Hello everyone,
We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.
We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.
Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.
Edit: @Striker@lemmy.world the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.
But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.
Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.
I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to all of the users here who liked lemmy shit posting. I feel like I let the situation grow too out of control before getting help. Don’t worry I am not quitting. I fully intend on staying around. The other two deserted the community but I won’t. Dm me If you wish to apply for mod.
Sincerest thanks to the admin team for dealing with this situation. I wish I linked in with you all earlier.
Please, please, please do not blame yourself for this. This is not your fault. You did what you were supposed to do as a mod and stepped up and asked for help when you needed to, lemmy just needs better tools. Please take care of yourself.
This isn’t your fault. Thank you for all you have done in regards to this situation thus far.
It’s not your fault, thank you for your job!
Definitely not your fault mate, you did what anyone would do, it’s a new community and shit happens
I love your community and I know it is hard for you to handle this but it isn’t your fault! I hope no one here blames you because it’s 100% the fault of these sick freaks posting CSAM.
You don’t have to apologize for having done your job. You did everything right and we appreciate it a lot. I’ve spent the whole day trying to remove this shit from my own instance and understanding how purges, removals and pictrs work. I feel you, my man. The only ones at fault here are the sickos who shared that stuff, you keep holding on.
You didn’t do anything wrong, this isn’t your fault and we’re grateful for the effort. These monsters will be slain, and we will get our community back.
Thanks for your work. The community was appreciated.
Thank you for your help. It is appreciated.
You’ve already had to take all that on, don’t add self-blame on top of it. This wasn’t your fault and no reasonable person would blame you. I really feel for what you and the admins have had to endure.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to supports or speak to a mental health professional if you’ve picked up trauma from the shit you’ve had to see. There’s no shame in getting help.
As so many others have said, there’s no need for an apology. Thank you for all of the work that you have been doing!
The fact that you are staying on as mod speaks to your character and commitment to the community.
Contact the FBI
This isn’t as crazy as it may sound either. I saw a similar situation, contacted them with the information I had, and the field agent was super nice/helpful and followed up multiple times with calls/updates.
This doesn’t sound crazy in the least. It sounds like exactly what should be done.
yha, what do people think the FBI is for… this isn’t crazy. They can get access to ISP logs, VPN provider logs, etc.
I think what they’re saying is that contacting the FBI may seem daunting to someone who has never dealt with something like this before, but that they don’t need to worry about it. Just contact them.
This is good advice; I suspect they’re outside of the FBI’s jurisdiction, but they could also be random idiots, in which case they’re random idiots who are about to become registered sex offenders.
You might be surprised to discover that the USA does not believe their laws end at their borders. That is why Kim Dotcom was arrested by the FBI in NZ for violating US law.
In this case I doubt any LE agency abroad wouldn’t like the tip off.
I’m not saying anybody takes csam less serious. But I wish the American government Went after minor csam events as much as they go after copyright/IP violations. Its not like mike pompeo flew out to other countries to strong arm them into new laws to prevent csam like they have done with pirates who threatened Hollywood profits
We did that back in the 1990s under Clinton and a bit under GWB as well. If I recall correctly we got really firm with Japan about how they needed to ban CP there.
There is no CP and no porn in Japan… add some tiny censor bars, and it’s just some wholesome family tentacle fun!
That one backfired spectacularly.
Yeah there was even that case where a citizen and resident of Mexico was arrested and detained in the US for breaking US law, even tho it technically didn’t apply to them since they were under Mexican sovereignty… Borders mean little to the US
The FBI has offices in alot of other countries and work with local law enforcement.
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/international-offices
Can’t really hide from them unless you live in North Korea or Russia
Wait, is this like China having police offices in other countries?
I knew the US collects taxes on their citizens no matter where they live, but isn’t this kind of excessive? Wasn’t Interpol supposed to take care of international crime?
For more than eight decades, the FBI has stationed special agents and other personnel overseas. We help protect Americans back home by building relationships with principal law enforcement, intelligence, and security services around the globe.
It is similar to China’s international police but keep in mind quite a few other countries have a similar setup
I’m just surprised that it’s FBI personnel, I thought the CIA was in charge of international affairs, with INTERPOL acting as liaison for the FBI with other countries.
IIRC in the EU we have EUROPOL acting as liaison between the national law enforcement branches, and while there is nothing stopping personnel from one country to enter another, I don’t think they do. But maybe that’s more like the state vs. federal jurisdictions in the US. On the other hand, it’s been some time since I’ve looked deeper into it, and things keep changing.
