this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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We have temporarily locked posting on AskLemmy until the CSAM posting stops.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't lemmy allow the communities to only allow text as posts? Could be a future feature

[–] [email protected] 73 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I feel like this is an underrated idea. Resonates with the whole thing of making a subset of the internet simpler and just like documents, as with the simpler protocols like Gemini etc.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (5 children)

That would still allow links to be posted. Better than allowing image posts, but not a complete solution.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago

It prevents concerns about hosting CSAM posted by someone else. A categorical improvement I’d say. But yes, nothing’s perfect.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Still better than nothing. Easier for mods of text-only communities to only have text-only posts submitted.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

If we then add a few conditions: "no links in the root message" and "OP may not be the first to comment within some unspecified amount of time," that could make it even easier to limit CSAM.

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 9 months ago (4 children)

CSAM? What is CSAM? Is it a rewrite of "scam"?

Googles...

Oh no. Oh no no no. Why are people so fucking shit?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

Sometimes, when it's too hard to be better and it's easier to be worse, people choose to be worse just to feel different than what they are.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Child Sexual Abuse Material.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Today is a bad day to be named Sam.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

See Sam.

See Sam run.

See Sam run down to the appropriate bureaucratic office to change their name to something else.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy.world is hosted on Cloudflare and Cloudflare has tools to prevent CSAM uploads. https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Important note, this feature is only available for US customers.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Also important to note: this feature will only really work against real CSAM. The images that were posted to this community weren't real CSAM but were pictures/gifs of adult models, with titles/captions that would imply they were CSAM. I don't think Cloudflare can do much about those.

At least, the handful of posts that I saw were like this. I'm doubtful that the guy doing this is uploading actual CSAM to the clearnet.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I hope you’re right, because as someone that sometimes browses by new I keep seeing it and it’s upsetting as fuck to think it could be real.

It’s weird they’re targeting asklemmy communities in particular, I don’t think the .ml and .world communities are even related are they?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Nah, they're completely separate communities, so no real link that I can see there.

I dug around a bit, and one of the sites he was using to host the images was some weird 4chan-like image board. But it seems like he may have been trolling them, too, because even though it's a degenerate board full of racist garbage, it's not otherwise full of CSAM, and his posts were also deleted from that board eventually, too. So I don't think they were willingly hosting those images, either. I mention this because I saw some people calling to ban links to that domain, which probably should still be done because it's a trash website, but not because it's a CSAM haven of any sort.

It makes me think that this isn't targeted at any one community, just some random weirdo trying to make the internet a worse place wherever he can.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well... it seems there's some issue with post removal federation. There's still 2 posts visible from my home instance.

And now it's definitely cached on our instance. And every other instance with pict-rs enabled.
This is what makes me scared of self hosting an instance. I would basically be hosting it. And I would be responsible for such content.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ok, this is interesting. There was one just posted to [email protected], but it got removed from my instance as well.

The account looks deleted from lemm.ee, not found on lemmy.world, banned on lemmy.ml, and empty on lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Perhaps it's account deletion that doesn't federate properly.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

account deletion does not federate in general, only banning (+ content removal) does

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Is there a way AskLemmy and other major communities could prevent new users from making posts in the future?

Like an account has to be over a month old to post for example. Maybe that could help prevent these kinds of disgusting attacks

I don't know if Lemmy has a moderator tool available that could do something like that though.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (9 children)

I don't quite like that idea. It's something I really hated on Reddit. It just discourages new people from joining. Besides, you could self host an instance with accounts claiming to be made in 1970.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately there aren't many great options right now. No one likes it, but people posting CSAM are the ones to blame there. They quite literally ruin it for everyone because they're butthurt about something happening they didn't like

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do we know what they are butthurt about? There is never an excuse for what they are doing, but I’m curious what happened to set it off if a reason I known

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nope, they're too cowardly to use their actual accounts and are making them anonymously. All we know is that rather than being mature about a mod action and simply leaving and creating an account elsewhere they decided to do this.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Gotcha. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Good point. I didn't think about how easy that would be to fake.

That said I would still prefer it to some subreddit's cryptic karma requirements. If it worked I mean.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (19 children)

And here's the spot where I point out that using a blockchain for recording accounts would be a good technological fit for a decentralized system like the Fediverse, and then get pilloried for being a "cryptobro" or whatever.

Seriously, all that you'd need to use the blockchain for would be a basic record of "this account holder has this name on that instance" and you get all sorts of unspoofable benefits from that. No tokens, no fancy authentication if you don't want it, just a distributed database that you can trust.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (5 children)

this account holder has this name on that instance

How would that help? A spam bot could just make lots of blockchain wallets.

you get all sorts of unspoofable benefits from that

what are the benefits? I struggle to come up with any benefits.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Instead of preempting criticism/downvotes, perhaps it would help to more clearly describe what kind of implementation of blockchain you mean?

If it would still involve some questionable consent mechanism that either consumes a large amount of energy (Proof-of-Work) or may benefit larger stakeholders (Proof-of-Stake), then even setting aside the cryptocurrency associations, I'm not sure it's necessarily worth it. However, if I'm not mistaken, there are implementations that may not require those, but may still provide the sort of benefit you're suggesting, aren't there?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Maybe. Some discussion going on at the moment about how to handle it.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Some could go to [email protected] too but tbh I think the user base as a whole is still too low for these differences to be meaningful to most people.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

This is exactly what they wanted.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

Thanks goddamn, WTF is wrong with people?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Thank you for your work on it

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

i don't think that's going to be very effective. i havent seen any of this but it sounds like a sybil attack. asklemmy isn't the only vector. lemmy.world is going to need to do something, possibly drastic.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

It's not even just lemmy.world, the same user is reposting to ask lemmy on lemmy.ml now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What are the victory conditions or payoff for someone posting that here?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago

Payoff: could be related to the coming Reddit IPO, to make alternatives unappealing or unsustainable.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I suggest limiting new accounts from uploading photos for 3 days, to prevent abuse.

3 days should be enough to make most people think twice before doing something so stupid, harmful and illegal. Most users don't upload photos right as they sign up anyway so this effect to legitimate use should be negligible.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

Sweet summer child.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

that doesn't do anything, they'll just register accounts in advance and wait some days.

we've even had spam recently from accounts that had been dormant for months, although it was a different kind of spam.

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