Real-time Video Disinformation

slaytanic killer writes "Stalin-like realtime filtering of live video has recently been demoed. This article on Tech Review analyzes the myriad uses of this technology, from disappearing Nancy Kerrigans (shadows, ice & all), to dynamic product insertions of Win98 in 'Frasier.' Each frame rendered in less than 1/30th of a second, regardless of motion or changing camera angles."

Comments

Re:I am patiently correcting you and your FUD

[Zan Thrax]

while i really don't care much about your arguement with fluxrad, I gotta say that I find your (implied) belief that the American government wouldn't take away personal liberties if they feel the need. Ever heard of FEMA?

Pax, Romana or Americana, doesn't do anything great for the world. All it means is the dominant world power considering its own people more important than anyone else's, even when its citizens are on someone else's territory...

Like fluxrad said, most people are fairly intelligent, on an individual basis. Many even fail to act as part of the mob when given the opportunity. Most people don't bother thinking for themselves in their day-to-day lives, and just go with the flow because its easier. "People are stupid, panicky animals" -- sheep in particular for the most part. And no, I don't exclude myself. I play nice with society's rules, even though I feel that our society is seriously flawed. So do most people who say how stupid people are...

Re:Let it happens

[1010011010]

Why not TV?

Lots of it on TV already. Watch any Sci-Fi show. But it is not acceptable on the news (not that what's on TV is really "news").

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nothing is real.

[Niac]

Welcome to the wonderful world of being unable to verify the authenticity of anything. You cannot prove that the inserted content is actually false, so how is it any different from /being/ the real content? It's not. :)

Welcome to a brave new world. :P

Re:nothing is real.

[wiZd0m]

"The only reason video evidence has had some credibility is that, until now, they have been hard to falsify."

Your kidding right? 99% of the first world war I imagery you see on TV even today was completely made in studios in New York and London. The reason is simple, it would not sell! To show really tiny silhouettes moving in a field was . People needed drama. See

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/propaganda.html

The greatest WWI forge of all time is that private who get killed as he raises his head to get out of the trench to go charge the germans And you see him fall down dead.

I agree tought that the net is very good at this from Fake nasa pictures http://www.terminator3armageddon.com/conspira/mars fake.html to some Cia-Nazi conspiracy theoriest here http://www.eaglehost.com/omega/omega.txt

At the end, the truth is : WE WERE NOT THERE and therefor we cannot trully take it for granted.

wiZd0m

Re:nothing is real.

[rgmoore]

Sure, and after a while people tend to discover that some sources are especially reliable, and they pay extra attention to them. The fact that people will give that extra attention, and in many cases extra business, to the most reliable sources is a key part of the reason that the press is as trustworthy as it is. In a real sense it's like the way that peer review of Open Source code helps to ensure that nobody deliberately slips in security bugs. The risk of being caught is enough to keep people from even trying. The result is that we know that we know that we can generally trust the facts presented in the Wall Street Journal, that ZDnet is less reliable, and the Weekly World News is completely unreliable.

Of probably greater impact than the use of this kind of technology in the news media is its use in criminal justice. People are very heavily swayed by the perceived reliability of videotaped evidence. The fact that tapes can now be falsified with considerable ease, and that in many cases tapes of relevance in criminal cases will be unique and not subject to this kind of peer review leaves a very big and dangerous place for falsification. Imagine the police taping an interview with a criminal suspect, for instance, and then changing their tape to show the suspect waiving his right to counsel and confessing to the crime. It sounds as though that's perfectly possible, and even comparatively easy, with this technology. That's far scarier than a news program changing the logo on the side of a building.

Re:nothing is real.

[Bob Uhl]

I think that you may perhaps have missed the point of Brave New World. The idea--as I understand it, both from the book itself and from Huxley's subsequent collection of essays--was that everyone in the happy society was living a second-rate life. The nightmare was that it was really and truly inescapable. At least in 1984 one could theoretically hope to break free. But no-one had any incentive to break out of the mediocre horror that was the brave new world.

The relevance to technology issues is that Huxley warned us that if the vast majority are content then anything is justifiable. In other words, if the majority are satisfied that it is fair to prevent us from playing DVDs we own, or that we should not be allowed to reverse engineer (engineering is good, so reverse engineering must be bad, like hacking!), or that we should not own but lease our software, then it will happen. The majority rules, but it ain't necessarily right.

Re:nothing is real.

[guran]

And yet, this is nothing new.

Falsified paper documents, falsified signatures, falsified fotographs... The only reason video evidence has had some credibility is that, until now, they have been hard to falsify.

What maters is that we, as well as the courts, are well informed on what is currently possible to fake.

Re:nothing is real.

[rgmoore]

Of course this is actually the way that things have always been. If you can't directly witness something yourself you are inherently trusting someone else to pass it on to you. You have no real knowledge of, to pick an example, whether there really was a Russian sub lost in the Barents Sea or whether it was an elaborate hoax. You're trusting that the people who bring you news are being honest and not showing you a bunch of crap.

