someone posts something online, I could see “oh, this person is a second degree connection, that seems fairly likely to be true” vs “this is a really crazy story if true, but I have no second or third or fourth degree connections with them, needs further investigation.”

    I’m not saying any of this will happen, just it’s potentially a way to deal with uncertainty from AI content.


  • Well as I said, I think there’s a collection of things we already use for judging what’s true, this would just be one more tool.

    A cryptographic signature (in the original sense, not just the Bitcoin sense) means that only someone who possesses a certain digital key is able to sign something. In the case of a digitally signed photo, it verifies “hey I, key holder, am signing this file”. And if the file is edited, the signed document won’t match the tampered version.

    Is it possible someone could hack and steal such a key? Yes. We see this with certificates for websites, where some bad actor is able to impersonate a trusted website. (And of course when NFT holders get their apes stolen)

    But if something like that happened it’s a cause for investigation, and it leaves a trail which authorities could look into. Not perfect, but right now there’s not even a starting point for “did this image come from somewhere real?”


  • In this case, digitally signing an image verifies that the image was generated by a specific camera (not just any camera of that brand) and that the image generated by that camera looks such and such a way. If anyone further edits the image the hash won’t match the one from the signature, so it will be apparent it was tampered with.

    What it can’t do is tell you if someone pasted a printout of some false image over the lens, or in some other sophisticated way presented a doctored scene to the camera. But there’s nothing preventing us from doing that today.

    The question was about deepfakes right? So this is one tool to address that, but certainly not the only one the legal system would want to use.