Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked?
BStorm writes "The Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been making headlines around the world, for allegedly smoking crack. This story was first broken by gawker.com, which is now crowd-funding $200,000 to buy the video in question. What do you look for to determine if a video has been faked? Of course I am only interested in the technical details and not the tawdry details related to this case ;) I live in Toronto, so the video still frame posted on Gawker certainly does look like Rob Ford."
If you want to edit or create videos, there's no better software than Windows Movie Maker. Create real or faked videos - it's all possible.
I usually look at the pixels. I've seen a lot of them in my time, so I can usually tell when they're fake.
Rob Ford hasn't been that thin in 20 years...
I'm no fan of Rob Ford, but I think smoking crack is extremely out-of-character for him. If it were a video of drunken bumblingness, groping, unwarranted sexual harassment, or just general belligerence, it would be more in character.
Even if it were cocaine, as opposed to crack, it would be a bit more plausible.
I personally don't believe it is real, but kudos to the epic trolls who started the rumour, who likely suspected that no media outlet would pay their price.
http://www.geek.com/news/why-it-was-impossible-to-fake-the-1969-moon-landing-1537386/
It's fairly similar reasons why the Ford Video is real, and explains why His Immensity hasn't had anything to say since the story broke.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The people purported to have this video want a rather princely sum. Originally to the tune of $1M, now dropping it to "six figures" which I'll post at around $100,000. Give me a $25,000 budget and I'll find a Rob Ford look-a-like, hire some wicked makeup artists, and grab some local extras who need some coin and give you a video of Toronto's Mayor doing anything you ask. That being said, I hope with every fiber of my being that it's true, and this unempathic embarrassment of a human being gets humiliated and run out of town. Yes, I live in Toronto. Heh.
I don't know if it's real or not, but I'm just going to imagine Marion Barry being arrested for crack possession and will laugh to myself for a few minutes.
Most of the time when a picture or video has been faked or photoshopped, you can probably tell if you look at it carefully. Their usually isn't something quite right, about it, that most people will miss.
For example odd lighting. If you superimpose an image chances are you do not have the lighting just right.
Picture Fragments. Sometimes if you look at photoshopped pics (Even professional ones) you might find extra or removed limbs or fingers. Or some impossible feat of a part of the body that somehow is in front of something that couldn't possible be.
Extra Sharp or Blurry: Sometimes thing of interest that is added in later is taken with better skills than the background so you will see a blurry picture with a sharp object. Or they will cover up the whole picture by making everything blurry. If the image seems like it was taken from an iPhone but it was super blurry more than what the device does you can probably expect it has been altered somehow.
Dithering/Anti-Alias methods: Most digital cameras on full resolution tend to have some dithering to the colors (Those sparkly bits that don't seem to exist in real life) Then some equipment scales it down a bit and adds some Anti-Aliasing to make the colors more smooth and natural looking. If you add a fake element chances are those methods will be different. Say a smooth well anti-aliased pipe, with a dithered person.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is it possible to fake a video well enough that 3 reporters (2 from the star, 1 from gawker), shown the video on a smartphone, would come to the conclusion that the video was real.
And I think we can assume that no intelligence agency or other other well financed organization was involved.
The press generally seems to be accepting that the video was legit, but that could be because of the way the Ford brothers' have responded.
You know, if the major news outlets that could afford to shell out for the video aren't touching it with a ten foot pole, maybe you should take that as a sign that it's not worth the money.
what about the video toaster?
With jpeg(and I think at least some of the mpeg flavors), quantization matrices can be your friend.
Different hardware and software uses different matrices. This isn't a slam-dunk(if somebody just lightened the image a bit to bring out the detail, the quantization matrix would scream "Photoshop!", despite that being pretty innocuous); but it makes it rather harder for a clueless faker to simulate a 'right off the camcorder' "authentic" video if the last compression was almost certainly performed with editing software.
