The Internet is Broken: Fake News

I read an email today that really disturbed me.

Enough for me to stop and write this article, and it relates to the most pressing need in the world that I find myself drawn to which is fixing the internet.

The email I read explained that our AI and video technology has got so good that we’re able to generate fake videos swapping one person’s face over another’s face, in realtime, using standard hardware tools and standard footage from Youtube, that’s indecipherable from the real thing. Here’s an example below from Stanford:

Stanford University Study

This is what is called a ‘deepfake’ and the US Department of Defense is so concerned by it that they think it’ll be the beginning of an AI-powered arms race.

What surprised me was that the technology is so far ahead of what I thought was possible.

What didn’t surprise me was that people are looking to use this technology to harm other people.

What worries me is that it’s too easy for people to get access to this technology. The consequences of our connectedness is very high now with all our critical infrastructure and weapons being connected. What would happen if the person with the control codes was duped by a fake video?

However what disturbs me (and angers me) most is that ‘fake news’ is a problem that is completely solvable, which makes this an entirely unnecessary problem to have to be dealing with today.

The solution is here today. And it’s name is the Elastos Smartweb.

Technology has allowed us to scale and reach more people than we ever have before. However the one thing technology has not improved on is screening for quality and when you can’t discern between what is real and what is fake, noise is the only result, and trust between different people suffers because of it.

The path of least resistance to solve this problem for us over the ages is to have a ‘trusted’ third party screen and manage this information for us. The problem is is that people are fragile, and corruptible by greed or extortion, and people are who run these ‘trusted’ third parties.

In the early days we received our news from a limited number of news media outlets (NewsCorp, TimeWarner, NBC etc ) who we trusted would report the news accurately for us to stay informed. There were two problems with this system:

1. the news has no business model. These news outlets were funded by advertising and classified ads regardless of whether they were papers, TV or radio. These rivers of gold ran dry by internet advertising (Google, Facebook) and specialist classified websites (seek.com.au, carsales.com.au, ebay.com etc) who undercut them out of a business.
2. because of the limited number of these outlets the majority of them saw their role to push agendas and influence others or simply pander to the masses for entertainment. The tsars of media couldn’t help but indulge their egos to grow their influence in society.

More recently we consume our news from social media businesses (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube) where we spend a vast majority of our time on. However the problems identified above still haven’t changed…but they have become more efficient and magnified.

What’s new is that because the news is now pretty much entirely run on the internet, the problems of the internet are weaving into this picture.

We can’t trust these social media businesses any more than we could the previous news outlets. The proof is in the news you can read today. They will continue to sell you out for profit.

Facebook has asked for your medical information from hospitals and your financial data from banks in exchange for your user data in order to redress their flagging growth numbers. Youtube can and will shutdown your account overnight with no trace of your work ever existing and they take most of the money in the entire value chain.

These organisations are behaving and acting more and more like cartels on the internet. Owning your data, showing you what they want you to see and pretending that they are your friend. All whilst they make money of you. Kind of like the mafia would do in your town, they protect you from noise, moderate what you see, provide some security from hackers on the internet, but they monitor everything you do, and you pay protection money by assigning all your data to them in exchange of using their service for free.

News is uneconomical.

We all know we need it and we all consume it every day but no one is willing to pay for it when it’s so easy to ‘free ride’ off it on the internet. This is a classic case of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which also effect things like public roads and bridges etc however these utilities get funded by government taxes.

News as a ‘service’ is effectively a public good without an effective mechanism to extract payment as a commercial operation (rather than government operation which we all know is also not a viable option) without disproportionate transaction costs.

What has happened since is a continual deterioration of the quality of service. Fewer journalists, less fact checking, ‘hard’ news (which is often the most valuable news) is ignored, more junk and more paid content is filled in to monetise a system that’s broken. More and more reliance is placed on advertising as a business model and news has effectively become prostituted, begging for funding in exchange for exposure.

Our society is poorer for it and we see the effects of it every day:

• Advertising is forced down our throats relentlessly on every platform we use today, and advertising is built to made us feel inadequate in order to consume more and more
• We are splintered into different interest groups because information in manipulated, censored and moderated to only show what will upset or entertain us without any regard for what is actually true because it keeps us on their platforms
• Bots are created, fake real people, conduct fraud, spread mis-information and shut down systems
• The issues above effect our ability to run elections without interference from special interests which weakens our democracy — when we lack trust, we become more disengaged and hostile

Fake news costs us so much.

But we can’t fix all the problems with news and the problems with the internet with the existing broken systems. Technology is improving all the time and the speed is too fast for humans to control it at scale — Facebook with all their resources can’t control it, nor do they have any incentive to do it.