I have to wonder if Interpol could help with issues like this I know there are agencies that work together globally to help protect missing and exploited children.
‘Criminal activity should be reported to your local or national police. INTERPOL does not carry out investigations or arrest people; this is the responsibility of national police.’
From their website.
What the hell do they actually do then?
“Interpol provides investigative support, expertise and training to law enforcement worldwide, focusing on three major areas of transnational crime: terrorism, cybercrime and organized crime. Its broad mandate covers virtually every kind of crime, including crimes against humanity, child pornography, drug trafficking and production, political corruption, intellectual property infringement, as well as white-collar crime. The agency also facilitates cooperation among national law enforcement institutions through criminal databases and communications networks. Contrary to popular belief, Interpol is itself not a law enforcement agency.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol
FBI would be great in this case tbh. They have the resources.
Perhaps most importantly, it establishes that the mods/admins/etc of the community are not complicit in dissemination of the material. If anyone (isp, cloud provider, law enforcement, etc) tries to shut them down for it, they can point to their active and prudent engagement of proper authorities.
Not that I’m familiar with Rust at all, but… perhaps we need to talk about this.
The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesn’t seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.
Lets be productive. What exactly are the moderation features needed, and what would be easiest to implement into the Lemmy source code? Are you talking about a mass-ban of users from specific instances? A ban of new accounts from instances? Like, what moderation tool exactly is needed here?
The best feature the current Lemmy devs could work on is making the process to onboard new devs smoother. We shouldn’t expect anything more than that for the near future.
I haven’t actually tried cloning and compliling, so if anyone has comments here they’re more than welcome.
I think having a means of viewing uploaded images as an admin would be helpful, as well disabling external image caching. Like an “uploaded” gallery for admins to view that can potentially hook into Photodna/CSAI-Match or whatever.
I was just discussing this under another post and turns out that the Germans have already developed a rule-based auto moderator that they use on their instance:
https://github.com/Dakkaron/SquareModBot
This could be adopted by
lemmy.worldby simply modifying the config fileThat statement is just outright wrong though. They could easily use CloudFlares CSAM monitoring and it never would have been a problem. A lot of people in these threads, including admins, have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
Cloudflare CSAM protection is not available outside of the US, unfortunately.
There are several other solutions including ones from Microsoft and Facebook.
This is flat out disgusting. Extremely questionable someone having an arsenal of this crap to spread to begin with. I hope they catch charges.
See that’s the part of this that bothers me most… Why do they have so much of it? Why do they feel comfortable letting others know they have so much of it? Why are they posting it on an open forum?
The worst part is, there is not a single god damn answer to ANY of those that wouldn’t keep a sane person up at night… shudder
I’m sure it’s not hard to find on the dark web. Child porn is one of those horrible things that is probably a lot more widespread than anyone wants to know.
I don’t really get why they are doing this though.
I hate to get conspiratorial, but it’s possible Reddit paid some people to do this to snuff out the competition.
Isn’t Spez a pedophile?
The amount of people in these comments asking the mods not to cave is bonkers.
This isn’t Reddit. These are hobbyists without legal teams to a) fend off false allegations or b) comply with laws that they don’t have any deep understanding of.
Yeah, you’ve got to think of this place like the big forums of 20 years ago, they’re just run by a tiny handful of regular people, and having to deal with solicitors and other such stuff is entirely out of the question.
If something’s bad, you lock it down and purge it until it’s not bad any more. Unfortunately that’s the best you can do with such minimal resources as a regular member of the public, and for those that don’t like it, there’s other forums out there.
This isn’t one single huge monopoly thing like Reddit, you either stay or leave forever, if you don’t like how one is being run, just sign up on a different one. Takes the stress out of it :-)
Lemmy instances are also international, which would cause more problems.
This instance is Finnish, and lemmy.ml is Malaysian(?), each with their own separate administration teams. Whereas Reddit knows that all of the Reddit servers are in a few known countries, and they have the capacity to make big changes across all of them as needed.
Server and url are not necessarily in the same location. Url is just a human friendly alias for the ip of a server that can be located anywhere
ml is Mali’s TLD. They reclaimed it recently, but the instance itself is hosted in Malaysia, if memory serves.
