<story><title>Putin on the Ritz</title><url>http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/595-Putin-on-the-Ritz.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>The main angle of the post (dressing exactly the same all the time) is a very interesting one, but the end points are somewhat scary.&lt;p&gt;Think of it: if it&amp;#x27;s so easy to fake color photos so that people won&amp;#x27;t notice, isn&amp;#x27;t it easier to fake black&amp;amp;white photos? How do you know this is real: &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Yalta_Conference_%28Churchill%2C_Roosevelt%2C_Stalin%29_%28B%26W%29.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wikipedia&amp;#x2F;commons&amp;#x2F;0&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;Yalta_Con...&lt;/a&gt;? I don&amp;#x27;t. If we routinely don&amp;#x27;t trust colour pictures in newspapers, why should we trust historic photographs?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve reached a point in time when we can start actually faking history. The only way to check if something happened now would be to find original copies of old photographs and books. But it&amp;#x27;s only matter of time before they&amp;#x27;ll be gone forever, or stuck deep in museum vaults, to be accessed by selected few. We could rewrite the history for next generation and no one would likely notice it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>&amp;gt; We&amp;#x27;ve reached a point in time when we can start actually faking history.&lt;p&gt;It has always been possible to fake history, inadvertently or intentionally. There was a narrow stretch of time when photography became widespread which made it a bit harder to fake history, but photographs were being faked and staged long before we had computers to do digital editing of them. And before we had photographs, it was possible to fake manuscripts, etc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Putin on the Ritz</title><url>http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/595-Putin-on-the-Ritz.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>The main angle of the post (dressing exactly the same all the time) is a very interesting one, but the end points are somewhat scary.&lt;p&gt;Think of it: if it&amp;#x27;s so easy to fake color photos so that people won&amp;#x27;t notice, isn&amp;#x27;t it easier to fake black&amp;amp;white photos? How do you know this is real: &lt;a href=&quot;http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Yalta_Conference_%28Churchill%2C_Roosevelt%2C_Stalin%29_%28B%26W%29.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wikipedia&amp;#x2F;commons&amp;#x2F;0&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;Yalta_Con...&lt;/a&gt;? I don&amp;#x27;t. If we routinely don&amp;#x27;t trust colour pictures in newspapers, why should we trust historic photographs?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve reached a point in time when we can start actually faking history. The only way to check if something happened now would be to find original copies of old photographs and books. But it&amp;#x27;s only matter of time before they&amp;#x27;ll be gone forever, or stuck deep in museum vaults, to be accessed by selected few. We could rewrite the history for next generation and no one would likely notice it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yoha</author><text>&amp;gt; isn&amp;#x27;t it easier to fake black&amp;amp;white photos&lt;p&gt;Stalin did use black and white photo montages. Check out the Wikipedia article [1].&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The only way to check if something happened now would be to find original copies&lt;p&gt;For now. Consider fine-grained 3D printing in the future.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We could rewrite the history for next generation and no one would likely notice it.&lt;p&gt;It is actually a fairly practical problem in medium-term future. The only plausible solution seems to have resilient duplicated information on trusted peers. But with time, even trust rusts.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_manipulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Photo_manipulation&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>