Lemmyshitpost community closed until further notice

Feathercrown, 10 months ago

Fuck these trolls

expatriado, 10 months ago

troll is too mild of an adjective for these people

Feathercrown, 10 months ago

How about “pedophile”? I mean, they had to have the images to post them.

jarfil, 9 months ago

“Terrorist”. Having the images doesn’t mean they liked them, they used them to terrorize a whole community though.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

“Petophilile enabled Terrorist” or “petophilic terrorist” depending on the person

It still means they can tolerate CSAM or are normalized to it enough that they can feel anything other than discust during “shipping and handling”.

AlpacaChariot, 9 months ago

All of your comments have “banned” next to them for me (logged in via lemmy.world using Liftoff) - any idea why?

I assume you’re not actually banned…?

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

They were banned because they were defending pedophilia (advocating for them to be able to get off to what turns them on) and also trolling very aggressively. You can look at them in the Modlog on the Website, not sure if Apps implement the modlog yet though.

AlpacaChariot, 9 months ago

Ah thanks, I’ve seen it a few times but thought it was a bug. Why are people like this!

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

I have not clue, people can be quite toxic and horrible. Also noticed that they reduced his ban, not sure why, defending pedophilia is pretty bad and definitely carries legal risk but it’s not my call to make.

jarfil, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, got banned for forgetting that some axioms give people free pass to say whatever they want, no matter how they say it… and replying in kind is forbidden. My bad.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

You were banned because you were arguing for why people shouldn’t be arrested for possession of CSAM material, trolling and straw-manning in the replies, and on top of that attempting to seriously and honestly advocate for pedophiles on another community, which is at best borderline illegal (anyone can check the modlog on that one if they don’t believe me, I wouldn’t make such claims if they weren’t true).

So to summerize you were banned for

• Trolling
• Promoting Illegal Activities (Pedophilla and CSAM)

PM_Your_Nudes_Please, 9 months ago

Yeah, this isn’t just joking or shitposting. This is the kind of shit that gets people locked up in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for decades. The feds don’t care if you sought out the CSAM, because it still exists on your device regardless of intent.

The laws about possessing CSAM are written in a way that any plausible deniability is removed, specifically to prevent pedophiles from being able to go “oh lol a buddy sent that to me as a joke” and getting acquitted. The courts don’t care why you have CSAM on your server. All they care about is the fact that you do. And since you own the server, you own the CSAM and they’ll prosecute you for it.

gammasfor, 9 months ago

And not just the instance admins would be at risk as well. Any time you view an image your device is making a local copy of it. Meaning every person who viewed the image even accidentally is at risk as well.

CharlesDarwin, 9 months ago

Sounds like a digital form of SWATing.

pensivepangolin, 9 months ago

Yeah honestly report all of those accounts to law enforcement. It’s unlikely they’d be able to do much, I assume, but these people are literally distributing CSAM.

Whitehat93875, 10 months ago

That’s not a troll, CSAM goes well beyond trolling, pedophile would be a more accurate term for them.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

A person who is attracted to children is an evil and disgusting person, someone being a pedophile isn’t just “liking something”, they are a monster.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

This is a serious problem we are discussing, please don’t use this as an opportunity to inject bad-faith arguments.

Edit: Wow your post history is a lot of the same garbage, there is no point in attempting to reason with you, you seem to be defending the act of CSAM or just trolling (really awful and severe trolling I might add, CSAM isn’t something to joke or troll about).

jarfil, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

Ah I see what’s going on, you’re salty that they closed the shitposting community so you’re trolling here, going so far as to compare gays and jews to pedophillia (which is extremely bigoted and incorrect) or downplay the horrific acts that led to the closing of that community and registrations to protect the rest of the Instance’s well being.

Also I’d appreciate it if you didn’t edit what I said when quoting me, thanks.

jarfil, 9 months ago

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Whitehat93875, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Amazing, you think that being against pedophiles makes someone a bigot, do you think the same applies to being against Nazis as well? Paradox of tolerance much?

There’s a very clear difference between the arguments you cited and pedophilia, which is that pedophilia causes physical and psychological harm to the child who is the victim and also is extremely psychologically harmful to the people who witness such event or the abuse material from it. I don’t think you realize how severe this is or you wouldn’t be trying to defend such heinous acts right now.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

🤓

AceLucario, 9 months ago

Nothing you say matters, because you’re defending pedophiles. Whoops.

jarfil, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

Lol you do realize blocking on Lemmy means to ignore them, it’s not going to silence them or more critically prevent them from downvoting or reporting you like it does on Reddit.

You’re just going to stop seeing them, they can keep calling you out for it. You just made it easier for them.

AceLucario, 9 months ago

Oh no. Anyways…

else, 9 months ago

People spreading CSAM are beyond terrible, but I don’t agree with this generalization. Pedophiles don’t choose to be pedophiles, so as long as they control themselves and avoid harming anyone, I don’t like labelling them as evil monsters.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

Okay, fair enough. I wasn’t considering those people since they’ll never really be labelled pedophiles due to hiding their mental illness from the world (only really disclosing it to mental health professionals if ever) and never acting on it. It’s the actions committed or fantasies endorsed that differentiate someone from merely being mentally ill or a monster.

**Disclaimer:**Would like to say, it is valid for me or anyone else to say pedophiles are mentally ill but it is not valid to say that gay people are mentally ill, homosexuality is a legitimate sexual orientation because people pursuing homosexual attractions with other consenting adults does not harm others, (this is not debatable and I WILL report any homophobic arguments I see popping up as a result here) however pedophilia is not like this at all because anyone who pursues it will cause harm because children cannot consent and therefore these interactions are harmful to them and anyone involved, which is why it is a mental illness (again this is also not debatable, anything that causes harm to others by acting on it is not a valid orientation but a mental illness, same thing goes for rapists).

else, 9 months ago

I wasn’t considering those people since they’ll never really be labelled pedophiles due to hiding their mental illness from the world (only really disclosing it to mental health professionals if ever) and never acting on it.

I guess this is also the difference between getting caught or not. To me, rapist that is never caught is still a rapist even if they are never labelled as such, so a pedophile that hides it forever successfully is still a pedophile.

Disclaimer

Yes agreed.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

I guess this is also the difference between getting caught or not. To me, rapist that is never caught is still a rapist even if they are never labelled as such, so a pedophile that hides it forever successfully is still a pedophile.

Agreed. If they did it but hid it and never were publicly labeled as a pedophile they are still a pedophile because of their actions and intentions, even if they were never caught and/or cancelled/convicted for it.

khannie, 9 months ago

Simply having it to post makes you culpable. It’s way beyond trolling.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

PeleSpirit, 9 months ago

Are you promoting the acceptance of pedophilia? Cuz that’s what it sounds like and maybe they should start looking at your account first.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

Do you know why we have possession laws against CSAM in the first place? It’s because people buy and sell abuse material in underground markets, it’s another way they profit off the abuse of children. This is nothing like drug possession laws (which are stupid) because the product is literally a direct product of the abuse of children that many of the people in possession likely helped the criminals in order to obtain it (either directly or by paying them for it).