Depending on the details of the format, there are likely to be a variety of other things that are optional or implementation-specific(at least within certain ranges) that can be examined to try to source a given file. If implementation(or quality level/encode settings)-specific details vary between sections of the video, or between parts of individual frames, that's probably a bad sign.
If you have enough footage, and ideally access to the alleged source hardware, you can also attempt to characterize physical defects in the sensor. All digital image sensors, to one degree or another, exhibit imperfect linearity. Some pixels are 'hot', some are abnormally insensitive, this is especially visible on long exposures, or in very dark scenes, where the hot pixels tend to stand out. Onboard image processors have gotten increasingly good at squelching minor sensor noise, so this isn't easy; but a given CCD or CMOS sensor will have a noise pattern that is extremely difficult to replicate. It's just an open question whether you'll actually be able to see enough noise to identify it.
Q: Has the person appearing on it sued the pants off the holders?
Yes: Probably fake
No: Most likely genuine
Why should we give $200,000 to drug dealers?
They are the ones setting up the mayor and the ones selling the video. Regardless of the authenticity if the government enticed you into breaking the law and filmed it, it's called entrapment which is inadmissible as evidence. However if some enterprising drug dealers entice you into breaking the law and film it somehow it's okay.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
At least one police force continuously record the main hum, which they claim both provides a unique signature and also enable to tell if the recording has been modified. Not sure if it would work for a battery-powered camcorder, tho'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20629671
If you see objects that are hanging from transparent strings of fishing line...
You enhance the video and zoom in on the reflections in the pupils of someone's eye, you know, like on CSI. Duh!
Proverbs 21:19
Remember that recent Tron reboot? They put a young Jeff Bridges in it. That was a major special effects studio, working with a huge budget, and it still looked pretty fake. Finding a fat guy that looks a heck of a lot like Ford would be more feasible.
How the head of Rob Ford is attached to the body has been a mystery for some time.
His point is that crack smoking doesn't automatically make one lose weight. Nice rebuttal.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What Mayor Ford doesn't want to admit is that the video is real, but it was taken while he was in the middle of secret negotiations with rival Toronto and Scarborough gangs. Ford was trying to broker a peace treaty and also recruit the gang members to work as the city's new sanitation engineering team, allowing him to cut the fat at city hall and pass on the savings to the taxpayers he respects.
Due to the tense nature of the meetings and the highly strung personalities present, Ford was loathe to bring something so provocative and weapon-shaped as his asthma inhaler, so he had no choice but to settle for a large glass pipe filled with prescription corticosteroids.
To minimize the possibility of rival gangs finding out about the meetings, all discussions were conducted in code. When he said "Justin Trudeau’s a fag", what he really meant was "I agree with your interpretation of paragraph seventeen, but I still feel that it contradicts the spirit of section seven which is also laid out in the preamble" and "those kids are just effing minorities" was a code phrase for "We cannot compromise on the issue of banked sick days, and have you ever been to the Russian Tearoom on Adelaide? Their curried chicken salad is to die for."
It's all quite obvious when you look at it. It's just the vast left wing media conspiracy that is trying to blow it out of proportion and make it look like something inappropriate.
A mayor is not a random anonymous schmuck so he presumably has opponents, rivals, or even enemies.
Would one of these stand to gain from a fake movie? Is it worthwhile to them? Such cold analysis is a reasonable approach, I think.
Okay, that narrows it down to "Everybody who lives in downtown Toronto". Clearly you're on to something.
Gawker is spending $200,000 to get a rise out of embarrassing a politician. It would be far to use it for something such as donating to the EFF, fighting the next SOPA or some other similar cause. Donating personal money for this cause is something only a tool would do.
Measure its mass before and after? I'm no nuclear , but that seems to me it'd ought to do it.
s/How/Why/
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not Rob Ford but his older brothers, Doug and Randy. I have lived in the USA for a long time now and am admittedly out of touch with the Toronto scene until this story made the wires. A few observations...