There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesn’t inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.
this doesn’t seem like a respectful comment to make. People have responsibilities; they aren’t paid for this. It doesn’t seem to fair to make criticisms of something when we aren’t doing anything to provide a solution. A better comment would be “there are just 2 full time developers on this project and they have other priorities. we are working on increasing the number of full time developers.”
Imagine if you were the owner of a really large computer with CSAM in it. And there is in fact no good way to prevent creeps from putting more into it. And when police come to have a look at your CSAM, you are liable for legal bullshit. Now imagine you had dependents. You would also be well past the point of being respectful.
On that note, the captain db0 has raised an issue on the github repository of LemmyNet, requesting essentially the ability to add middleware that checks the nature of uploaded images (issue #3920 if anyone wants to check). Point being, the ball is squarely in their court now.
You can already protect your instance using CloudFlare’s CSAM protection, and sorry to say it, but I would not use db0’s solution. It is more likely to get you in trouble than help you out. I posted about it in their initial thread, but they are not warning people about actual legal requirements that are required in many places and their script can get you put in jail (yes, put in jail for deleting CSAM).
The developers of LemmyNet are being asked for the ability to define a subroutine by which uploaded images are to be preprocessed and denied or passed thereafter. There is no such feature right now. Even if they wanted to use CloudFlare CSAM protection, they couldn’t. That’s the entire problem. This preprocessing routine could use Microsoft PhotoDNA and Google CSAI, it could use a self-hosted alternative as db0 desires or it could even be your own custom solution that doesn’t destroy, but stores CSAM on a computer you own and stops it from being posted.
Even if they wanted to use CloudFlare CSAM protection, they couldn’t.
? CF’s solution happens at the DNS level. It has absolutely nothing to do with lemmy and there’s nothing the devs could do to change that.
Yeah I just looked it up. Serving stuff through CF does a check for illicit material. Pretty neat. Be that as it may, the original complaint is that Lemmy is lacking moderation tools. Such a moderation tool would be something that disallows CSAM even being stored in the server in the first place.
I agree with you, I’d just gently suggest that it’s borne of what is probably significant upset at having to deal with what they’re having to deal with.
we are working on increasing the number of full time developers.
I see where you are coming from, but who is supposed to make this statement, LW admins? Because it’s not their role. And if it’s Lemmy devs, then it shouldn’t be we.
I mean, the “other priorities” comment does seem to be in bad taste. But as for the comment on the future of Lemmy, I dunno. I feel like they’re just being realistic. I think the majority of us understand the devs have lives but if things don’t get sorted out soon enough it could impact the future of Lemmy.
No one is paid for this, but moderation is going to become a problem for Lemmy and the volunteers who are admins are going to need support.
Thing is, if this continues to be a problem and if the userbase/admins of instances are organised, we can shift those priorities. They may not have envisioned this being a problem with the work they decided to work on for the next several months. Truly, the solution is to get more developers involved so that more can happen at once.
Seriously. We need to cut them some slack because nobody expected Reddit to go full Elon in May.
Exactly, and Mastodon had been kinda gunning for Twitter for years before Elon went full Elon, so they were primed for the influx. Lemmy I think expected to have years to go before it’s userbase would similarly skyrocket.
They just edited their comment
Wish I was a dev. I’d jump in to help so fast.
You don’t become a developer by wishing. Here’s a tutorial if you want to learn
(edit: Rust, not Go)
Thank you!!!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/playlist?list=PL4cUxeGkcC9gC88BEo9czgyS72A3doDeM&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I’m a dev but i’m in no way familiar with Rust (or more importantly, the code structure).
Very early on I also had a look at the codebase for their join-lemmy.org site to see if I could contibute some UX changes to make it less text-heavy, but the framework they use for the UI is something I’m not familiar with either.
Perhaps they’re both things to revisit when I have more spare time…
Good bot
DEVELOPERS produce a software to help people post images and text online. Nothing bad about that.
ADMINS install the developers software on a server and run it as an instance.
MODS (if any exist besides the admin) moderate the instance to keep illegal content off the site.
USERS may choose to use the software to post CSAM.
None of these groups of people have paid for or are getting paid for their time. USERS generally don’t take much legal risk for what’s posted, as instance owners don’t ask for personally identifiable information from users.
Sites like reddit, although we all hate it, do make a profit, and some of that profit is used to pay “trust and safety” teams who are paid (generally not very well, usually in underdeveloped or developing countries) to wade through thousands of pictures of CSAM, SA, DV/IPV and other violent material, taking it down as it gets posted to facebook, reddit, other major online properties.