So yes in this case it does make sense to criminally charge people for possession of something like this considering the direct connection CSAM has to child trafficking and child sexual abuse and when you defend it by going against possession laws it makes it seem like you support these criminals.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

GodzillaFanboy129, 9 months ago

Oh boy do we have a very hot take here don’t we, lmao this guy just tried to compare someone smoking a joint, doing shrooms, or even cocaine to the act of sexually abusing a child and trying to sell the pictures.

Don’t even bother engaging with this guy, he’s clearly a troll mindlessly parroting other people’s arguments, report, block, move on.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

Oh by the way, MAP stuff really doesn’t look good on you (that’s in your comment history). Yeah maybe you think I’m a terrible person because I think drugs should be treated less harshly but you have literally said in other comments that Pedophiles should be allowed to get off on what turns them on (which I remind you is exploitation of Minors). That is a very different stance than people shouldn’t be beaten and arrested for snorting coke, you’re literally advocating for people to be allowed to produce and consume abuse material and claiming that it’s acceptable for people to be pedophiles, and pursue their attractions instead of getting help. I don’t know how you don’t see what is wrong with that. Like seriously this is either really bad trolling (way too far) or, you’re one of them.

Too bad, I’m “kid agnostic”; they might as well be cars or dragons —drawn or otherwise—, I don’t care whether they’re “kid” or “grownup” cars or dragons.

I think I now know which one it is if that statement from the horse’s mouth is to be believed…

HelloHotel, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

A lot of stuff the government bans doesnt align with morrality. In this instance it fucken does

Yes getting someone to drop this on your hard drive even if its explicitly labeled “cache” is equivilant to evidence planting. It puts you in danger of our laws falsely finding you guilty (misunderstandings are a thing, i dont know the level of risk). The advice by our governments is “delete it emedately”. Follow it as completely as you can. Most devices dont broadcast your harddrive contents without warning, giving you time to delete it. For this being false for iphones, Its a risk to ones personal freedom to go on lemmy on an iphone until we can get this CSAM issue resolved.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

What he’s saying is FBI CHECK THAT GUY’S HARD DRIVE!

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

FBI doesn’t use pitchforks bud, they have tasers and guns.

jarfil, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

🤓

PeleSpirit, 9 months ago

And I think we all agree with that.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

I had no idea how right I was at the time I commented that, since I hadn’t scrolled far back enough in his comment history but yeah, way more right than I would’ve liked 😬

HelloHotel, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Yes, its a virus, the FBI will target anyone who is a host. anyone Who has it on their drive, (edit: intent may be relivant, im no expert). The only way to stay safe is to rid yourself of it. Delete it.

Lemmy mods, keep yourself safeplease dont use an iphone to moderate, if your on linux (i think windows too) use bleachbit on your browser cache and do the “vaccuum” operation. On android - to clear cache or better written instructions here- go to where you see all your apps - find your client - tap and hold on its icon - tap “app info” - go to “storage” - tap “clear cache” - (if your parranoid “clear data” and loose you sign in, settings and other local data). - To manually vaccum, vant find better instructions - download an app called “termux”, it doesnt need any permissions for this task. - when you see a black screen with text, type clear and hit enter, - Then type or paste { echo writing big file of random; cat /dev/urandom >file-gets-big; rm file-gets-big -v; }- And hit enter Your phone and the program cat will complain About being out of storage, if rm gets run, it will be fixed again. If it still complains or termux crashes, uninstall and reinstall termux, the vaccum process is finished Some people know at a glance wether these steps are safe or not, others do not. never follow instructions you dont understand, verify that i havent led you do somthing dumb.

FlyingSquid, 9 months ago

I’d say the proper word is ‘criminal.’

CoderKat, 9 months ago

Yeah. A troll might post something like a ton of oversized images of pig buttholes. Who the fuck even has access to CSAM to post? That’s something you only have on hand if you’re a predator already. Nor is it something you can shrug off like “lol I was only trolling”. It’s a crime that will send you to jail for years. It’s a major crime that gets entire police units dedicated to it. It’s a huuuuge deal and I cannot even fathom what kind of person would risk years in prison to sabotage an internet forum.

HawlSera, 9 months ago

My thoughts exactly, like if they were just spamming goatsee or something, that would be one thing…

But this raises several questions, and they can only have grimdark answers.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago

Dont forget they are doing this to harm others, they deserve the name “e-terrorist” or simmlar. hey are still absolutely pedophiles. Their bombing out a space, not trying to set up shop.

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

I would definately agree that this would very likely count as cyber terrorism, and if it doesn’t it should.

GreenMario, 9 months ago

Criminals.

RightHandOfIkaros, 9 months ago

Trolls? In most regions of the planet, I am fairly certain their actions would be considered criminal.

DLSchichtl, 9 months ago

To be fair, that is exactly what trolls did in the wild west days of the net. Back when not many people had home computers, much less the internet. CP and gore, the proverbial shit flung by the troll chimps.

3ntranced, 9 months ago

The Internet is essentially a small microbiome of beautiful flora and fauna that grew on top of a lake of sewage.

jarfil, 9 months ago

The Internet is a reflection of humanity, minus some of the fear of getting punched in the face.

PM_Your_Nudes_Please, 9 months ago

Yeah, back in the Limewire/Napster/etc days, it wasn’t unheard of for people to troll by relabeling CSAM as a popular movie or TV show. Oh, you wanted to download the latest Friends episode? Congrats, now you have CSAM because a troll uploaded it with the title “Friends S10E7.mov”

figaro, 9 months ago

Lemmy devs NEED to get mod tools out asap. Approved posts only, whitelisting users for communities, etc.

helloharu, 9 months ago

Honestly, as a moderator of a community this shit concerns me to no end. We desperately need more tools.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

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.

Downvote this message if you are a pedophile, as I’m taking the stance that CSAM should not be allowed on lemmy servers.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

Are you seriously conflating my position with arguing that CSAM should be allowed?

dipshit, 9 months ago

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.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

I think commenters are getting a little uppity

What praytell the fuck do you mean by this term specifically

dipshit, 9 months ago

I’ve spent the better part of this morning explaining to people the fact that a community needs to be shut down in order for volunteers to work on cleaning it up in the time they have available.

commenters seem to be pretty upset that something as “drastic” as turning off a community needs to be done. Some commenters have gone so far as to say that the policy of turning off communities in response to handling CSAM is what will “kill the fediverse”.

I think the normal response to this is: “Wow, this sucks. Thanks admins for doing your best work. I understand the community make not come back for a bit, take all the time you need!”. Yet, I hear “it’s the dev’s fault for not putting in the code for blocking CSAM and taking a community offline is unacceptable”. I call that “upity” but there’s probably better words for it.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago

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.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago

I mentioned this before but I’m sorry that I didn’t see who I was responding to. I usually respond on the internet to ideas, not people. Today I’ve been responding a lot to the idea that CSAM is easy to fix and that for reasons unknown it just hasn’t been done with lemmy and the way it’s being done with lemmy isn’t “the right way”.

GeoIP databases aren’t perfect, which is another problem entirely. It’s better than pulling the plug on the entire internet, sure, but it has its own problems.

