Schneier on Security's Journal
 
[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]

Friday, October 26th, 2018

    Time Event
    2:50p
    Detecting Fake Videos

    This story nicely illustrates the arms race between technologies to create fake videos and technologies to detect fake videos:

    These fakes, while convincing if you watch a few seconds on a phone screen, aren't perfect (yet). They contain tells, like creepily ever-open eyes, from flaws in their creation process. In looking into DeepFake's guts, Lyu realized that the images that the program learned from didn't include many with closed eyes (after all, you wouldn't keep a selfie where you were blinking, would you?). "This becomes a bias," he says. The neural network doesn't get blinking. Programs also might miss other "physiological signals intrinsic to human beings," says Lyu's paper on the phenomenon, such as breathing at a normal rate, or having a pulse. (Autonomic signs of constant existential distress are not listed.) While this research focused specifically on videos created with this particular software, it is a truth universally acknowledged that even a large set of snapshots might not adequately capture the physical human experience, and so any software trained on those images may be found lacking.

    Lyu's blinking revelation revealed a lot of fakes. But a few weeks after his team put a draft of their paper online, they got anonymous emails with links to deeply faked YouTube videos whose stars opened and closed their eyes more normally. The fake content creators had evolved.

    I don't know who will win this arms race, if there ever will be a winner. But the problem with fake videos goes deeper: they affect people even if they are later told that they are fake, and there always will be people that will believe they are real, despite any evidence to the contrary.

    10:02p
    Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Falsely Labeled as Octopus

    Two New Yorkers have been charged with importing squid from Peru and then reselling it as octopus.

    Yet another problem that a blockchain-enabled supply-chain system won't solve.

    As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.

    Read my blog posting guidelines here.

    << Previous Day 2018/10/26
    [Calendar]
    Next Day >>

Schneier on Security   About LJ.Rossia.org