—-
Developers, admins and mods are generally doing this in their free time. Not sure how many people realize this but developers, admins and mods are also people who need to eat - developers have a skill of developing software, so many open source devs are also employed and contribute to open source in their off time. Admins may be existing sysadmins at companies but admin lemmy instances in their off time. Mods do it to protect the community and the instance itself.
USERS can be a bit self-important at times. We get it, you all generate the content on this site. Some content isn’t just unwanted though, it’s illegal and if not responded to quickly could mean not only a shutdown instance but also possible jailtime for admins, who ultimately will be the ones who are running a “reddit-like site” or “a haven for child porn”.
People have responsibilities
Exactly - when you create a site, you have a responsibility to make sure it’s not used to distribute child porn.
Fucking bastards. I don’t even know what beef they have with the community and why, but using THAT method to get them to shut down is nothing short of despicable. What absolute scum.
I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse. Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers. If taking the community down is the only option here, that’s extremely insufficient and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.
Lemmy is new for all of us. I don’t see any other solution right now. You got some ideas how to handle it better?
I think better mod tools are needed but it will take time. Doesn’t mean the platform will die, but means we may have to deal with some stuff like this.
It’s a hard problem but it absolutely is an existential risk. Spam is an existential risk. A platform that collapses under spam will either remain too small to be irrelevant or collapse from unusability. I’m sorry but I don’t think your response completely grasps the number of forums, social media sites, wikis, etc. that have been completely crushed by spam.
I admit I haven’t kept track of that, true.
Solution now. Better solution later.
I’ve just finished arguing with other lemmy users about how admins aren’t interested in taking on your legal risk. That was for the topic of piracy. CSAM is another issue entirely. Not only can lemmy users not expect to see a CSAM-friendly instance, lemmy users should expect to be deanonymized by law enforcement. Fuck around with kids and find out.
Are you seriously conflating my position with arguing that CSAM should be allowed?
Are people having a difficult time reading today? It’s not just you. Maybe it’s this topic and how it intermeshes with technology. Some people seem to think that there’s a technical solution for this already (one that works as well if not better than human moderators).
No, I don’t think you personally are advocating for CSAM to be allowed. I think commenters are getting a little uppity about missing out on their favorite community while the admins deal with content that is:
- harmful to children
- damaging to the admin’s psyche
- damaging to the user’s psyche
- against the law
Imagine you owned an instance, and you found 100 moderators for your communities. You rest your head on the pillow and go to sleep. You wake up and find that some user has written a script to post CSAM on all your communities, because “fuck you that’s why”. You get on the line with your moderators and they tell you they’ve been battling this all night, just banning people and deleting comments on site. They tell you they’ve had to turn off a few communities and that some users are complaining. Your hard work for weeks and months to get this instance to a healthy place is being tested. You get an email from your hosting service, saying that they have reports that your site contains CSAM and that’s against ToS - they give you a day to get it under control before they boot your server or turn it over to police. Imagine in this case you make the drastic move to simply pull the plug - taking the entire instance offline until you can sort it through. Now imagine some users come in and start complaining about how you dear admin are killing the fediverse. Personally, I have no sympathy for those user who complain about their community or instance being taken offline while admins deal with real shit.
Maybe it’s this topic and how it intermeshes with technology. Some people seem to think that there’s a technical solution for this already (one that works as well if not better than human moderators).
So 4chan has this problem a lot but they are also based in the US where its most definitely illegal and they IP ban people and I think for the most part it works. It did suck though - I don’t go on there anymore but in the last few years I did, if I was on mobile, I would often get hit with a region ban because so many people in that area were banned that they just decided to block an entire IP region to prevent anyone else posting illegal content.
maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.
You’re discussing how to ban people, this isn’t the problem.
The problem is this: In the last hour, 10,000 images were uploaded. Some of those contain CSAM. Now, you have 1 hour to find all the CSAM photos (0 to 10,000 of them). In the next hour, another 10,000 images will be uploaded, some of them containing CSAM…
Unless you have a lot of human moderators, you’re going to use automated tools and get false-postives or false-negatives.