I was responding to the idea of gating csam content via geoip as “yikes” because I can’t find myself personally allowing CSAM in some countries, because it’s “legal” in those countries. This is a moral argument I’m making, but I am happy imposing the US law as it relates to CSAM being illegal (not US law such as FOSTA/KOSA, etc… those are a different can of worms entirely) on other countries. Or to put it another way, as an admin, if I get an email saying “actually bro in country xyz we get to abuse children”, it won’t sway me into allowing that content in that country. IF someone in that country wants to put up a site for that country, that’s their problem (and if I could intervene and prevent them from doing so, I would).

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Today I’ve been responding a lot to the idea that CSAM is easy to fix and that for reasons unknown it just hasn’t been done with lemmy and the way it’s being done with lemmy isn’t “the right way”.

Right, it’s definitely not an easy fix and Lemmy doesn’t even operate the way other sites do but today I’m learning that using these instances seems to be easily exploitable.

The reason I mentioned region banning is because it definitely worked. There weren’t people uploading 10000 images of CSA cause if you tried to, you’d get banned so hard that you’d ruin it for other people posting near by.

I was responding to the idea of gating csam content via geoip as “yikes” because I can’t find myself personally allowing CSAM in some countries, because it’s “legal” in those countries

I agree. Honestly, if I was in charge in anyway - those countries just wouldn’t be allowed access. And that does happen. I use to work for an app where we had people working in the Philippines who couldn’t access the app itself. We had to just give them info and they would feed it to the customers. And it was because their country is blocked from viewing the app in the first place. They’re just straight up not allowed to use it there.

Like I’m totally with you. Fuck MAPs, fuck all of em. If some archaic country still participates in something that is obviously harmful to people - yeah, impose these laws on them. Tell them to fuck off until they stop this shit.

And lets be real. It’s gonna be years before they ever stop.

dipshit, 9 months ago

The reason I mentioned region banning is because it definitely worked. There weren’t people uploading 10000 images of CSA cause if you tried to, you’d get banned so hard that you’d ruin it for other people posting near by.

That’s an interesting point. I didn’t take into account that 4chan might use region banning as a way to shame other anons by removing access from their country. That’s an interesting approach and I guess that’s something that lemmy admins could use in their toolbag. Users would absolutely hate it more than a simple community being banned, but whatever works or at least helps decrease the amount of this in existance.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Oh right, and it wasn’t country based. I’m in a large city and only the downtown region of my city was banned. If I went back home, I could easily get on the site and post.

dipshit, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, there isn’t any geographic information required when giving out ip addresses. Companies like MaxMind maintain a large “GeoIP” database that tries to match IP address with location and is pretty good, but isn’t 100%. VPNs also make the situation worse, as it sounds like with 4chan someone could vpn to a country they didn’t like, post CSAM and get that country banned. It also means users can circumvent the banings with VPNs. All of this makes the entire region banning pretty useless. It’s value comes likely comes from users who don’t know how to use VPNs, but do know what 4chan is.

And then there was the issue with people distributing CSAM via sprays on counterstrike servers. Just joining a server would mean downloading those sprays onto your machine without your knowledge, just so they could be visible in game (which is more or less how the web works anyway, but the point here was that someone could create hundreds of sprays with CSAM and then even if not used, every player would have that content somewhere on their computer.

Edit: not sure why I brought up the counterstrike thing. I think I was trying to make the point thats unfortunately sometimes this material seems to be weaponized. All around awful.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Yeah I mean, I only mentioned how they do this on 4chan with region bans because they have worked. Believe or not but people don’t just get VPNs to spam CP there.

They use to do that back in like what… 2005 ish? Maybe even into like 2008, or around that era? In all my years wasted on that site, no one was just spamming CP and getting away with it. It was always taken down quickly and the bans were put in place and the spamming of illegal content stopped.

And people there definitely use VPNs but to do things like torrent or pirate usually. They aren’t all dumb, they just have bad morals in general over there.

I’m familiar with the CS sprays you’re talking about! This was an issue in other games too where you could upload images as a spray to put on a wall in a game. I believe my ex and I use to spray the image from Goatse in one of the earlier Call of Duty games.

My ex ran his own server though. If someone uploaded CP, he would just ban them.

dragontamer, 9 months ago

Again, the technical issue isn’t on banning. Here’s the code to ban user at IP 1.2.3.4:

How does an IP Ban work when this attack came through a different, legitimate, federated Lemmy server?

Katana314, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

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.

Edit: Sarcasm on the internet doesn’t work well so let me be frank: admins aren’t responsible for going to jail for a user’s desire to post CSAM. admins have a right to shut down a community that posts CSAM or remove CSAM or any material they find objectionable from their site. Admins take on the legal risk of the content on the site and OWE USERS NOTHING. Y’all can “the customer is always right” all you want but if you aren’t the one paying you aren’t the customer and you aren’t right.

wanderingmagus, 9 months ago

I feel like you didn’t actually read their comment before posting, !dipshit

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?

dipshit, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I read it. Let’s read it together again.

I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse.

The developers who build lemmy aren’t able to put in CSAM blocking code. That’s not how this works. I assume the commenter meant to say “admins” here, as developers write the code, they don’t admin the sites. If a developer has a lemmy instance they admin, they they are both a dev and an admin. Lemmy wasn’t built for CSAM sharing specifically, it is a site that allows sharing of CSAM as much as reddit or facebook do. The devs can’t do much about this. The admins and mods can.

Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers.

Neat. Irrelevant, but cool.

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.

This I take issue with, and is what I mostly responded to.

“If taking the community down is the only option here” well no, it’s not. We could just get 100’s of mods to specifically address this one user’s posting of CSAM. Hey, anyone want to moderate the site? Oh right, and they’ll need to be vetted, and they’ll need to keep doing this on the side for free as volunteers since lemmy is volunteer run…

“that’s extremely insufficient” hard disagree. A community is liable for the content on it. If we put a CSAM post up on a site and leave it around for a few minutes, that’s one thing. If it’s left up for days and weeks, that’s quite another problem entirely. The minute that an admin or mod saw CSAM material, they did the right thing by shutting that down. Even if it means downtime for users. Oh no! Users can’t read lemmyshitpost and now the world is ending.

“and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.” Welcome to the internet, where all platforms are at the risk of uncontrolled spam. At first it was just email, but then it was bulletin boards, and then message boards, and then forums, and then community-moderated forums like reddit and lemmy. This has and will be a problem. This isn’t a new concern for lemmy devs or admins or mods, they all are aware that this can happen and is why they do what they do. Turning off the community is a viable option, and is what has happened in larger companies too while they cleaned up the mess.

Additionally, it seems you are contradicting your own post from 20 minutes prior to your current comment. Perhaps you responded to the wrong comment?

I’ve been very consistent in my arguments. Show me the contradiction and I’ll address it.

TL;DR: users cannot expect to be allowed to post CSAM material on lemmy instances. Allowing CSAM material to be up on lemmy instances constitutes a legal risk for admin owners, and thus we cannot leave it up. Blocking a community (even if it’s like the bestest and most favorited and most subscribed and everyone loves it and wow just super-duper community) is a viable means of blocking all CSAM on that community while it is cleaned up. To suggest that the community should have stayed online is assinine. To suggest that the admins should not have blocked a community to combat CSAM is assinine. Trust admins to do their jobs.

wanderingmagus, 9 months ago

They aren’t asking devs to be admins or for admins to be devs. They specifically called out the developers because code exists to filter child sexual abuse material, disseminated by organizations such as the FBI and law enforcement, which can be implemented for image uploading.