1) All three of them were troublemakers at school...numerous assault charges, alcohol and drug related nonsense, etc. If it weren't for their rich old man I suspect that all of them would be in jail now. After Daddy paid to have him attend special football camps he somehow got admitted to Carleton University where he didn't start a single game and dropped out after the first year, never to graduate. Nothing like having some stellar academic credentials to prepare yourself for public service.
2) How does this guy get elected mayor? This is far from his first brush with the law, as outlined here --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ford
Fired from his high school football coach job (twice now as it turns out), several controversial public intoxication episodes, homophobic and racist remarks on several occasions...yeah, real model citizen there folks.
3) He has had a long running feud with the Toronto Star (a liberal newspaper). Ford is clearly a staunch conservative - not saying there is anything wrong with being a conservative, just pointing out the contrast in beliefs.
I have no idea whether or not he was the one in the video smoking crack. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he was set up, given point #3 above. Having said that, there are plenty of other incidents that appear to make him unfit to hold the mayor's job.
You have to talk with the people in the video to get information to confirm its validity. There is probably ways to Doctoring a video to look like an event, but the easiest way is to get actors and look-a-likes to pull it off.
faking a video is a lot of work, even with Adobe Premiere, Photoshop and other tools.
I know I've done a lot of work towards "fixing" images in my time, removing red-eye, whitening teeth, removing blemishes, heck, restoring missing parts of images or removing people from images, I mean, this is the staple of Photoshop work.
So, to me, the obvious way to know if a video is fake is by zooming in on the footage and look for pixel disparity, because someone trying to alter a photo or an image never truly gets the smoothing and the blur done right when they try to 'heal' the alteration.
More to the point, superimposing images or alterations means sometimes that the light source will be a bit different.
After all, that's pretty much how one can tell when a picture is altered. Although down the road, a few years from now, it will get even harder to determine "real" from fake, for now, that should work.
So, say this is a fake video, why? how? what are the reasons and motivations? How much would one pay to fake a video with the purpose of damaging Ford's reputation?
To me, this brings another issue. How will we be able in the future to distinguish between "fake" media and "real" media. As media is being used in legal battles, eventually there will have to be a requirement to determine an 'authentic' footage, which means we will need some form of protocol, file format and/or tools which can create media which can be proven as 100% original and unaltered in any way.
You submit it to Mythbusters.
/* No Comment */
" I think smoking crack is extremely out-of-character for him"
—bwahahahhahah
"video of drunken bumblingness, ..., or just general belligerence"
—it has that *as well*, including slurs against Justin Trudeau, gays, and the kids he spends his afternoons coaching instead of working.
"kudos to the epic trolls who started the rumour"
—The video is not a "rumour". It's out there and has been seen by journalists who didn't have the $200K on them at the time.
you had me at #!
A mayor is not a random anonymous schmuck so he presumably has opponents, rivals, or even enemies.
Would one of these stand to gain from a fake movie? Is it worthwhile to them? Such cold analysis is a reasonable approach, I think.
100 000k + from some internet dudes buys crack for a while. the worth is there fake or not. so what would one gain from it? well, potentially 100k+.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well, here's the video. Judge for yourself. Send it to the Batcave and let the crime computer analyze it if you want.
I don't see any indication that any part of that video has been faked at all.
Is that you, Doug?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
especially if it's attached to an email that's been forwarded with complete headers several times.
Does the video include footage of a female having an orgasm?
It's that you can tell if a video is fake if a 13 year old says "FAKE!!111!" in the comments section.
Therefore I implore the owners prove the veracity of their video by posting it to YouTube.
