this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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I still find it fascinating that you can go to jail because there's an IP address in a log file somewhere or because of a screenshot of a messenger communication.
Any more so than, say, fingerprints, DNA, or accounting records?
Definitely. I can just write a log file myself, change the creation date in the filesystem if I have to. There are websites that generate images of DM conversations on a myriad of platforms online. Manipulation of these artifacts is beyond trivial
Or, for that matter, surveillance video recordings stored on a server somewhere. It's all just ones and zeros, but some combinations of ones and zeros are quite informative.
As technology progresses it is a fact of life that AI will get better at forgery. Perhaps these items will be less permissible in the future.
Forgery is easy. Putting the forged document into the chain of custody is, and has always been, the hard part.
If we're talking about financial records, it's been trivially easy to create fake bank statements, or fraudulently place an old date on a newly created document, or even forge wet signatures, since before computers were invented. But getting that forged document into the filing cabinet of a bank or an accounting firm is the hard part.
I can make fake IP logs, sure. I can generate fake videos, I guess (under current tech, that takes a ton of effort and skill to be believable). But getting those logs onto Proton's servers, without Proton knowing? I don't know about that.