NOBODY in this comment section is advocating for uploading fucking child sexual abuse material. That is a strawman you are setting up. Nobody is advocating for allowing the uploading of child sexual abuse material, or for the “material to be up on lemmy instances”. NOBODY is suggesting that a single instance going down is “the world is ending”. NOBODY is asking for “100’s of mods to specifically address this one user’s posting of CSAM”.

You’re setting up a strawman argument nobody is proposing. The criticism is that, at this moment, the developers of Lemmy have not implemented a method for automatically vetting uploaded images for CSAM without requiring “100’s of mods”, which is what resulted in the condition that “taking the community down is the only option here”.

Perhaps the wording of the original post was not precise and accurate enough for your full and complete understanding of the intent and meaning behind it. In this post, I have attempted to elucidate that intent and meaning to a degree which I hope is understandable to you.

dipshit, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

They aren’t asking devs to be admins or for admins to be devs. They specifically called out the developers because code exists to filter child sexual abuse material, disseminated by organizations such as the FBI and law enforcement, which can be implemented for image uploading.

Yeah? I doubt this is true but I could be wrong. You make it sound like preventing CSAM is as simple as importing a library, something I find dubious. Companies have been trying to filter out this material in an automated fashion for decades and yet they still have to employ humans to do it manually because automated means don’t really work. This is why companies like Reddit, facebook have trust and safety teams to do this work.

Edit: I goggled and could not find this database. I’m thinking it’s a myth.

NOBODY in this comment section is advocating for uploading fucking child sexual abuse material. That is a strawman you are setting up. Nobody is advocating for allowing the uploading of child sexual abuse material, or for the “material to be up on lemmy instances”. NOBODY is suggesting that a single instance going down is “the world is ending”. NOBODY is asking for “100’s of mods to specifically address this one user’s posting of CSAM”.

ahem there were users who uploaded CSAM. Those are the users who were advocating for uploading CSAM, becuase they uploaded CSAM.

I’m literally arguing with people who are saying that they shouldn’t have shut down the community because it’s big and that shutting down the community (not CSAM) poses an threat to the fediverse. Maybe, but CSAM poses a legal threat, which is much greater than the threat of low engagement.

You’re setting up a strawman argument nobody is proposing. The criticism is that, at this moment, the developers of Lemmy have not implemented a method for automatically vetting uploaded images for CSAM without requiring “100’s of mods”, which is what resulted in the condition that “taking the community down is the only option here”.

Yeah, that doesn’t exist, as I’ve mentioned previously. You make it sound like getting CSAM off lemmy was as simple as writing some code - if it were, why doesn’t facebook and reddit do this?

Perhaps the wording of the original post was not precise and accurate enough for your full and complete understanding of the intent and meaning behind it. In this post, I have attempted to elucidate that intent and meaning to a degree which I hope is understandable to you.

You’re not understanding how CSAM detection works or is handled.

The grim reality is this: cameras exist, children exist, adults exist, the internet exists, and the second that a crime is committed, it is not added to an FBI database. If such as FBI database existed and IF it was useful (and not just a database of hashes for bit-perfect copies of CSAM) and IF it were updated when evidence of the crime surfaces… IF all of those things are true, THEN it means there’s still likely a huge swath of CSAM material still out there, that could be posted at any time, and that would NOT be detected.

Again ask yourself, IF such a database existed, then WHY does reddit, twitter, facebook, hell, why doesn’t every or any site use it?

Pedophiles, instead of downvoting me, why not explain yourself?

wanderingmagus, 9 months ago

As another commenter posted below:

But tools do exist. PhotoDNA by Microsoft. Although much more user-friendly implementation if you use Cloudflare, related links:

• blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/
• prostasia.org/…/csam-filtering-options-compared/
• prostasia.org/project/hall-of-fame/

As far as I am aware, every major site does use it in addition to manual vetting for any flagged “borderline” or “uncertain” results caught up in the filter.

Blaze, 9 months ago

Db0 even created a tool for Lemmy:

lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2896209

dipshit, 9 months ago

As far as I am aware, every major site does use it in addition to manual vetting for any flagged “borderline” or “uncertain” results caught up in the filter.

I think this is where you could be wrong here. I appreciate the links, I’ll look into those in more detail. My best understanding is that these tools generate so many false-positives and false-negatives that it’s not worth using them. It may be a first line of defense until real humans get to see them, but my point is that humans are still needed. When humans are included because the system isn’t 100%, it means humans do the labor and as such, with limited time, humans need to determine when they can do the labor - sometimes shutting down a community is the best way to stop the flood while they clean up the mess.

ricdeh, 9 months ago

This is just a matter of confirmation bias from your side now. You stubbornly refuse to accept factual information very helpfully delivered to you by users who have many better things to do than respond to your inquiries, and you dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that there are advanced and reliable automation tools available for the use case in question. And while you do all that, you belittle the other users in the community by referring to your supposedly superior knowledge and experience, however somehow failing to provide any data or secondary sources to back up your claims.

dipshit, 9 months ago

This is just a matter of confirmation bias from your side now. You stubbornly refuse to accept factual information very helpfully delivered to you by users who have many better things to do than respond to your inquiries, and you dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that there are advanced and reliable automation tools available for the use case in question. And while you do all that, you belittle the other users in the community by referring to your supposedly superior knowledge and experience, however somehow failing to provide any data or secondary sources to back up your claims.

Hello Richard, thanks for taking the time to present your criticism. I take some issue with it, but I believe it’s due to a misunderstanding. I’ll explain.

This is just a matter of confirmation bias from your side now.

I do think there is some confirmation bias at play here but I’m thinking you may be surprised where it’s coming from.

You stubbornly refuse to accept factual information very helpfully delivered to you by users who have many better things to do than respond to your inquiries, and you dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that there are advanced and reliable automation tools available for the use case in question.

This factual information, to the best as I can understand from reading the comments is that these tools exist. I don’t deny that they exist. I didn’t deny they exist.

users who have many better things to do than respond to your inquiries

Unfortunately, it would seem you are wrong here, as they have responded to my inquiries. Or, are you talking about the people who haven’t responded to my inquiries? Either way, I agree that there are people who have or haven’t responded to my inquiries that do have better things to do. What is also true is that the people who responded to my inquiries, even if they had better things to do, still responded to my inquires.

you dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that there are advanced and reliable automation tools available for the use case in question.

But, I didn’t, is the thing. In the cases where people have provided links to projects, I’ve thanked them. I’ve mentioned my skepticism and I’ve also wished them well on their projects.

“Advanced and reliable” are marketing terms, and I don’t really care to use them as they have no meaning. Advanced how? In that it uses neural networks? NEAT! reliable how? in that they work 100% of the time? That they don’t generate false-positives or false-negatives? That they don’t degrade the user experience? These are questions worth asking… but… let me be clear: they are questions worth asking for the sake of improving these tools and maintaining the user experience; these are not meant to discourage use of such tools. I believe admins should use all tools available to them, including turning the servers off if they need to - in that toolbelt includes ai based tools and scripts.

And while you do all that, you belittle the other users in the community by referring to your supposedly superior knowledge and experience, however somehow failing to provide any data or secondary sources to back up your claims.

Richard, is it, or can I call you dick?

