Truth, Trust, and Deepfakes

You never write, you never call, you never send flowers “just because.” But that’s ok, we welcome you back to another scintillating episode of Radio Free HPC anyway. Henry is traveling on yet another business trip, lodged in the Washington, DC area, and not even in his favorite hotel chain. But his reputation as a team player goes back to his days in the bayou, Dan says. And he performs another skillful yet awkward segue from Henry’s swamp origins to the swamp-like nature of the internet, which brings us to our special guest.

What’s true? What’s real? And how can we KNOW it?

We welcome Dave Maher, CTO of internet security company Intertrust, to share with us his deep knowledge of digital communication, identity management, data rights management, cryptography and digital certificates, blockchain, and much else. This whole subject is very much in his wheelhouse.

Dave gave us the run down on Intertrust and his other roles in the cybersecurity arena. Dan opens up the questioning with “Dave, do we really need security on the internet?” Dave, quick on the draw, responded “Well, we really haven’t had it for the last 20 years, so why start now?” which got the conversation off and running. Dave talked about the evolution of the internet and the rising need for security given that the internet has vastly changed since it began so long ago.

The main topic of the conversation is authenticity and truth. With the rise of deepfakes (images or videos that are convincingly falsified), how do we know that what we’re seeing and hearing is created by who we think and is what we think?

This leads to a deep conversation on ways we can verify content so that we know that it’s authentic. There are many ways of approaching it, but some implementation of blockchain seems to be a promising route.

Listen to the pod and get hipped to this very important topic. Shahin keeps saying it's the grand challenge of our time. He might be right.

Listen in to hear the full conversation

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