this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
992 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
76089 readers
3471 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And the people that are going to check for a digital signature in the first place, THEN check that the signature emanates from a trusted key, then, eventually, check who's deciding the list of trusted keys… those people, where are they?
Because the lack of trust, validation, verification, and more generally the lack of any credibility hasn't stopped anything from spreading like a dumpster fire in a field full of dumpsters doused in gasoline. Part of my job is providing digital signature tools and creating "trusted" data (I'm not in sales, obviously), and the main issue is that nobody checks anything, even when faced with liability, even when they actually pay for an off the shelve solution to do so. And I'm talking about people that should care, not even the general public.
There are a lot of steps before "digitally signing everything" even get on people's radar. For now, a green checkmark anywhere is enough to convince anyone, sadly.
It could be a feature of web browsers. Images would get some icon indicating the valid signature, just like browsers already show the padlock icon indicating a valid certificate. So everybody would be seeing the verification.
But I don't think it's a good idea, for other reasons.
An individual wouldn't verify this but enough independent agencies or news orgs would probably care enough to verify a photo. For the vast majority we're already too far gone to properly separate fiction an reality. If we can't get into a courtroom and prove that a picture or video is fact or fiction then we're REALLY fucked.
I think there's enough people who care about this that you can just provide the data and wait for someone to do the rest.
I'd like to think like that too, but it's actually experience with large business users that led me to say otherwise.