Either way, Richard, I don’t claim to have superior knowledge. I honestly thought that would come across in my username. Sorry that it did not. I’m a dipshit.

Like, an actual dipshit. I’m dumber than a lot of people on here. That doesn’t mean that I’m the dumbest, but it doesn’t mean I’m the smartest either. I’m far from being the smartest on this site, and that’s not impostor syndrome. If I sound smart it’s just because I do know a bit on some topics relating to technology and development, and because I have many interests in many topics. What I have at best is a baseline understanding, and I try to remain humble about it. I got pretty emotional in this thread, calling people who disagreed with my very much hard-to-disagree-with stances that “CSAM bad” and “admins should feel free using all tools available to remove and prevent CSAM” names that got me a 3-day ban. A ban which is now ending, allowing me to finally respond to you.

You see the problem here is that the people I’ve been responding to are people who are misunderstanding some things, which I’m trying to clear up. I believe this is one of the main draw to any message board system, for most people. We like to communicate and share knowledge.

however somehow failing to provide any data or secondary sources to back up your claims.

I don’t walk around with sources handy for everything I say, ready to cite them in every single post. I also don’t see many people doing this. I don’t lie, and I’m happy to provide links, sources, whatever - when asked for them. No one’s asked for sources for my claims that “CSAM bad” or that “admins should feel free using all the tools available to them…” or even when I say that AI tools aren’t perfect and lead to false-positives and false-negatives. But, I can give them to you if you want to see them. I don’t talk out my ass. One easy example I’ve been giving people is what’s happening and has been happening for years to this one youtuber, who constantly gets her videos flagged as having a child in them, despite her being 30 and only having herself in her videos. Her experience is valid, as there are some people who will constantly be falsely identified (which again is just stating facts, not suggesting these tools shouldn’t be used - that would suggest that these tools cannot be improved, which they can and are).

Richard, your comment was a slam-dunk. I’m just not sure you hit the right net. Please let me know if I am misunderstanding anything.

Yours, Dipshit.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

The developers who build lemmy aren’t able to put in CSAM blocking code. That’s not how this works.

They absolutely can, and every forum under the sun has tools and extensions to help with this. Fucking 4chan has code specifically dedicated to deal with CSAM. You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Oh no! Users can’t read lemmyshitpost and now the world is ending.

Replace this with !technology, or !selfhosted, or !announcements. “Oh no, users can’t read the entire site” yes that is the definition of the end of the site.

You’re not seeing that this isn’t a lemmyshitpost issue, it’s an “any popular community on lemmy” issue. Snarkily taking potshots at lemmyshitpost as a community doesn’t change it.

Turning off the community is a viable option

It’s not “not an option”, it’s the last resort. It’s like saying that your only option to seeing a roach in your apartment is to burn the whole building down. Because doing it means you don’t have a community anymore, and without communities the site has no purpose.

dipshit, 9 months ago

They absolutely can, and every forum under the sun has tools and extensions to help with this. Fucking 4chan has code specifically dedicated to deal with CSAM. You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Cool, name them and give me links then. I could not find such on the internet. There is software that tries to detect this, but even youtube’s algorithm is incorrectly flagging fully clothed 30 year old women as children.

Links or you’re talking out your ass.

Replace this with !technology, or !selfhosted, or !announcements. “Oh no, users can’t read the entire site” yes that is the definition of the end of the site.

Replace a site with CSAM and you’ll find it’s not a site you’ll want to go to in the first place. READ the original post where it was mentioned this is a stop-gap measure.

You’re not seeing that this isn’t a lemmyshitpost issue, it’s an “any popular community on lemmy” issue. Snarkily taking potshots at lemmyshitpost as a community doesn’t change it.

You’re… offended that I had snark on the topic of lemmySHITPOST? surely, you are joking.

My point is not that this community is shit and that’s why this happened.

My point is that this is a community on a lemmy instance that was flooded with CSAM, and was shutdown because of the flood of CSAM.

It’s not “not an option”, it’s the last resort. It’s like saying that your only option to seeing a roach in your apartment is to burn the whole building down. Because doing it means you don’t have a community anymore, and without communities the site has no purpose.

You do see how turning a community off and then on again isn’t the same thing as burning down a house (and unburning it again?)

You do realize that we’re talking about a literal crime against children vs your ability to see memes? Fuck off with your self-importance.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

Replace a site with CSAM and you’ll find it’s not a site you’ll want to go to in the first place.

Are you being intentionally dense or do you not understand that it’s my point? If someone can flood lemmy with CSAM so easily that the only way to stop it is a site shutdown, then there are not sufficient mitigation measures in place.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Are you being intentionally dense or do you not understand that it’s my point? If someone can flood lemmy with CSAM so easily that the only way to stop it is a site shutdown, then there are not sufficient mitigation measures in place.

Yes, this is the Internet. Take your statement and replace “lemmy” with “reddit” “facebook” “9gag” “imgur” etc… No site has “sufficient mitigation measures in place” as CSAM continues to flood the internet.

“Flooding” a site with CSAM is a matter of opinion. If one person posted one image of CSAM on my instance, that would be flooding - that’s one image too many. It’s not like there’s some magic threshold of the amount of CSAM allowed on a site. All sites use human moderators to detect CSAM and all sties who do this have teams that are far too small and far too underpaid for the most part.

Underpaid being the keyword here, as lemmy admins are volunteers. I would think that the threshold for “flooding” a lemmy instance with CSAM would be far lower than that of a major for-profit site.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Yes, this is the Internet. Take your statement and replace “lemmy” with “reddit” “facebook” “9gag” “imgur” etc… No site has “sufficient mitigation measures in place” as CSAM continues to flood the internet.

it’s true, if I remember correctly, tumblr was removed from the App Store because of CSA issues. I could be remembering wrong and maybe it was the Google Play Store.

dipshit, 9 months ago

This is likely going to be an issue for any site that hosts nsfw content. It’s easier to have mods just ban all NSFW content without trying to go into trying to figure out if the people in the content are consenting adults.

If the admins of nsfw instances aren’t already on high alert, they should be now.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

It’s easier to have mods just ban all NSFW content without trying to go into trying to figure out if the people in the content are consenting adults.

Yeah, I fully agree with that. If people want porn, they should go to porn sites.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Cool, name them and give me links then. I could not find such on the internet. There is software that tries to detect this, but even youtube’s algorithm is incorrectly flagging fully clothed 30 year old women as children.

have you ever talked to janitors and mods on 4chan? Good luck getting any info out of them.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Do you realize that 4chan isn’t the full internet? That these programs that you already know of can exist outside of 4chan? I’m asking you - the person who knows of these apps - to provide links to back up your claims.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

I’m not the other person you responded to and I never claimed to have an apps or links.

I’m just telling you how this works on 4chan. I’m aware that’s not the entire internet obviously - your sarcasm needs work considering we are both here on Lemmy, ie, not 4chan.

If anyone on there is using these programs/apps/whatever, they’re not just gonna tell other people about them.

And as far as I know, I haven’t been on 4chan in like 3 years not but they region ban for CSAM.

dipshit, 9 months ago

I don’t really keep track of who I’m responding to. I just respond to comments. Sorry if I got mixed up here.

My comments still stand, though the snark isn’t directed towards you specifically.

