Tue, 26 Feb 2008

The Camera May Not Lie, but the Software Does

It's been possible to fake photographs since the advent of the art, but never with this degree of precision. Fake has never looked so good.

The approach being taken by these researchers, that of "tamper-proofing", makes good sense until you consider the consequences in some types of cases: all a kiddie porn criminal would have to do to throw the Canon checksum detection method off would be to modify a few inconspicious pixels, and voila, he'd have an illegal real image that would be detected as a legal fake. And which would probably save him in court from the hard time he deserves.

I'm not sure there are any good answers here: technology has thrown us into a gray area where we can no longer trust our senses, and that's not exactly a good thing at all.

If a photograph seems to good to be true, maybe it is. Photoshopping has made photo manipulation so easy that photojournalism is suffering a credibility crisis.

(link) [Wired: Top Stories]

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