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."
Re:it's really really hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, even easier is the science behind the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment [wikipedia.org].
Since it relies on placing a retro-reflector in a known position on the lunar surface, and understanding the physics behind it, you'd have had to have been there to do it.
Of course, for those who believe the moon landing was fake (or anything else which involves a blatant denial of science), no amount of refutation of their claims is ever going to work -- they're too invested in their beliefs to be swayed by facts.
Simple test (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: Has the person appearing on it sued the pants off the holders?
Yes: Probably fake
No: Most likely genuine
Re:Physics. (Score:5, Insightful)
Faking a video by photoshopping it together from other video sources would indeed be rather hard to do convincingly. However, why bother with photoshopping? Just get a lookalike actor and a decent makeup technician, and produce a perfectly "real" low-fi home video. Especially when the subject is supposed to be whacked out of their gourd on drugs, you don't need to meticulously recreate their familiar sober style of speech and body-language.
Re:it's really really hard (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Wasted money (Score:5, Insightful)
Gawker is spending $200,000 to get a rise out of embarrassing a politician. It would be far to use it for something such as donating to the EFF, fighting the next SOPA or some other similar cause. Donating personal money for this cause is something only a tool would do.
Re:it's really really hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, first and foremost, we landed on the moon. I'm not arguing that we didn't. I'm not an idiot. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. If John Glenn reads this I kindly ask that he not punch me in the face.
Now. All a retro reflector proves is that we landed something on the moon. Landing 'something' is a lot easier than landing people. The Russians could have very trivially mounted a retro reflector to their lunar rover and we could bounce lasers off them the exact same way you can bounce lasers off the reflectors the Apollo astronauts left behind. There are many good pieces of evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that a manned lunar landing happened; the Lunar Ranging Experiment isn't one of them.