A site like 4 chan banning whole regions isn’t a great example of handling this well. I don’t think I need to explain (but maybe I do) that one person in a region who is posting CSAM doesn’t mean the entire region posts CSAM. You could just opt to block all regions by pulling the site off the internet. Not to mention, does this now mean that 4 chan allows CSAM for certain regions? Yikes. “Children can be abused only in these countries” “I’m sorry but your countries laws prevent images of children being abused, so this content is banned”. Yikes.
maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.
Again, the technical issue isn’t on banning. Here’s the code to ban user at IP 1.2.3.4:
if ( $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’] === ‘1.2.3.4’ ) { die(‘nope!’); }
Here’s the code to ban a user at a specific region (pseudocode):
$geoip = new GeoIPDB(); $region = $geoip->get_region( ‘1.2.3.4’ ); if ( $region === ‘USA’ ) { die(‘nope!’); }
This isn’t difficult.
Now, for the code to DETECT CSAM:
look for skin tone tints (take into account all skin tone colors), look for quantity of skin on image (this would make close-ups of arms possible nude detections), detect a person in the photo, determine the person’s age by the photo… don’t detect images of art or of artful nudes, etc… or you know this is a lot of work, let’s make the humans detect instead.
Region banning would prevent anyone in the area from posting. I even mentioned that I use to come across bans for other people. In the case of 4chan, when they region ban, its possible someone else will be prevented from posting.
Not to mention, does this now mean that 4 chan allows CSAM for certain regions? Yikes No its against their TOS entirely. It’s readable on their site and they do enforce rules even though they also enable people to be shitty in other ways.
Now, if you want to talk about legality in other countries - that’s a different discussion. The internet is open to the WORLD. And all I would be comfortable confirming is that it’s definitely illegal in the US where I am. I’m not gonna get into other countries where it might not be illegal. I don’t know enough about those places to be able to tell you more.
Basically a region ban would be similar to just pulling that instance down. Preventing whatever region that person was posting in would prevent them from posting as well as making local accounts to try and post more.
When I would be downtown where I live, and got a ban that wasn’t meant for me, but I was in the region that was banned, I was able to appeal my ban. In order to appeal, you have to be good at using your words because a person has to sit there and read the appeal to make the decision to unban or not. Mine always went through but I also am capable of talking things out and I’m smart enough to know when to properly explain myself.
Other people didn’t get their appeals and I would see them complain about it elsewhere.
Anyway, you don’t need to condescend to me. I’m not against what you’re saying. I agree with a lot of what you said in other comments.
I don’t think the comment above was trying to express dissatisfaction towards Lemmy’s hosts for failure to respond. They’re simply stating that the way things are all set up, much as we might like it, has serious problems - ones that may end up being considered unsolvable. As you said, we might be heading for an eventual plug pull.
It’s like pointing out that cars produce fossil fuel exhaust. It sucks, and we’re seeing it as unsustainable, but there’s no convenient alternative yet.
Things are setup the way they are because it’s the best way that admins (not just of lemmy instances but of major sites like reddit and facebook) have found to handle these situations.
You could take it a step further and give law enforcement their own backdoor to your site, as Facebook has done, but I would not advocate for that solution. We are in a special place in the internet where we can somewhat self-police our own content, assuming we actually self-police our own content. The way we do this is the way these admins are currently handling this.
It may be reasonable to think that sites like reddit and facebook have it all figured out, but all they have is similar code to what lemmy has, but with a bit more money to pay some content moderators on trust and safety to actually remove this content before users get a chance to see it. The difference between those sites and lemmy is $$$ and that’s not something that’s likely to change anytime soon.
Sorry to hear about your investment in lemmy. How much did you end up investing? It just sounds like you’re very unsatisified with the value that lemmy has provided.
Personally, I don’t pay for lemmy. Lemmy is free as for as I understood it. As it being free, I can’t really dictate the legal risk that the admins have to go through, as I do not have power over them, and because I treat them as humans.
But yeah, I guess if you have a good reason, they really should be falling over backwards to moderate all the CSAM away from your favorite community. You are an all-powerful being.
I feel like you didn’t actually read their comment before posting, !dipshit@lemmy.world
It has nothing to do with Lemmyshitpost being their “favorite community” and they never mentioned “investing” or “value”. That’s all from you. Stop strawmanning their position. They were criticizing the ease with which entire communities can be taken down by single individuals. Additionally, it seems you are contradicting your own post from 20 minutes prior to your current comment. Perhaps you responded to the wrong comment?