I just want people to understand that there isn’t a solution that we all think exists in other places and not here. The solution is largely people. People who get PTSD from viewing and moderating these images. It’s not a good solution but it’s the best solution we have so far.

The other truth of the matter is if the Internet itself were to hypothetically shut down, this content will just be distributed via other means. The one nice thing about the internet is that lots of stuff is tracable back to the person who posted the infringing material.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

I just want people to understand that there isn’t a solution that we all think exists in other places and not here

I agree with you on this. I agree with a lot of things you’re saying.

part of responding means you know who you are talking to. I know it can be easy to forget someone is behind the screen here but there are in fact other human beings responding to you.

Just try to be more considerate, if anything.

newIdentity, 9 months ago

Everyone got your sarcasm. We just think the Lemmyverse has no chance when it’s flooded with child porn

dipshit, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

deleted_by_moderator

DarthBueller, 9 months ago

People are downvoting you because you’re acting like a dick.

despotic_machine, 9 months ago

I don’t think they’re acting.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

If you’re a pedophile and disagree with me - instead of downvoting, why not explain yourself?

People have been, but you’re not truly listening, Internet Warrior.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Whatever you say, kid.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

Whatever you say, kid.

I’m over 50, but you keep doing you, Internet Warrior, as it just proves my point.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Your age does not come across in your writing. You sound like a kid, which is why I called you one.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

Your age does not come across in your writing.

Well, lets see …

People have been, but you’re not truly listening

That sounds to you like a sentence a young person would say, punctuation and all?

dipshit, 9 months ago

Yes.

It doesn’t to you? How young do you think these people are? If you’re 50, there’s 49 different ages which are younger than you. Not all of them know how to write like that, but I would say at least the ones with a high school education do.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

Yes. It doesn’t to you?

These days especially, I see very few young people who bother with things like commas, multiple paragraphs, or using words like “truly”.

dipshit, 9 months ago

You may want to keep your day job, and not move into the online-age-detecting sector, truly.

Sorry for miss-generationing you.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

You may want to keep your day job, and not move into the online-age-detecting sector, truly.

Well, for the record, you’re the one who started identifying the age of somebody online by what they wrote. So I would just advise you to follow your own advice.

Sorry for miss-generationing you.

Wow, assuming you weren’t just being sarcastic, an actual apology. Thanks. There’s still hope for you.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

I agree with a lot of what you said and upvoted you but you really need to just stop calling people pedos for disagreeing with you.

I’m a victim of CSAM myself and you can take a look through my comment history where I talked about it in depth more. I hate pedos just as much as you do but going around calling people pedos isn’t going to do anything but upset people.

dipshit, 9 months ago

I’m taking the radical stance that CSAM isn’t a good thing, should be reported to law enforcement and that the site with CSAM can be shut down as a viable option for handling CSAM material.

I’m getting downvotes from people who disagree with me on this “radical” stance. People who disagree that CSAM is a problem, that CSAM is a concern. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who promote CSAM like the people who downvoted my posts. I don’t care about the loss of internet points, I care that these worthless shits are still on lemmy, so yes, I call them what they are.

newIdentity, 9 months ago

You’re completely misinterpreting everything we said. If we would shutdown every site with CSAM, the internet wouldn’t exist. We don’t disagree that CSAM isn’t a problem. We disagree with your solution.

dipshit, 9 months ago

You’re completely misinterpreting everything we said.

Not at all. I am completely underestanding you.

If we would shutdown every site with CSAM, the internet wouldn’t exist.

You are wrong. My site doesn’t have CSAM. Lots of other sites don’t have CSAM. The internet isn’t just for CSAM. You must be smarter than this.

We don’t disagree that CSAM isn’t a problem. We disagree with your solution.

My solution which is to remove CSAM? My solution to turn off communities while the CSAM issue is cleaned up? What about those solutions do you disagree with?

Another question for you: if your house is flooding due to a burst pipe, what do you do first:

a) get all the water out of the house b) turn off the water coming into the house.

my solution would be to do step B followed by step A. Your solution appears to be to just do step A, which means you’ll constantly be flooded and never have enough manpower to dry your house.

I’d bet money that the following will happen:

1. community gets turned off
2. csam gets deleted, posters are identified, information turned over to law enforcement
3. community gets turned back on.

In the meantime, folks missing the community are free to go elsewhere on the internet. Why? because CSAM is a crime which depicts Sexual Assult and the evidence is posted online. It’s not a matter of just deleting content, it’s also a matter of turning over the people posting that content over to the police so they can be held accountable for their crimes.

newIdentity, 9 months ago

You are wrong. My site doesn’t have CSAM. Lots of other sites don’t have CSAM. The internet isn’t just for CSAM. You must be smarter than this.

Sorry let me word this correctly: social media wouldn’t exist.

My solution to turn off communities while the CSAM issue is cleaned up? What about those solutions do you disagree with?

No your solution is to permanently shut down Lemmy since there is the possibility of being CSAM on one instance. The community it’s posted in doesn’t matter. They can just keep spamming CSAM and the mods can’t do anything about it except shutting down the instance/community. Unless there are better tools to moderate. That’s basically what everyone wants. We want better tools and more automation so the job gets easier. It’s better to have a picture removed because of CSAM that is wrongly flagged than not removing one that is CSAM.

The problem is that it won’t stop and that it will happen again.

I’d bet money that the following will happen:

1. community gets turned off
2. csam gets deleted, posters are identified, information turned over to law enforcement
3. community gets turned back on.

You’re wrong at step 2 The posters Might’ve used Tor which basically makes it impossible to identify them. Also in most cases LE doesn’t do shit. So the spamming won’t stop (unless someone other than LE does something against it). We can’t only relay on LE to do their job. We need better moderation tools.

Also even if the community is turned back on, what’s stopping someone from doing it again? This time maybe a whole instance?

It’s simply too easy to spam child porn everywhere. One instance of CP is much easier to moderate than thousands.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Sorry let me word this correctly: social media wouldn’t exist.

And this is hardly the argument you think it is. Again, not true of all social media sites, but let’s strongman your argument for a moment and say that you are refering to only the major social media sites.

Well then, we have a problem, don’t we? What’s something the major social media sites have that lemmy doesn’t? Ad revenue, to the tune of millions of dollars. What do they do with that revenue? Well, some if it goes to pay real humans who’s entire job is simply seeking out and destroying CSAM content on the site.

So then how does lemmy, with only enough money to pay hosting costs, if that… deal with CSAM when a user wants to create a botnet that posts CSAM to lemmy instances all day? My answer is: the admins do whatever they think is nessecary, including turning off the community for a bit. They have my full support in this.

No your solution is to permanently shut down Lemmy since there is the possibility of being CSAM on one instance. The community it’s posted in doesn’t matter. They can just keep spamming CSAM and the mods can’t do anything about it except shutting down the instance/community. Unless there are better tools to moderate. That’s basically what everyone wants. We want better tools and more automation so the job gets easier. It’s better to have a picture removed because of CSAM that is wrongly flagged than not removing one that is CSAM.

You’re strawmanning my argument. I’ve never said forever. I’ve said while the community gets cleaned up. I’ve even described a timeline below.

The better tools you want to moderate are your own eyeballs. I’ve said this before but there have been many attempts at making automated CSAM detection material and they just don’t work as well as needed, requiring humans to intervene. These humans are paid by major social media networks but not volunteer networks.

