Thread

1. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1789535685 · focus · HN ↗

   This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

   There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

   Edit: And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case, the insurance/ID verification use cases are perfectly fine with anything that raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort. Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

   1. Topfi · 1789543520 · focus · HN ↗

      > […] the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

      Why do you believe Android manufacturers and SOC makers like Qualcomm won’t be able to offer a similar solution?

      1. jeroenhd · 1789545265 · focus · HN ↗

         A bunch of them already offer one. Have been a while, actually; the S25 and Pixel 10 came with exactly this.

         The timestamping server is the hard part, especially with the verified compute component. It's just not something I see Samsung doing.

         I expect Google to show up with a blog post titled "extending C2PA with timestamps for industry-leading authenticity confirmation" any time.

         1. Topfi · 1789552632 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't think that's quite the same, though still valuable. Don't those still depend on the OS being trusted?

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