Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked? 237
BStorm writes "The Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been making headlines around the world, for allegedly smoking crack. This story was first broken by gawker.com, which is now crowd-funding $200,000 to buy the video in question. What do you look for to determine if a video has been faked? Of course I am only interested in the technical details and not the tawdry details related to this case ;) I live in Toronto, so the video still frame posted on Gawker certainly does look like Rob Ford."
Windows Movie Maker (Score:5, Funny)
The pixels! (Score:5, Funny)
I usually look at the pixels. I've seen a lot of them in my time, so I can usually tell when they're fake.
Re:Windows Movie Maker (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The pixels! (Score:4, Funny)
reddit would be better, doncha think?
It's all a misunderstanding. (Score:5, Funny)
What Mayor Ford doesn't want to admit is that the video is real, but it was taken while he was in the middle of secret negotiations with rival Toronto and Scarborough gangs. Ford was trying to broker a peace treaty and also recruit the gang members to work as the city's new sanitation engineering team, allowing him to cut the fat at city hall and pass on the savings to the taxpayers he respects.
Due to the tense nature of the meetings and the highly strung personalities present, Ford was loathe to bring something so provocative and weapon-shaped as his asthma inhaler, so he had no choice but to settle for a large glass pipe filled with prescription corticosteroids.
To minimize the possibility of rival gangs finding out about the meetings, all discussions were conducted in code. When he said "Justin Trudeau’s a fag", what he really meant was "I agree with your interpretation of paragraph seventeen, but I still feel that it contradicts the spirit of section seven which is also laid out in the preamble" and "those kids are just effing minorities" was a code phrase for "We cannot compromise on the issue of banked sick days, and have you ever been to the Russian Tearoom on Adelaide? Their curried chicken salad is to die for."
It's all quite obvious when you look at it. It's just the vast left wing media conspiracy that is trying to blow it out of proportion and make it look like something inappropriate.
How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked? (Score:4, Funny)
You submit it to Mythbusters.
Re:it's really really hard (Score:2, Funny)
The moon landing could not have been faked because:
The USSR.
(unless your conspiracy theory includes the Russians using their own space tech to observe no moon landing taking place, and then deciding not to tell anyone, because they were secretly best buddies with the USA)
Close. The landings themselves weren't fake... we landed on the Moon, alright. But the footage of it is fake. NASA also faked the Russians. Completely fake nation.
Re:it's really really hard (Score:5, Funny)
well,
actually they(moon landing conspiracy theorists) believe that USA and USSR did everything in orchestration, even the fall of the USSR.
and well, everyone in europe being in the same conspiracy boat as well. they think that pretty much everyone else is "in" the conspiracy.
it's pretty hard to explain why they would fake the space race though whilst staying sensible at all, so quite many of them seem to believe in UFO's as well - and in that the government has antigravity technology they received from the aliens and that the space race was just a diversion.
it snowballs pretty quickly... which might be an indication that they did go to the moon.
First, the process of elimination. (Score:5, Funny)
Does the video include footage of a female having an orgasm?
Re:The pixels! (Score:5, Funny)
At least we don't go accusing the wrong people of blowing people up, unlike Reddit.
At least we don't start witch hunts, unlike Reddit.
At least we focus on technology, unlike Reddit.
Re:The pixels! (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno. Seems like kind of a gray area, to me.