Fyi, admins have the protection of federal law to not be held responsible, as long as they take action when it happens.
They have very low to zero legal risk, as long as they’re doing their job.
IANAL, but I can read laws.
Fyi, admins have the protection of federal law to not be held responsible, as long as they take action when it happens.
Correct, emphasis mine. As long as they take action when it happens being the key phrase here.
IANAL but from what I understand, doing something to take action (removing content, disabling communites, banning users, all of the above) shows that they are working to remove the content. This is why previously when having conversations with people about the topic of piracy I mentioned DCMA takedown notices and how the companies I’ve worked at responded to those with extreme importance (sometimes the higher ups would walk over to the devs and make sure the content was deleted).
I’m annoyed at people in this thread who believe that the admins did the wrong thing, because turning off communities could cause users to go to another instance - who cares, this is bigger than site engagement. I’m annoyed at people who think that the devs had access to code which could prevent this issue but chose not to implement that code - this is a larger and much more difficult problem that can’t just be coded away, it usually involves humans to verify the code is working and correct false-positives and false-negatives.
You misunderstood what I meant by the part that you highlighted of my comment.
I’m speaking of Safe Harbor provisions, not having to take active DCMA actions. They’re two very different things.
Everyone got your sarcasm. We just think the Lemmyverse has no chance when it’s flooded with child porn
I’m a victim of CSAM and my dad exploited me for several websites.
I get being upset about this. But it’s not the end of the world for a site. Lemmy is still totally fine and I have been using it without seeing any CSAM and the only knowledge I even have of this is from posts like OP’s.
Like this isn’t a good time to be just down on the site and pessimistic.
We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.
It’s likely that we’ll be seeing a large number of instances switch to whitelist based federation instead of the current blacklist based one, especially for niche instances that does not want to deal with this at all (and I don’t blame them).
Basically ruins the fediverse concept, as it will ultimately lock out all small instances of self hosted instances, which really is a shame.
I mean, you could have some sort of application system and allow instances to pull from you by default. That way you’re “read only” until approved by other instances
Sounds a lot like email where it is really difficult to self-host your own email server since you’ll be flagged as spam. It seemed like something that would happen to Lemmy eventually, but I didn’t think it would be a strong possibility this soon.
I don’t think it does, since self hosters can just federated with any number of instances they would like to interact with and not worry about the rest.
Those instances would have to actively fedeate with the self-hosters though. Blacklist is better than whitelist - keep the internet open.
Although a blacklist also wouldn’t stop someone from firing up their instance, and posting CSAM to the bigger instances that way.
It’s a downside of the Federation model. If an instance is blacklisted, they could just shut it down, fire up a new one, and get around it that way.
Whitelisting basically puts power in the hands of a few and suddenly the fediverse is capable of being bought. I’d prefer looking into other options if possible prior to essentially putting the nail in the coffin of an open fediverse.
Sounds like the 4chan raids of old.
Batten down, report the offender’s to the authorities, and then clean up the mess!
Good job so far _
Yeah, in good and in bad, this place is a lot like “the old days of the internet”, but thankfully more in the good way than the bad. People keep complaining about shit I haven’t seen for a second, constantly there are actions from the mod/admin side about shit I’ve never even seen etc. Even without proper mod tools and shit it seems like everything is working out quite well. To which I and all of us owe a huge thank you to the people working on this stuff.
Thank you people! Thank you for making this place feel like home and something greater than what we’ve had for a long ass time.
Mods, Keep yourself safe, be open to your support groups (dont isolate),
clearshread (overrite with garbage) your cache oftenWe will get thru this together
Thank you for your work to keep that despicable trash out of our feeds. Sorry you have to deal with it. Fuck those losers.
How does closing lemmyshitpost do anything to solve the issue? Isn’t it a foregone conclusion that the offenders would just start targeting other communities or was there something unique about lemmyshitpost that made it more susceptible?
It stops their instance hosting CSAM and removes their legal liability to deal with something they don’t have the capacity to at this point in time.
How would you respond to having someone else forcibly load up your pc with child porn over the Internet? Would you take it offline?
How would you respond to having someone else forcibly load up your pc with child porn over the Internet? Would you take it offline?
But that’s not what happened. They didn’t take the server offline. They banned a community. If some remote person had access to my pc and they were loading it up with child porn, I would not expect that deleting the folder would fix the problem. So I don’t understand what your analogy is trying to accomplish because it’s faulty.
