India, Aug. 13 -- Worried about deepfakes and how they can impact our societies, systems, and political processes? This simple fix could be the key to address this issue. A team at Cornell University has shown that you can watermark reality itself by using light, not software. Instead of embedding a signature in a file that a bad actor can strip or ignore, they embed a quiet code in the scene while you record. Lamps or panels fitted with a tiny controller nudge brightness in patterns that people do not notice, yet cameras do. The camera captures those fluctuations as part of the image. Later, anyone with the matching key can recover a low fidelity code stream from the footage and check whether it lines up with the scene. If a face was swa...