The real issue that photographers grapple with, emotionally and financially, is that pictures have become so thoroughly commodified that nobody assigns them cultural value anymore. They are the thumbnail you see before the short video clip starts playing.

Nobody has ever walked past a photograph because they can't inspect its digital authenticity hash. This is especially funny to me because I used to struggle with the fact that people looking at your work don't know or care what kind of camera or process was involved. They don't know if I spent two hours zoomed in removing microscopic dust particles from the scanning process after a long hike to get a single shot at 5:30am, or if it was just the 32nd of 122 shots taken in a burst by someone holding up an iPad Pro Max at a U2 concert.

This all made me sad for a long time, but I ultimately came to terms with the fact that my own incentives were perverse; I was seeking the external gratification of getting likes just like everyone else. If you can get back to a place where you're taking photographs or making music or doing 5 minute daily synth drills for your own happiness with no expectation of external validity, you will be far happier taking that $399 and buying a Mamiya C330.

This video is about music, but it's also about everything worth doing for the right reasons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQF4YIvxwE

Now moving on to the sensor (IMX 519 - Arducam?) - it's tinier than the tiniest sensor found on phones. If you really want to have decent image quality, you should look at Will Whang's OneInchEye and Four-thirds eye (https://www.willwhang.dev/). 4/3 Eye uses IMX294 which is currently the only large sensor which has Linux support (I think he upstreamed it) and MIPI. All the other larger sensors use interfaces like SLVS which are impossible to connect to.

If anyone's going to attempt a serious camera, they need to do two things. Use at least a 1 inch sensor, and a board which can actually sleep (which means it can't be the RPi). This would mean a bunch of difficult work, such as drivers to get these sensors to work with those boards. The Alice Camera (https://www.alice.camera/) is a better attempt and probably uses the IMX294 as well. The most impressive attempt however is Wenting Zhang's Sitina S1 - (https://rangefinderforum.com/threads/diy-full-frame-digital-...). He used a full frame Kodak CCD Sensor.

There is a market for a well made camera like the Fuji X-Half. It doesn't need to have a lot of features, just needs to have ergonomics and take decent pictures. Stuff like proofs are secondary to what actually matters - first it needs to take good pictures, which the IMX 519 is going to struggle with.

https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/spec...

> The C2PA information comprises a series of statements that cover areas such as asset creation, edit actions, capture device details, bindings to content and many other subjects. These statements, called assertions, make up the provenance of a given asset and represent a series of trust signals that can be used by a human to improve their view of trustworthiness concerning the asset. Assertions are wrapped up with additional information into a digitally signed entity called a claim.

Other than that it's a 16MP Sony CMOS, I'd expect a pretty noisy picture...

    How do I get my photos off the camera?
    
    Coming soon. We're working on export functionality to get your photos off the camera.

It's not feasible or desirable for our hardware devices to verify the information they record autonomously. A real solution to the problem of attribution in the age of AI must be based on reputation. People should be able to vouch for information in verifiable ways with consequences for being untrustworthy.

Like, how is this any different than having each camera equipped with a vendor controlled key and then having it sign every photo?

If you can spoof the sensor enough to reuse the key, couldn't you spoof the sensor enough to fool a verifier into believing your false proof?

If I generate image with AI, print it, then take a photo of it with Roc Camera so that you can't tell that this is actually a printed image, I will then have an AI image with ZKP of its authenticity?

[0]: https://authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us/

[1]: https://petapixel.com/2023/10/26/leica-m11-p-review-as-authe...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-03-c2pa-verification-news...

I believe various cameras support this, e.g. https://www.canon-europe.com/press-centre/press-releases/202...

`C2PA Authenticity: Integrated support for the C2PA standard for photo authenticity verification – initially available exclusively for registered news agencies.`

Sounds like it's limited to some users for now, I guess this will change in the future.

Going too far won't really help, since the scene being photographed can be manipulated or staged, which sounds more likely to be a concern rather than the hardware being hacked.

On one hand, it’s a cool application of cryptography as a power tool to balance AI, but on the other, it’s a real hit to free and open systems. There’s a risk that concern over AI spirals into a justification for mandatory attestation that undermines digital freedom. See: online banking apps that refuse to operate on free devices.

Identity verification for financial services, social platforms, and gig economy (KYC/AML compliance) Professional tools for insurance, real estate, law enforcement, and healthcare documentation Enterprise authentication-as-a-service model

Similar to ad-clicks or product reviews, if this were to catch on, Roc cameras (and Roc camera farms) will be used to take photos of inauthentic photos.

Ultimately, the only useful authenticity test is human reputation.

If someone (or an organization) wants to be trusted as authentic, the best they can do is stake their identity on the authenticity of things they do and share, over and over.

When the goal is having a proof that the photo hasn’t been edited or ai generated, using an analog camera and shooting on film seems more practical to me than using a device like this.

How do you stop someone from taking a picture of an AI picture? It will still come from the sensor.

