Tech News

A group of influential technology and media companies has partnered to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project established to address the supposed prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content.

Founding members Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic seek to establish a standardized provenance solution with the goal of combating misleading content. C2PA member organizations will work together to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents. These technical specifications will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified.

The C2PA's open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Because an open standard can be adopted by any online platform, it is critical to scaling trust across the internet. In addition to the inclusion of varied media types at scale, C2PA is driving an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies is critical to facilitate a comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.

The US company Toki is building 'school-in-a-box' devices to connect up to 1 billion people across Africa and Asia, using technologies that it claims could bypass local censorship. The devices will be Wi-Fi-ready servers that can handle dozens of concurrent users.

One of Toki's country managers describes on LinkedIn that the devices would also run a decentralized search engine, designed to be anonymous, private and censorship-resistant. They will be donated to communities in the developing world by U.S.-based eRise, which was founded in 2019 to, according to its website, focus on digital empowerment initiatives that are capital-efficient, and which improve access to content, community and commerce.

Both Toki and eRise were founded by entrepreneur and free speech advocate Rob Monster. Monster owns domain registration company Epik, which allowed controversial social network Parler to come briefly back online last week after the site was booted from Amazon's cloud service. Parler is just one of several platforms enabled by Epik, and Monster's other domain and web hosting companies, that have been home to right leaning forums that western states and social media companies censor and ban.

Presumably technology that was designed to help developing countries with their censorship problems could now be repurposed to helping western countries with their censorship problems.

Tech entrepreneur Joseph Thompson has founded a start-up technology company AID:Tech which has created a digital app to act as a global identity card.

Apparently it is one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals that everyone has a control enabling legal identity, including birth registration, by 2030. This the prompted the World Bank to launch its Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative in 2014.

The latest data from the Bank shows there are just over 987 million people in the world who have no legal identity, down from 1.5 billion in 2016. The majority live in low-income countries where almost 45% of women and 28% of men lack a legal ID.

The blurb about Thomson's waves its arms about blockchain and makes the unlikely claim that the unlikely claim that the digital identity is accessible only to the person whose ID it holds. I can't imagine many country's authorities would be happy with a system that they cannot access.