We need to upgrade to a better system.

That better system is the Elastos Smartweb.

To solve fake news, we need a system that solves for most, if not all of the problems below:

Vulnerabilities with humans:

• Humans are social creatures and have so many biases — from what we see first, confirmation bias etc.
• Humans are corruptible with greed and extortion
• Humans are vulnerable to manipulation and persuasion
• Humans are not consistent in their behaviour, very poor at consistently applying standards on our own and especially as a group
• Humans don’t trust other humans and can be selfish
• Humans are lazy and can’t co-ordinate or communicate effectively in groups

Vulnerabilities with computers and the internet:

• There is no accepted, standardised, interoperable and tamperproof way to verify authenticity, source or time of content, and source data between parties. This means with no way to determine authenticity. With no verification at the speed of dissemination and no referencing of sources mis-information just keeps spreading endlessly
• There is no way to control, secure and monetise creative content from replication. Therefore there is no incentive to deliver news because there is no cost or technical enforcement for piracy and replication
• There is no open source protocols for identity — so we have created centralised corporate proxies for this in Facebook and Google who abuse their power. Without identity, honesty is not scored, reputation is not built and there are no consequences for poor behaviour and it leads to every greater extremes of behaviour
• Data can be intercepted, stolen and manipulated using existing shared standards of data transfer at multiple points both at the point of creation (source) as well as in transit (transfer) — these are Man-in-the-Middle attacks
• By default most of the systems and protocal standards are insecure and unencrypted i.e. it is ‘opt-in’ for security which is why we need security certificates when buying things online, and there are no transfer costs which is why we receive so much spam
• The architecture of operating systems and applications are device specific and need to be continually maintained and patched (versioned) to make them secure until a new hack has been found which is very expensive (especially for hardware which requires firmware and software updates) and incredibly inefficient and leaves systems open to DDoS attacks
• We store all our data and transfer our data through centralised databases and servers which make them economically attractive for hackers to penetrate for ransom

Enter Elastos

Elastos is a completely open source, network operating system that utilizes the decentralization of P2P communication (Elastos Carrier) and security of blockchain to create an end-to-end secure web environment for users, internet of things, and all smart devices.

It also creates, for the first time, a space for creatives to build true digital wealth and protect their intellectual property by creating scarcity and true identification of digital content.

In other words…

Elastos is like a decentralised, upgraded security version of the Windows operating system and is owned by everyone (open sourced), not one company. Elastos focuses on providing a secure infrastructure platform for developers and business people to build useful fast, scalable and secure dApps to interact with any blockchain, using any operating system and device.

What Elastos has solved for is incredibly difficult and challenging and has take some brilliant minds and 18 years to develop.

You can learn more about Elastos here

What does the world look like with Elastos when it comes to news?

In an Elastos world:

• News is cheap, always available and verified from multiple sources (decentralised)
• news content creators (journalists, videographers, designers, musicians) are richer and every user (or institution ) will have their own unique id and signature which allows them to prove ownership, authenticity, provenance and timestamp of their news content (written word, video, music, art)
• news creator’s content is encrypted by default, cannot be destroyed, and cannot be used without the express rights to that access those assets to it or bought outright
• news is created by more content creators and there will be more news sources on many more topics from every conceivable niche
• anyone can make money from ‘curating’ their own news channels and build their own audiences
• news content will be verifiable and trustable and fake news cannot be sent to you unsolicited because there is no spam
• there is less need for advertising as content creators get paid for the use of their work at consumption by users and those users cannot replicate or share that content without citing it as a source (and paying for it)
• news will be available anywhere in the world and no one can censor (through firewalls), fake or tamper with news content without irrevocably registering it as a new ‘changed’ asset attached to their own id and reputation. So news in another country can be captured and reported by people actually on the ground without censorship.
• no one can modify or use news content without first giving credit to the source and payment for the use of their work removing piracy entirely and making it possible to earn a living from producing news content
• there are no middlemen (‘trusted’ third parties) so content could cost fractions of a cent rather than tens or hundreds of dollars
• user data is kept locally, encrypted at source by default and stored and transferred in a distributed manner which makes it very difficult to intercept and modify and takes the economic incentive away from hackers to steal.
• applications are fast, scalable, cheaper, more powerful and run on any device (computers, phones, tv’s, routers etc)
• users can use applications and surf the internet freely without worrying about being hacked because their operating system is forever in a protected sandbox that is constantly updated without needing to be ‘updated’

The world of Elastos is coming…by the end of 2018 there will be 1M carrier nodes around the world and over 50K users.

Come join us in this better world.