Certainly this has always been the case in print media, hence the saying that you can't believe everything that you read. This invention doesn't really change anything, except that it makes the need for trust in your news deliverer more explicit- and in some well publicized cases so far showing how untrustworthy some of those news deliverers actually are.

Some Potential Uses

[Calamity Jane]

One of the better uses I've seen in the vein of the yellow down line used in American Football to show the down, is in swimming. They add a line that moves at the speed of the current world record- so if a swimmer stays in front of that line, they've broken the record.

It adds a lot of excitement, instead of watching the clock, you see the swimmers fingers just behind, or in front of the record. No confirmation, but I think they'll by using it in Sydney at the Olympics.

Obviously this tech could be be ported to a lot of other sports. A line in the sand for long / triple jump, a moving line for running track races, ghost cars in motor sport, etc. Adding ads is boring; adding value by showing records I think is very interesting- it effectively combines many events / races into one, if we can see the best result everyone's trying to beat.

MTV blurrs all logos on all shows...

[SethJohnson]

This brings up a question that has been pestering me for a couple years now.

It seems that every piece of video shot by or broadcast by MTV has the clothing logos (actually all logos) blurred out. This is especially prevalent in their dumb REAL WORLD tv show and the MAKING THE BAND show they have sold to ABC that plays on friday nights. Every single clothing article they're wearing will have the logos blurred out. When the kids walk into a room with posters on the walls, bang!, everything's blurred. Sometimes it's as if the people's faces are the only thing in focus. They'll even blurr the triple stripe pattern on a kid's addidas sweat pants.

I always thought this was strange considering no other networks do this. I interpreted it as a step MTV had taken in order to try to get money from companies to have their logos featured in the content.

I was talking to my roommate about this as we watched those poor, sodomized, teen boys get modelled into the next 'N Synch. He suggested that perhaps MTV has some clause in their advertising contracts that says no competing products will be featured during the shows (i.e. the dorks on Making the Band won't be shown wearing Addidas baseball caps right after a Nike commercial airs). Since the network has no idea what advertising is going to get picked up, they're just blurring everything that pops in camera.

Perhaps this is unrelated, but does anyone know why Beavis and Butthead were always wearing Metallica and AC/DC shirts on their show, but every piece of merchandizing (keyrings, posters, mugs, etc) had them wearing 'Deathrock' and 'Skullz' shirts? I suspect the merchandizing couldn't feature the logo because of trademark law while the show was considered 'fair use'... You'd think Metallica would be rushing to sign a licensing agreement with MTV in order to promote themselves via such a lucrative medium. Oh, whoops! I forgot. I'm talking about Metallica here. Never mind.

Seth

Re:does this surprise anyone?

[Kris_J]

There are many times when I know that the little "live" written in the corner is accurate; usually because another channel is also live at the scene. I suppose they could be collaborating, but I doubt it.

And this is also how you'll know if something is real or not. Imagine the joy that one station would feel if it caught another doctoring footage and the shit storm that would erupt. Checks, balances, redundancy and indepenant sources keep everyone honest (more or less)

Let it happens

[Fervent]

I say let it happen. It's going to happen anyway. Since the earliest days of TV, man has been trying to alter broadcasts to filter content. Whether it be for entertainment (superimposing a painted picture of western scenary behind some cowboys) or for information (superimposing a weather map on a bluescreen behind some meterologist). Are we supposed to stand there and say "That weather map isn't real! I don't want to be mislead. Show me the wall behind that guy."

There have also been struggles between corporations for brand marketing. Since networks started embedding watermarks on their screens, rival networks have tried everything to remove them (from whiting them out to blowing the screen up a few inches). Even early TV networks would sometimes try to hide huge corporate logos of other networks (CBS's attempt to hide the NBC logo on one of the video cameras in Vietnam footage is a good example).

I say let it go. We've already accepted computer generated foolary in movies and in video games. Why not TV?

Baseball

[linuxonceleron]

This type of technology is being used for many obvious purposes and not just subtle uses for product placement. Watch a baseball match today on television and the mat behind the batter will be overlaid with video advertisements which change every few minutes and sometimes animate, or show the speed of the ball thrown. In the real stadium all you see is a blank mat. One thing I've also noticed is the not so obvious removal of Sony logos on TVs and logos on shirts, giving the attitude from the producers that "If you don't pay for your logo to be on TV, we'll take it off" even for simple things like a television or a shirt.

So that's how they did it!

[Elvis Maximus]

This explains all those African-Americans at the Republican convention!

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I think you're on to something here

[A nonymous Coward]

Right now I imagine it takes a fair amount of cpu power to do this, so only networks can afford it. However, in 5 years or so, it will probably be within reach of ordinary folk -- like you!

I imagine junkbuster will be much different then, zapping out product placement ads, replacing bilboards with your email summaries, and so on. I haven't thought about this much yet.

