Fakes Aren't Funny -- or Are They?

Presented at HOPE 2020 Virtual Rescheduled, July 30, 2020, 5 p.m. (60 minutes)

The tools to create fake images are in the hands of the masses! From PhotoShop to InDesign to DeepFace Lab and Zao, you can make anyone say anything. Want a free drink on the plane? A simple editing on your self-printed boarding pass might do the trick (don't try this please!).

This talk will explore the ways in which images/video/documents can be manipulated, including some humorous examples. It will also discuss the serious aspects (e.g. lots of insurance fraud now involves faked "photo evidence" of flooded basements, etc.) As we move to elections in the U.S. and Canada, it is inevitable that we'll see political deepfakes and other chicanery.

After establishing that fakery is child's play, the talk will discuss various different ways of detecting fakes. Everything from checking the carotid pulse of a speaker to background matching and phoneme analysis. The author has developed a blockchain-based validation model that would, for example, have proven which "CNN Jim Acosta video" was the original and which was the fake that the White House tweeted out.

Finally, this talk will give an important message to all of us who have hacker abilities: just because you can do it doesn't mean you should!


Presenters:

  • Tom Keenan
    **Tom Keenan** taught Canada's first computer security course in 1977 and, since then, has been a systems programmer, computer science professor, expert witness in technology cases, and the author of the best-selling book *Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy*. He has spoken about hacking related topics on five continents. Tom was educated at Columbia University, earning four degrees in philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and education. He is a currently a professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at the University of Calgary, where he teaches courses on smart communities. He is also an adjunct professor of computer science where he teaches courses in computer security and cyberwarfare. He is a fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and board chair of the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada. He was also one of the folks who attended the early *2600* meetings in Manhattan where people ran to the bank of telephones in the Citicorp Building to try phone hacks they had just learned.<br>

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