The problem is that it won’t stop and will happen again.

Yes, this is the internet! No one has a solution to stop CSAM from happening. We aren’t discussing that. We are discussing how to handle it WHEN it happens.

You’re wrong at step 2 The posters Might’ve used Tor which basically makes it impossible to identify them. Also in most cases LE doesn’t do shit. So the spamming won’t stop (unless someone other than LE does something against it). We can’t only relay on LE to do their job. We need better moderation tools.

No, I’m correct about step 2, which I described as: “csam gets deleted, posters are identified, information turned over to law enforcement”

I’ll break it down further:

1. CSAM gets deleted from the instance. Admins and mods can do this, and they do this already.
2. posters are identified. Admins and mods can do this, and might do this already. TO BE CLEAR, they can identify the users by IP address and user agent, that’s about it. The rest of it… is…
3. “information turned over to law enformcement” … left up to law enforcement. “Hello police, I’m the owner of xyz.com and today a user at 23.43.23.22 posted CSAM on my site at this time. The user has been banned and have given you all the information we have on this. The cops can get a warrant for the ISP and go from there.

Oh yeah, TOR. well, we’re getting deep off topic here but go on youtube and see some defcon talks about how TOR users are identified. You may think you’re slick going on TOR but then you open up facebook or check your gmail and it’s all over.

Either way, I’m not speaking to the success of catching CSAM posters, I’m only speaking to what the admins likely are doing already, which is probably true.

Also even if the community is turned back on, what’s stopping someone from doing it again? This time maybe a whole instance?

Nothing, which is why social media sites dedicate teams of mods to handle this exact thing. It’s a cat and mouse game. But not playing the game and not trying to remove this content means the admins face legal trouble.

It’s simply too easy to spam child porn everywhere. One instance of CP is much easier to moderate than thousands.

This makes no sense to me. What was your point? Yes, one image is easier to delete than thousands of images. I don’t see how that plays into any of what we have been discussing though.

newIdentity, 9 months ago

I don’t want to write a long text so here is the short version: These automated tools are not perfect but they don’t have to be. They just have to be good enough to block most of it. The rest can be done through manual labor which also people have done voluntarily on reddit. Reporting needs to get easier and you can prevent spammers from rate limiting them.

To be clear, I don’t have anything against temporarly shutting down a community filled with CP until everything is cleared up. But we need better solutions to make it easier in the future so it doesn’t need to go this far and be more manageable.

I’m sorry for the grammatical mistakes. I’m really tired right now and should probably go to bed.

dipshit, 9 months ago

i agree with most of what you’ve written, just one small issue:

The rest can be done through manual labor which also people have done voluntarily on reddit.

You’re probably right that some volunteers handle this content on reddit. By this I mean, mods are volunteers and sometimes mods handle this content.

My point however has been that big social media sites can’t rely on volunteers to handle this content. Reddit, along with facebook and other major sites (but not twitter, as elon just removed this team) has a team of people who pick up the slack where the automated tools leave off. These people are paid, and usually not well, but enough so that it’s their job to remove this content (as opposed to it being a volunteer gig they do on the side). I’ll say that again: these people are paid to look at photographs of CSAM and other psychologically damaging content all day, usually for pennies.

But we need better solutions to make it easier in the future so it doesn’t need to go this far and be more manageable.

I fully agree with you. It’s just, as a dev, who has toyed around with AI and has been working on code for decades now, I don’t see a clear path forward. I am also not an expert in these tools, so I can’t speak specifically to how well they work. I can only say that they don’t work so well that humans are not required. Ideally, we want tools that work so well humans won’t be required (as it’s a psychologically damaging job), but at the sametime, we don’t want legit users to be misflagged either. The other day there was a link posted to hackerne.ws by a youtube creator who keeps needing to reenable comments on her shorts. The youtube algorithm keeps disabing comments on her shorts because it thinks there’s a child in the video - it’s only ever been her and while she is petite in stature, she’s also 30 years old. She’s been reaching out to youtube for over 3-4 years now and they still haven’t fixed the issue. Each video she uploads she needs to turn on comments manually, which affects her engagement. While nowhere near comparible to the sin of CSAM, it’s also not right for a legit user to be penalized just because of the way she looks - because the algorithm cannot properly determine her age.

Youtube is a good example of how difficult it is to moderate something like this. A while ago, youtube revealed that “a years-worth of content is uploaded every minute” (or maybe it was every hour? still)… Consider how many people would be required to watch every minute of uploaded video, multiplied by each minute in their day. Youtube requires automated tools, and community reporting, and likely also has a team of mods. And it’s still imperfect.

So to be clear, you’re not wrong, it’s just a very difficult problem to solve.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

I mean, I think people are downvoting you for other reasons.

Obviously I agree with you that CSAM is bad. It happened to me and ruined my fucking life for like all of my teen years and then most of my early 20s.

But calling people names is pointless. Especially when it comes off like a baseless accusation.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Noted. You’ll have to excuse the fact that I don’t really care about calling people names on the internet if the content of their message promotes abuse.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Yeah I get that for sure. I mean, if I knew someone was some kind of MAP idiot who was trying to fight for the rights of pedos, I’d call them names too. Idiot seems fitting for that lol

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

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.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

I have a recurring donation to the instance, but that’s aside the point.

dipshit, 9 months ago

You’re right, it is. You may be the sole person donating, and maybe you of all people have the “right” to have your opinion “respected” for donating. My point is that by and large, the CSAM posters and most people who use this site aren’t directly paying for a service which contractually obligates them to take part in the site or service, let alone by posting CSAM.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago

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.

CosmicCleric, 9 months ago

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.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Yes, and believe it or not, I’ve been discussing both with people.

I use DCMA actions because they are easily understood. People get copyright strikes. People pirate music.

Safe Harbor provisions are not as easily understood, but basically amount to (IANAL) “if the administrator removes the offending content in a reasonable amount of time when they learn about the offending content, then we’re all good”. It’s not a safe haven for illicit content, it’s more of a “well, you didn’t know so we can’t really fault you for it” sort of deal. But when admins know about the content, they need to take action.

systemglitch, 9 months ago

It doesn’t bode well.

1984, 9 months ago

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.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

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.

1984, 9 months ago

I admit I haven’t kept track of that, true.

SamboT, 9 months ago

Solution now. Better solution later.

utopianfiat, 9 months ago

That’s what I’m hoping - we can’t just burn down any community with spam

ptrckstr, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I’m afraid the fediverse will need a crowdsec-like decentralized banning platform. Get banned one platform for this shit, get banned everywhere.

I’m willing to participate in fleshing that out.

Edit: it’s just an idea, I do not have all the answers, otherwise I’d be building it.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago

Mabe FIDO for identity purposes is a good idea. Mabe some process that takes a week to calculate an identity token and an approval and rejection system for known tokens

atticus88th, 9 months ago

[ptrck has been permanently banned from all social media]

Katana314, 9 months ago

What you’re basically talking about is centralization. And, as much as it has tremendous benefits of convenience, I think a lot of people here can cite their own feelings as to why that’s generally bad. It’s a hard call to make.

rbar, 9 months ago

They didn’t say anything about implementation. Why couldn’t you build tooling to keep it decentralized? Servers or even communities could choose to ban from their own communities based on a heuristic based on the moderation actions published by other communities. At the end of the day it is still individual communities making their own decisions.