I will guess that this instant artificial product placement, like the network show mentioned, will be common place within a year or two, and annoy the heck out of consumers. However, it may reduce the number of distinct commercials as product placement becomes more common and as Tivo and Replay make it easier to ignore separate commericals. In 5 years, it will be the ordinary way to do things. Then -- Gnoview! It will start out primitive and for geeks, get better, then proprietary programs will jump in, and it will be a war between the new junkbuster trying to find ads to zap, and the producers trying to get ever more tricky with placement to make the ads harder for a program to spot.

This sounds like a lot of fun!

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Re:does this surprise anyone?

[C.Thomas]

And this is also how you'll know if something is real or not. Imagine the joy that one station would feel if it caught another doctoring footage and the shit storm that would erupt. Checks, balances, redundancy and indepenant sources keep everyone honest (more or less)

Yes, they *would* keep everyone honest, if it were not for the fact that the media have common goals, all being megacorporations. The filtration of what you see on television has been going on for a *very* long time. The danger of being misinformed by the news lies more in what is not reported than in what is outright falsified - for example, the fact that 5000 children are dying every month in Iraq from the sanctions on food and medicine. For example, that the US and Britain have been bombing Iraq almost every day for the last year. Thought the war was over? It hasn't been in the news recently, has it? Since it is not in the media's interest for you to know this, it's Not News(tm).

Likewise, it's Not News(tm) that peaceful demonstrators are getting beat, shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed and pepper sprayed by police merely for excercising their right to peaceful assembly outside of the democratic and republican national conventions. If these events are documented at all, the people being beaten are branded as "anarchists" or "rioters".

Television is controlled by the megacorps, and if you watch it, your world view is being shaped by what they want you to know. So, do yourself a favor: Kill Your TV and load up www.pacifica.org to find out what is really happening.

As for this technology, it merely adds one more weapon to the arsenal of the megacorps, which can and will be used against YOU if you watch television.

Dog bites man

[A nonymous Coward]

Remember that Canadian outfit that netcast tv shows and got sued to death? Remember those framing lawsuits, claiming that putting someone else's content inside a frame with your own ads in other frames was copyright infringment?

How long before a stadium advertiser sues the network for eliminating their ad? After all, the big audience for that stadium ad is not the in-person crowd, but the tv audience. Suddenly they are paying rates for millions of eyeballs and getting just thousands.

I smell lawyer fodder!

--

Use your powers for good, not evil.

[KFury]

All kidding aside (just for this post), just think of how handy this would be if it were in the hands of people other than censors and advertisers.

I would love if information specific to me was able to be incorporated into my everyday sensorium. I'd really like it if, for example:

• Instead of seeing a wendy's ad behind home plate, I saw an infographic of how many messages were in my inbox
  
• When someone opens their fridge on tv, I see what's in my fridge (ooh, I need more jolt!)
  
• When watching Tiger drive a ball down the fairway, I see text messages from friends trimmed into the green instead of the Nike Swoosh
  
• My portfolio scrolls at the bottom of the screen instead of whatever random stocks CNNfn highlights

Of course, this is just the beginning. Soon, commercials and then sitcoms would be prepared in VXML (video-extensible-markup-language) so that you could choose whatever theme you want and personalize the show to you.
For example:

• UPN Tuesday Theme: All black, all the time
  
• UPN Wednesday Theme: All sci-fi, all the time
  
• Simpson Animation Theme (animated La Femme Nikita with Lisa's spiky hair?)
  
• NBC YuppieVision

You get the picture...

but of course we won't see this, because the dollars are driven by the ads.

Kevin Fox

People really do believe what they see...

[kabir]

Have you ever been overheard a conversation between a couple of your coworkers/family/etc. full of concern, speculation, and drama, only to find out that they were talking about soap opera characters rather than real people? As many people, including Pat Cadigan, I believe, have noted this seems to be a fine indicator of the level of "reality" that people ascribe to television. It's not just video either, but television. Odds are if you show it on the news there are a whole lot of people who will believe it. I'm not quite sure when we ended up in a culture that's quite so trusting of media (heck, maybe it's just human nature), but it's quite disturbing.

"Live" TV was one of the last forms of broadcast that I felt had any integrity, but now that's going the way of the evening news. Where, exactly, does that leave me for finding out what's _actually_ going on in the world?
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It all comes down to reputation

[Mr. Slippery]

When you can't verify the data itself, you've only got the reputation of the source to go on.

Soon it may not be the video itself, but the digital signature on it, that carries veracity and inspires trust. Maybe tamper-proof (or at least tamper-evident) digital video cameras will each have a unique private key and will sign the video with the reputation of the manufacturer; maybe the operator will provide his key to the camera and sign the data himself.

Digital signatures don't guarantee truth; but they stake the reputation of the signer (whether named or psudononymous) on the contents. In a data-driver world, your reputation as a source of good bits becomes vital. (Look at how excited peoplke get about /. karma, only a pale and distorted reflection of reputation.)

Remeber, Winston

[Greyfox]

He who controls the past, controls the future! And now we even control the present.