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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.

    The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer’s offering.




  • I think that’s not the problem that this technology is intended to solve.

    It’s not a “Is this picture copied from someone else?” technology. It’s a “Did a human take this picture, and did anyone modify it?” technology.

    Eg: Photographer Bob takes a picture of Famous Fiona driving her camaro and posts it online with this metadata. Attacker Andy uses photo editing tools to make it look like Fiona just ran over a child. Maybe his skills are so good that the edits are undetectable.

    Andy has two choices: Strip the metadata, or keep it.

    If Andy keeps the metadata, anyone looking at his image can see that it was originally taken by Bob, and that Fiona never ran over a child.

    If Andy strips the metadata (and if this technology is widely accessible and accepted by social media, news sites, and everyday people) then anyone looking at the image can say “You can’t prove this image was actually taken. Without further evidence I must assume that it’s faked”.

    I think spinning this as a tool to fight AI is just clickbait because AI is hot in the news. It’s about provenance and limiting misinformation.