Cloudflare Rolls Out Digital Tracker To Combat Fake Images

Cloudflare, a major web infrastructure company, will now track and verify the authenticity of images across its network through Content Credentials, a digital signature system that documents an image's origin and editing history. The technology, developed by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative, embeds metadata showing who created an image, when it was taken, and any subsequent modifications - including those made by AI tools.

Major news organizations including the BBC, Wall Street Journal and New York Times have already adopted the system. The feature is available immediately through a single toggle in Cloudflare Images settings. Users can verify an image's authenticity through Adobe's web tool or Chrome extension.

How does this help?

[jonbryce]

If you see an image on a social media website, how do you know whether it is a photo taken with a camera by the account holder, or an AI generated image? This digital tracker isn't going to help.

Re:

[Bradac_55]

Cloudflare and Akamai are the two largest CDN's on the planet there SD-Wan's set in front of all of the social media websites.

Re:

[jonbryce]

Sure, but I don't see how this helps.

Re:

[Nephilimi]

It's a big piece of the problem but not the complete solution. Once you've identified something malicious you can then automate the back channels to the social media providers to get posts using that flagged for mis/dis/malinformation en masse, and/or straight up block others from posting the same thing upon submittal. This will probably be abused...

Re:

[Bradac_55]

The CDN's index the social media sites unlike say a telco or a factory. That lets them tag all of the images incoming/outgoing with this Adobe system, which who knows if it even works correctly it's Adobe after all but that's a different issue.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

It helps direct attention to Adobe's image credential 'service'.

What we need...

[MpVpRb]

...is an open source tool, supported by international standards and tested by independent researchers.
What we DON'T need is a proprietary tool, pushed by one of the worst and most abusive monopolists.

Re:

[gotamd]

Yeah, I think the only audience for this are the large media outlets. It does nothing for the everyday person who might post their photos or artwork on a blog.

I don't exactly feel warm and fuzzy

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

when CloudFlare, one of the most overlooked, most massive and most egregious surveillance outfit operating on the internet proposes to follow my data around to "certify its authenticity".

How Is This Actually Useful?

[SlashbotAgent]

OK, I can sign the image and I or others can sign the edits. I guess that if someone directly copies the image I can prove that it is my via the signature.

But, nothing stops someone from stripping the signatures. You can edit the image, resave without signatures and even then sign the new image yourself, if that's of any importance to you.

The grainy UFO and bigfoot picture will still be able to float around in all sorts of unsigned variants. Does lack of a signature prove anything? Can you unsee unsigned im

Re:

[Woeful Countenance]

But, nothing stops someone from stripping the signatures. You can edit the image, resave without signatures and even then sign the new image yourself

The article seems to imply that a picture taken with a compliant device is signed by the device using the device's unique serial number and signature. (Does this mean I have to have a connection to the Internet to take a picture?) If someone later removes the signatures, they have no evidence that they created the picture, while the originator does have evidence. If someone creates their own signature, it will have to be signed by some device. Will every device maintain an accurate time-stamp? If so, the s

When you think "trust" . . .

[nightflameauto]

. . . think Cloudflare.

Funny how all these behemoth corporations think they can control various parts of the Internet just by imposing sanctified corporation approved emblems of authenticity. Hate to break it to them, but that's not at all how any aspect of this works. Not the internet, nor human nature as it manifests on the internet.

Cloudflare pisses me off enough already...

[dargaud]

If you use various anti-spam, anti-javascript and anti-tracking plugins in your browser, you may have noticed plenty of websites that won't load anymore, with messages in the likes of "Your browser is outdated", courtesy of CloudFlare. So fuck them, they broke the web already, unless you bend the knees to the ads gods.