I was trying to enhance images taken from a cheap pan/tilt camera by taking hundreds of stills and using imagemagik to average them together. Works really well. If you don't average them, but take the darkest pixel from your stack of 100 frames, or take the lightest pixel from your stack you see an interesting pattern of the extremes of noise. It was an 8px by 16px repeating pattern of noisiest pixels. Now this worked because the camera was still, I had a stack of near identical frames so the noise was easy to isolate, however it would be pretty much impossible to graft in another image without disrupting the sensor noise.
crowd-funding $200,000 to buy the video in question
Founded in 2003, Gawker is the flagship blog for Nick Denton's Gawker Media.
http://247wallst.com/2009/11/10/the-twenty-five-most-valuable-blogs-in-america/
1. Gawker Properties, $300 million. This group of blogs which includes Gawker, Deadspin, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker has about 23 million monthly unique visitors and 250 million page views. Owner Nick Denton has pointed out the business is highly profitable and growing and that advertising revenue has performed better than expected. Almost all the advertising at the family of websites is premium marketing from major companies. The average CPM on a page is estimated to be $20. That would drive $60 million in annual revenue. Gawker is not expensive to run. Its writers are paid relatively low wages. Many of the blogs Gawker owns have only five or ten writers and editors. Gawker keeps at least 50% of its revenue as operating income. The valuation is based on 10x operating income.
And they're asking for people to pay for their scoop, so they could make more money from the ads?
What's next? CNN asking viewers to do their journalism for them? Oh... wait...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If the video shows men shouting allah akbar but nobody is doing anything fucking repulsive, depraved, pointless or idiotic then it's a fake.
I don't know why anyone cares about the video. In fact, it's clear people don't care about the video, they just care about how Ford is (or is not) reacting to it.
But there's no value in forming an opinion, informed or otherwise, as to the authenticity of the video. If there's one thing there can be absolutely no doubt about, it's that Ford doesn't care what any one else thinks.
The summary is wrong in suggesting that the "still frame" showing Rob Ford hanging out with (alleged) drug dealers is from the video. It is in fact a photo given to Gawker to lend credence to their claim that the video is real, but from all accounts it was taken at a different time.
More generally: many people think this is a hilarious story, but as a Canadian I'm sick of it. This isn't the first time Rob Ford has done something to insult the people of Toronto and bring shame to the municipal government, it's just the most heinous thing he's done. It's been a week since we learned about the video, a week! A week and he still hasn't confirmed or denied it. That's pathetic. It's bringing attention to Toronto that the city doesn't need or want. Hockey riots in Vancouver, organized crime and corruption rampant in Montreal, and a crackhead mayor in Toronto? So much for Canada's reputation. The whole situation makes me angry.
Well this is how I see it. 1) Single frames easy to fake. No brainer. 2) Movies harder to fake, but still take a bit of time and you can probably make something look believable. 3) But require someone to create a fake video in less than 3 seconds, when they only find out what the video needs to show at the start of the recording. Thats sounds pretty damn hard to me! This is what http://gestya.me/ claim to do - so does anyone think they could get around this?
Let's lay it out:
a) The man is being attacked on pure speculation with the purported proof coming at cost from a drug dealer; and
b) The man is being attacked because he isn't vociferously denying the allegations which we all know he could do until he was blue in the face and the media would just say he's lying.
To which one can only say ... SERIOUSLY?!!
No, what has happened here is an unattractive, overweight, outspoken man is being bullied (writ large) just like the fat kid in the school yard. End of story.
A prediction: since the mayor is normally outspoken, his silence is very odd and should be taken as a warning by the paper. The silence means he goes in to the coming lawsuit against the newspaper with no record of having abused his position as mayor to slander the newspaper. Let's hope he sues them in to bankruptcy.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
In theory, since a movie is just a series of still frames, the same techniques could be used to modify individual frames as are used to "photoshop" a still image, (albeit, tediously). You might find the tools and tutorials at this site of some help in analyzing individual frames: http://fotoforensics.com/
You might also find some of the information at the associated Hacker Factor blog of use: http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/categories/17-FotoForensics
In CNN's case, that was raising the standards, at least where things like accuracy are concerned.
I'm not sure THAT was the outcome.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The could be right, except he fired his chief of staff two days ago for repeatedly telling him he needs to check in to rehab. You'd think Rob Ford's closest ally (not including his brother) would know what he's talking about.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Maybe Flamebait / Troll is accurate.. but it's still funny.