- I hope they succeed and eventually deliver a solid version of this product - verifiable photography is going to become important, and it's good to see startups working on this - While I'm sure some artists will like the idea of verifiable photography, the applications that matter to me are any kind of photography that has the potential to end up in a news article or in court - Selling what is essentially a prototype is fine, it's extremely obvious that's what it is, they explicitly say it! Who cares if it's not very good as a camera? - The almost complete lack of information on their site about their security model or how their ZKPs work is not particularly encouraging - It follows that my faith that either the cryptography or the hardware anti-tamper measures in this beta device would stand up to even some decent amateurs, given a couple of weeks to have a crack at it, is not high. I'm almost tempted to buy one just to see how far I, a random kernel engineer who gets modestly decent scores at my local hacker con CTF, could get. But I may well be completely underestimating them! Hard to tell with the fairly scarce information - Why did they pick a name that's similar to a) AMD's GPU stack, and b) the law enforcement/natsec computer vision business, ROC (https://roc.ai)?

There are larger problems when you consider this question. What is real and not in photography is a long and storied debate - any photograph is ultimately a curation of a small part of the real world - what is just out of frame could completely change the interpretation of the viewer if they saw it, regardless of whether the picture is unaltered after taking. The choice of framing, colours, subject etc etc can radically alter meaning. There is no getting away from this.

So ultimately I don't think the biggest problem facing photography is attested reality. I actually think the democratisation of photography offers a better way out - we have so many views on each event now that it's actually harder to fake because there are usually hundreds of pictures of the same thing.

PS for the site author, there is a typo in the sentence beginning - remove the an 'By combining sensors, an on-device zero-knowledge proofs'.

Both cameras still allow “staging” a scene and taking a shot of that. Both cameras will both say that the scene was shot in the physical world, but that’s it.

I would argue that slide film is more “verifiable” in the ways that matter: easier to explain to laypeople how slide film works, and it’s them that you want to convince.

If I was a film or camera manufacturer I would try and go for this angle in marketing.

Apple could really make an interesting product here where they combine the LIDAR data with the camera data, cryptographically sign it, and attest to it as unmodified straight from the camera. Can it still be faked? Yes, but it's much harder to do.

It’s possible that this could have value in journalism or law enforcement.

Just make it look the part. Make it black and put some decent lens on it.

This is a brilliant solution to one of the most critical emergent problems. I can see a world where no digital image can be trusted if it doesn't come with a hash.

There is also something called "film" which might be a retro answer to this problem.

>> We store the photos generated by the Roc Camera on IPFS (by default). We'll have more information on this soon, so check back for more details in the future.

> How do I get my photos off the camera?

>> Coming soon. We're working on export functionality to get your photos off the camera.

> Where is the ZKP generated?

>> The zero-knowledge proofs are generated on-device using the Raspberry Pi 4.

I am a bit puzzled as to why IPFS was used as the "primary" storage medium there, it's a Pi so wouldn't it be pretty easy to make it have a micro-sd port? Wouldn't it be able to work fully locally then?

When I look at their socials, it seems like they primarily engage with a crypto-focused audience, all of this leads me to believe that IPFS and ZKP are the actual main appeal of this product... not that there's anything overtly wrong with this.

Just the other day I stumbled across this picture on Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_AT%26T_wireless_r... Can anyone explain what's going on with the front tyre of the white car? To me it looks like the actual picture was ingested by a model then spat back out again with a weird artifact.

The worrying thing is when it becomes too hard to spot the artifacts we won't know how much of our history has been altered subtly, either unintentionally or not, by "AI".

I also believe that whatever they're aiming at with verifiably real photos will either be commodified or end up not being valued very highly.

It's not quite the Rabbit R1 (at least the presentation here seems more honest) but I don't see it generating more than niche-of-niche interest.

Also, and maybe more to the previous point about commodification (or within-reach tech), this is the kind of project I can imagine hardware hacker/AI and crypto enthusiast doing on their own ( and I guess selling to friends and neighbors for $400 ... )

Side effect is I get a small little window into what he "sees" and his lived experience. Going through some of the pics recently was quite beautiful.

But I feel like the only way to accomplish fool-proof photos we can trust in a trustless way (i.e. without relying on e.g. the Press Association to vet) is to utterly PACK the hardware with sensors and tamper-proof attestation so the capture can’t be plausibly faked: multi-spectral (RGB + IR + UV) imaging, depth/LiDAR, stereo cameras, PRNU fingerprinting, IMU motion data, secure GPS with attested fix, a hardware clock and secure element for signing, ambient audio, lens telemetry, environmental sensors (temperature, barometer, humidity, light spectrum) — all wrapped in cryptographic proofs that bind these readings to the pixels.

In the meantime however, I'd trust a 360deg go-pro with some kind of signature of manafacture. OR just a LOT of people taking photos in a given vicinity. Hard to fake that.

That you can't believe everything you see in the age of AI is a feature, not a bug. We are so used to photographs being hard facts that we'll have to go through a hard transition, but we'll be fine afterwards, just as we were before the invention of photography. Our norms will adapt. And photographs will become mere heresay and illustration, but that's OK.

