Poptalk.scrubbles.tech is going down temporarily due to fear of federating CSAM - eviltoast
Sad post, going down for a while - Lemmy.world
lemmy.world
Hey all, first of all I love you all for being here, this started as a small side project and ballooned into a fun area to talk about pop music. Sadly, I have to take the site down for a while while I rethink how I host. Currently, this site is hosted on my own hardware, on my own network. Something that was never an issue, I had some protections around it to keep it safe. I won’t go into all details, but yesterday someone on another instance uploaded some extremely vile child content that federated to several other instances. Ours was not affected (luckily), but to be safe I purged everything from the last 24 hours. Unfortuanately, this will be a growing trend, and Lemmy devs haven’t done much to protect instance owners. If someone uploaded something like that to a different instance that we subscribed to, technically I would also be hosting that data. (Federation is cool, but it means we are all hosting it), which means the feds could come and beat down my door for hosting it. In the short term, I’m going to let this go out so others can see it, but I’m hoping it’ll be federated for other users while I convert over. Step 1 is that I cannot host this locally, I need to get it off my network and into the cloud. Steps 2, 3, 4, and on are going to be adding protections so stuff can’t ever get in in the first place, integrating tools, and probably working with the lemmy developers on ways to prevent it in the first place. I don’t know how long we’ll be down, but unfortunately someone else ruined it for all of us for a bit. I’ll do my best to come back up soon while I shore up our ingest. -Your swiftie admin, Scrubbles
  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    74·
    1 year ago

    We need much better moderation tools. List of uploaded content, list of cached content, option to purge cached content.

    • Trekman10@sh.itjust.works
      17·
      1 year ago

      I keep hearing they are swamped and not many people, so if that’s really the case i hope this spurs knowledgeable people to join to help add these things.

    • CMahaff@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Absolutely this. There are issues with deletes not federating properly too, right?

      That’s a big part of the issue here too since even when .world cleans up the content it’s already been pushed out to every other instance and will now remain there until all THOSE admins also purge it.

  • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
    664·
    1 year ago

    Fascist shutdown of public discourse, step by step:

    1. Find out where public discourse is.
    2. Post child porn on an obscure corner of it.
    3. Take screenshots of the posted porn.
    4. Send law enforcement to seize all the things.
  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    341·
    1 year ago

    IANAL, but you are still responsible for it if you host it on a cloud server, the difference is mainly that the authorities will complain first with your cloud host, which will likely take down the entire site, instead of with you directly who can swiftly remove the offending material if asked to do so.

    It is FUD to say the police will SWAT you if someone reports CSAM on your server. But you should have an easy way for the responsible agencies to contact you for take-down requests.

    For people hosting in the EU, this pdf document explains the legal situation a bit and also where and how to report CSAM, should you come across it.

  • dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de
    305·
    1 year ago

    Federation lovers find out all the work that goes behind curtains in any modern website that hosts user generated content.

    To all the people who like to talk smack to Jitsi for requiring Google login, lemmy.world for banning piracy communities, or to even to YT for honouring takedown requests: go ahead and try to host just 100 people on your site.

  • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
    20·
    1 year ago

    I was contemplating setting up an instance dedicated to micromobility, active transport and livable cities… but this is a BIG turn off - I don’t think it’s worth spinning up a new instance until the new mod tools land, and the ability to disable caching federated thumbnails

    There are some instances using ML to scan their pictrs folder IIRC, could be good if it could quarantine/delete/purge posts from Lemmy

    • not_amm@lemmy.ml
      6·
      1 year ago

      Hey, that sounds very interesting. Hope you can do it in the future, I’ll definitely join. :)

    • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      11·
      1 year ago

      I know, and I just saw this after the meme about people hosting instances taking risks for others…

  • Naomikho@monyet.cc
    152·
    1 year ago

    I had to clean a child porn image once because some bastard registered at an instance I’m moderating and posted an anime child porn image to another instance using the account he created here. And I found a total of 5 copies of that image in the server…

  • Pregnenolone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Egregious CSAM aside, none of these websites, including sites like Reddit, can be 100% confident that the people posting images are doing so of people who are over 18. For example, how could Lemmy or Reddit be confident that (insert gonewild poster here) is over the age of 18? As far as I’m aware the only checks that they do are to confirm that the poster is the person they say they are, not that they are of an appropriate age to post.

  • spiritedpause@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I get that the Lemmy devs are swamped with a lot of github issues, but how is this not one of, if not THE top priority for them right now? It’s mind blowing that instance admins don’t have the ability to disable the automatic caching of images from other remote instances.

    If any shit show instance that ends up having CSAM can then cause an admin’s instance to inadvertently cache/host that same content, why the fuck would anyone be motivated to host an instance and deal with the liability?

    • koper@feddit.nl
      1·
      1 year ago

      Because people are blowing this way out of proportion. Users uploading illegal content is always part of hosting a platform and lawmakers realized this decades ago. Platform hosters legally cannot be held liable for the content of their users unless they have actual knowledge of specific instances of illegal content. This is both in the US (section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and the EU (chapter II of the Digital Services Act, previously the eCommerce directive)