Also, I think you are confusing my question as some kind of disapproval. It isn’t. If closing a community solves the problem then I fully support the admin team actions.
I’m just questioning whether that really solves the problem or not. It was a community created on Lemmy.world, not some other instance. So if the perpetrators were capable of posting to it, they are capable of posting to any community on lemmy.world. You get that, yeah?
My question is just a request for clarification. How does shutting down 1 community stop the perpetrators from posting the same stuff to other communities?
It’s not meant to solve the problem, it’s meant to limit liability.
How does it limit liability when they could continue posting that content to any/every other community on lemmy.world?
Genuine question: won’t they just move to spamming CSAM in other communities?
I assume you’ve contacted the FBI, but if not PLEASE DO.
lemmy.world is based in Finland.
Yes, the Finnish Bureau of Investigation
They’re the ones that can finish the job.
In that case probably Europol or the Finnish police/cybersecurity agency or something?
Didn’t realize that. Thanks.
Most people in the world don’t live in that one very specific country, it’s somewhat presumptuous to assume they do, and I’m a bit tired of those assumptions only ever coming from people from a very specific place.
I put up with it for a long while without saying anything, but it’s been 15 years and they’re doing it more now than ever. I’m kinda… worn down now.
Can’t we all just accept that the world is vast and amazing, and exists beyond our own borders? :-(
It’s not that deep
Can’t we all just accept that the world is vast and amazing, and exists beyond our own borders? :-(
So can I count on you to make sure every comment you make on social media doesn’t incorrectly reference the wrong country, culture, or generally get something wrong?
Y’all act like Americans just get up in the morning and say “to hell with it, everywhere is 'Merica.” The person just tried to help; hell they might not even be an American and just assumed (at least) one of the site admins is.
it’s been 15 years and they’re doing it more now than ever
The pure unnecessary drama over what’s easily a simple mistake is ridiculous. I can’t even comprehend why you even care? And beyond that, why not just tell this person “well actually, it’s X they should call because Y”?
Yes. Everywhere I go Americans (and us Dutch) act like the entire world is theirs. (but I’m American! Or in case of us Dutch: ik zit hier en ik moet bier. En die bbq gaat niet uit. En techno moet hard.)
I more or less concur with the other guy. He said it in a shitty way though.
Problem is, there is no “world police”. ('obligatory: ’ MURICA FUCK YEAH!)
Calling the FBI, Essex police department, Clouseau’s Surete or even interpol will do jack shit in 99% of these cases because of the simple fact they don’t have any jurisdiction. Add to that they couldn’t care less because narcotics and gang violence are bigger problems and you end up with reality: it will only cost time and solve nothing. Why? Because IT crimes are hard and often times pricey to investigate with very little returns. (yeeeh, we arrested a 14 year old pimply faced youth, a minor so he will be out in 2 days with a slap on the wrist)
And finally: The FBI does not have global reach. This is a global platform.
The FBI work hand in hand with the CIA, who can and do set up black sites all over the world for enhanced interrogation and extrajudicial detention, and work extremely closely with the Five Eyes and NATO. I’d call that global reach.
Wat betekent moet bier of moet hard?
In this context:
“ik moet bier” - I need beer/I must have beer (literally “I must beer”)
“techno moet hard” - Techno (music) must (go) hard.
I vaguelly recognize this whole thing as a dutch saying. (Not dutch myself)
The wordplay because “moet” there is used with two slightly different meanings, as “having need” and as “must”.
Yeah I’ve just not seen moet alone like that. I like it lol.
And finally: The FBI does not have global reach. This is a global platform.
The FBI does work with Interpol, and every national police agency the US is friendly with.
It’s not a crazy leap of faith to assume Lemmy demographics are similar to reddit demographics, where the USA makes up the plurality by a huge margin https://www.statista.com/statistics/325144/reddit-global-active-user-distribution/
a lot of the fediverse is rooted in the EU so I’m not entirely sure the demographics are 1:1 with reddit.
Ah, so there’s a 53% chance that contacting the FBI is pointless advice, gotcha
It’s always fun to see Americans assume the Internett is all American as well.
They* should contact Europol.
they should contact the local authorities thats the easiest probably
They probably haven’t. Also they won’t do anything as long as you aren’t a large cooperation. Even if you are they might not do anything. See the Epic Games hack in the early 2000s
Please get some legal advice, this is so fucked up.