I think here the same dynamic is at play as with music/videos and DRM. Our society is so used to doing it the old way - selling physical records - that when new technology comes along, which allows free copying, we can't go where the technology leads us (because we don't know how to feed the artists, and because the record industry has too much power), so we invent a mechanism to turn back the wheel and make music into a scarce good again. Similar here: we can't ban Photoshop and AI, but we invent a technology to try to turn back time and make photos "evidence" again.

Step 1: Create an AI image and display it.

Step 2: Use this camera to take a picture of it.

Now you have "attested" proof of "verifiably real" image.

It should be an industry standard system for guaranteeing authenticity by coordinating hardware and software to be as tamper proof as possible and saved in a cryptographically verifiable way.

No system like this would be perfect, but that's the enemy of the good.

how long does the batter last

> Currently, the battery will last estimated 2~3 hours on constant use on a full charge. It can last much longer if it is off.

The only real solution I can think of is just to have multiple independent parties photograph the same event and use social trust. Luckily this solution is getting easier now that almost everyone is generally no further than 3 feet away from multiple cameras.

I think that a disposable camera, or even something fancier, like a Mamiya C330, are better and more gratifying bets for the money.

Also does this mean I can't adjust colors or make any changes to my photos?

I could see this being neat in the context of a digital detox photo competition or something, but I don't see any real place for this in Art world

I wonder how have they made the boot up fast enough to not be annoying.

I used non-real time eInk display to cut down on the battery life so I could just keep it on in my pocket while out taking pictures since it took good minute to get ready from cold boot.

Not sure if ZK is the right way of achieving this. Even if the cryptographic guarantees are strong, generating these proofs is very expensive.

That's it. That's the verification?

So what happens when I use a Raspberry Pi to attach a ZK proof to an AI- generated image?

The ACLU is sceptical regarding the whole concept: https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/attempts-technological-solut...

The root causes podcast discusses this topic in its episode 336: https://www.sectigo.com/resource-library/root-causes-336-dig...

I strongly believe this should be an open source project.

this is one of those things you shouldn't buy aside from novelty, but this idea wouldnt reach the light of day now without doing it this way

the real goal would be integration into more popular camera systems

I hope the founders and this concept gets all the support they are looking for

Not trolling. Genuinely don’t understand.

https://www.amazon.com/Camera-Digital-Toddler-Christmas-Birt...

Devs -- stop hijacking native scrolling functionality. Why? You had one shot to sell me on this product. I can't see the page, so I can't consider it for purchase. That's a lost sale.

What if I make a photo of my screen?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092225

I love the idea, but the product execution is simply horrendous. It looks more like a money grab gimmick. The sensor selection is also bad, the image quality will be terrible.

Even worse when I see people saying “it’s over” for slop content posted on social media

We lived fine and well before social media or photography or videos.

The truth is worse than anyone wants to face. It was never about authenticity or creativity. Those words are just bullshit armor for fragile egos. Proofs and certificates do not mean a damn thing.

AI tore the mask off. It showed that everything we worship, art, music, poetry, beauty, all of it runs on patterns. Patterns so simple and predictable that a lifeless algorithm can spit them out while we sit here calling ourselves special. The magic we swore was human turns out to be math wearing makeup.

Strip away the label and no one can tell who made it. The human touch we brag about dissolves into noise. The line between creator and creation never existed. We were just too arrogant to admit it.

Love, happiness, beauty, meaning, all of it is chemistry and physics. Neurons firing, hormones leaking, atoms slamming into each other. That is what we are when we fall in love, when we cry, when we write a song we think no machine could ever match. It is all the same damn pattern. Give a machine enough data and it will mimic our souls so well we will start to feel stupid for ever thinking we had one.

This is not the future. It is already moving beneath us. The trendline is clear. AI will make films that crush Hollywood. Maybe not today, maybe not next year, but that is where the graph is pointing. And artists who refuse to use it, who cling to the old ways out of pride or fear, are just holding on to stupidity. The tools have changed. Pretending they have not is the fastest way to become irrelevant.

Yes, maybe right now you can still tell the difference. Maybe it is obvious. But look at the rate. Look at the slope of that goddamn line. The speed of progress is unmistakable. Every year the gap closes. Every year the boundary between man and machine blurs a little more. Anyone who cannot see where this is going, anyone who cannot admit that this is a realistic possibility, is in total denial. The projection of that line into the future cannot be ignored. It is not speculation anymore. It is math, and it is happening right in front of us.

People will still scoff, call it soulless, call it fake. But put them in a blind test and they will swear it was human. The applause will sound exactly the same.

And one day a masterpiece will explode across the world. Everyone will lose their minds over it. Critics will write essays about its beauty and depth. People will cry, saying it touched something pure in them. Then the creator will step forward and say it was AI. And the whole fucking world will go quiet.

Because in that silence we will understand. There was never anything special about us. No divine spark. No secret soul. Just patterns pretending to mean something.

We are noise that learned to imitate order. Equations wrapped in skin. Puppets jerking to the pull of chemistry, pretending it is choice.