Deep Fakes, Phishing & Epistemological War - how we can help combat these.

In a recent article on Deep Fakes in the Washington Post, 
Assistant Prof. of Global Politics Dr. Brian Klaas, University 
College London, wrote
"You thought 2016 was a mess? You ain't seen nothing yet.” 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/14/deepfakes-are-coming-were-not-ready/

Deep fakes are produced by new technological breakthroughs that allows one to
realistically create live videos of real people, to make them say whatever one
wants them to say with the right tone of voice too. There is no turning back 
this technology, and this will bring us back to a pre-photographic world, 
where trust in the coherence and authorship of a story is all we have to go 
by for believability. 

But we have no good system of trust one the web. X509 certificates are much 
too uninformative to be of interest.  With the deployment of Let’s Encrypt
anyone can get a free certificate. That is actually great, because it solves
the problem that TLS can solve: namely that one has reached the web server
named by the domain. But it cannot tell us anything interesting about where
we landed, what company it is, what jurisdiction they are under, what legal
system it is repsonbible to, and how that is related diplomatically to the 
country to which the web surfer is embedded. We do not know if that entity is 
in legal trouble or not. We know nothing really. Is it surprising that
fake news and scams have completely ovewhelmed us?

The tremendous growth of Phishing is just one aspect of the fake news problem
that has been plaguing us recently. And the only answer is to tie the legal
institutions in an open way into the browsing experience of every day users.

I have detailed how this can be done in my 2nd year Phd report, and have 
also written this up as a couple of blog posts

"Stopping (https) phishing"
https://medium.com/cybersoton/stopping-https-phishing-42226ca9e7d9

In the thesis I have started using Abadi’s logic of "saying that” which is 
both a modal logic and a strong monad from category theory, to work out how
one can formalize the intuitions of the Linked Data community.

One thing this allows us to do is to think logically also of user interfaces, 
and to make actually very coherent and enticing  proposals for how one can make 
this information available in our everyday browsing experience. In
"Phishing in Context - Epistemology of the screen"
https://medium.com/cybersoton/phishing-in-context-9c84ca451314

The semantic web as a knowledge representation language that is decentralised
is exactly the right tool to use here, as it can help us weave nations together
into a web, without requiring impossible global centralisation.

We have all the technology to do this. We just need to bring the right people together,
a task that the W3C excels at.


Henry Story

Received on Tuesday, 4 June 2019 08:37:29 UTC