I don’t have any stats or anything, but I lived in China in 2018 and would see them on my way to work. Usually amputees dressed in very sad attire with a QR code on the ground in front of them. My coworkers told me not to give them money because all the money is going to organized crime groups that manage all the beggars in town. I have no idea if this is true, but I heard it multiple times

In China where digital payments are done mostly via apps like Venmo, there are beggars with QR codes in front of them. However they’re mostly being used by organized crime rings

This is a very hard problem to solve, and people have tried.

Let’s say you do as you said: hash the data (screenshot, date, etc) and upload it to a trusted server. Nothing can stop me from generating fake data, hashing that and uploading it instead.

Ok, so maybe you decide to add a cryptographic signature to prove that it was the web browser that made this hash, not an unauthorized one. That might work for a while, but the private key needs to be shipped with the browser software, so a sophisticated person could extract that key and then generate fake data. Especially is the browser is open source (like most are).

Alright, what about if we add a special chip on the device that is hard to tamper with and keep the private key on there and do all the signing on that chip. Those do exist somewhat already, but hackers have found ways to break them.

Ok then you move everything to the cloud. Have the entire web browser running on a cloud machine by a trusted authority. Maybe then you can do what you’re discussing, but you’ve also entered a privacy nightmare where everything you’re doing can be monitored in real time.

What would be a better situation (and where I think we’re going eventually with Gen-AI) would be to put the responsibility on the website publisher to provide cryptographic proof of their content. For example, the NYTimes could create a digital signature of a photo and publish it on a blockchain or other trusted tamper-proof ledger as they publish the photo. Then anyone can verify that the photo is from the NYTimes and the date it was created.

No true Scotsman fallacy

I’m progressive, but we should not deny the failure modes of progressivism

There are many examples of the left pushing blind faith in the leader (see Mao, Kim Il Sung, Stalin)

I have to give credit where it’s due, I actually like this change. Likes used to be private, and then they became public and subject to the toxic performativity of social media

This is fair, I wonder if in former Soviet spaces the roles are reversed

It’s a bit bizarre that if you have a hammer and sickle on your shirt it’s a kind of edgy cool, but if you had a swastika on your shirt you risk being fired/cancelled/arrested

It’s worth noting that this is not being done for environmental reasons (more half of all coal pollution comes from China), but for strategic reasons as China has limited access to oil near it’s borders.