I just wouldn’t be so quick to shoot this down.

Rambi, 9 months ago

There is something similar to that for Minecraft servers, it’s a website/ plugin where people’s bans get added to and other admins can check usernames on there to see if they’re a troll or whatever and ban them straight away before they cause issues. So it’s definitely possible to do in a decentralised way.

newIdentity, 9 months ago

Soo… You want to centrelize a decentralized platform…

ptrckstr, 9 months ago

You can have a local banlist supplemented by a shared banlist containing these CSAM individuals for example.

thisisawayoflife, 9 months ago

That ban list could be a set of rich objects. The user that was banned, date of action, community it happened in, reason, server it happened at. Sysops could choose to not accept any bans from a particular site. Make things fairly granular so there’s flexibility to account for bad actor sysops.

newIdentity, 9 months ago

But how do you know that these people actually spread CSAM and someone isn’t abusing their power?

BradleyUffner, 9 months ago

There is no way that could get abused… Like say, by hosting your own instance and banning anyone you want.

ptrckstr, 9 months ago

Anything can be abused, but you can also build proper safeguards.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago

It might be in the works, comment

ImpossibleRubiksCube, 9 months ago

I think a ban list is, unfortunately, contrary to the notion of decentralization; as otherwise warranted as it is in this instance.

What about a centralized list of data on major offenders, which could be made subscribable by instances? Perhaps a way of calculating probability of origin, matched with offenses made by that origin in the past? That way an instance could take it under advisory, and take actions suiting them?

This is only the beginning of an idea, but if it is possible to collaborate without centralizing, we should explore it.

CreeperODeath, 9 months ago

I feel like this would be difficult to enforce

Whitehat93875, 9 months ago

Do people think that someone has to use the same email address, or the same username? If someone uses a different email, username, and IP address (don’t try and argue semantics it can, always can, and always has been done) then whatever you put into the list can’t be applied to them.

Even if you ask for IDs people can fake those, it’s illegal sure but so is what these assholes did and it didn’t really stop them now did it.

Draconic_NEO, 9 months ago

We already have that, it’s called prison. Can’t go on the internet from Prison (at least I’d assume so, wouldn’t make much sense if people could). That’s not 100% since people need to be caught for it to work but once they are it certainly is.

Though other Global ban solutions don’t really work well because they require a certain level of compliance that criminals aren’t going to follow though with (i.e. Not commiting identity theft). They can also be abused by malicious actors to falsely ban people (especially with the whole identity theft thing).

firediviner, 9 months ago

Can you please stop pinning threads globally? or maybe add toggle so people could disable it in their feed

MrWafflesNBacon, 9 months ago

Yeah same here, I’m fine if it’s pinned for just a day then unpinned globally afterwards through.

pleasemakesense, 9 months ago

Who the fuck has such a problem with this instance?

khannie, 9 months ago

It’s a great question. What’s the motivation? Who loses if Lemmy succeeds?

Psythik, 9 months ago

Spez loses. Maybe he’s the one behind it cause he’s salty that people called him out for being a pedophile.

Excrubulent, 9 months ago

Yeah it’s definitely a targeted campaign of sabotage. I’m glad people have found a way to stem the flow, but we’ll need a better solution long term.

pjhenry1216, 9 months ago

It’s highly unlikely. There are better, less CSAM ways for a company to make lemmy instances unstable. This is clearly for shock and troll value.

Psythik, 9 months ago

I know; I’m just being sarcastic. I didn’t think I had to pull out the /s here on Lemmy, cause everyone here seems more intelligent (for the most part).

pjhenry1216, 9 months ago

I’m going to assume you meant that you didn’t expect others to post the same sentiment alongside you unironically and not that anyone who replied to you seriously should have known better for literally no reason.

Transcendant, 9 months ago

It wouldn’t surprise me if an associate of reddit (or someone they hired at arms length) was responsible for the DDOS attacks, but I highly doubt reddit as a company is hiring anyone to spam CSAM.

Think about what sort of motivations and personality someone would have to do it. IMO it’s the guy who got butthurt over not being able to spam and threatened that he would wreck the site.

cyberpunk007, 9 months ago

Exactly.

obinice, 9 months ago

Rivals such as Reddit, the groups who benefit from the ease at which they can manipulate what people see on Reddit to further their agendas (companies, governments, groups).

And fascists in general, who hate open global community platforms that are hard to control, and hate things that bring people together, things that give people strength to fight together against things bigger than them.

All it takes is one of those interested parties to fund a couple of low rent hackers to poke at Lemmy until it’s so unstable and untrustworthy that people stop using it.

Cheap and effective if done right, a good investment in the long run for any discerning fascist.

T156, 9 months ago

I doubt it would be company rivals for the time being. Lemmy is nowhere big enough, and even the largest instances are dwarfed by either other social networks, or other projects like Mastodon.

Reddit has much more of a concern for Facebook or Twitter trying to co-opt their model, than some small open source project, like how Meta released Threads during the recent Twitter controversy.

T156, 9 months ago

The motivation could also be just trying to get the instance shut down, or otherwise break it, like the user that was spamming communities not that long ago.

Nothing too conspiratorial.

leraje, 9 months ago

I don’t think either a corporate entity or another instance/software type is behind this. The motivation for these people is the same as those who used to post a certain image with the word ‘goat’ as part of the title all over usenet binary groups and web forums. They simply find it funny that so many people are appalled and they feel a sense of power that they’ve affected so large a community. There’s nothing more complicated than that to it.

gammasfor, 9 months ago

… I can think of one possibility - an instance known that lemmy.world recently defederated from.

STRIKINGdebate2, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The odds are no one. To the trolls this isn’t meant to be a personal attack against a server they don’t like. They just want to wreck havoc and cause shock to anywhere. It just so happens they discovered lemmy shit posting.

pleasemakesense, 9 months ago

I was thinking in combination with the ddos attack, personally I believe they’re the same people doing this, obviously not everybody will share that belief

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Yup. It’s this. This is the mentality behind trolling. The point is to antagonize people just to get a reaction. That’s all they care about. They want to do the most outrageous thing in a public space because they know people will respond and they think its funny when people react to anything they do.

People need to realize: They want to get banned. They want you to try and sit around figuring out why they’re doing this.

dipshit, 9 months ago

Step 1: Go on the internet and say some shit. Step 2: Get moderated off your favorite website. Step 3: RAGE

MsPenguinette, 9 months ago

Last week an explodingheads shithead kept posting racist (Also antisemitic etc etc) “memes”. People told them to get fucked. It was wonderful to see everyone be incredibly mean to the fucker.

If we know one thing about nazis, it’s that when they get busted for any crime, they always end up finding csam as well. So wouldn’t suprise me if some nazi got angry because they weren’t welcome here and cracked open his personal collection

pleasemakesense, 9 months ago

Huh, interesting. I was thinking hexbear because of the tianmen square post

zzpza, 9 months ago

I’m sorry you (and the other admins & mods of the community) have to deal with this shit, it’s disgusting. Thank you for doing what you do.

carroarmato0, 9 months ago

As someone who was a moderator on a nothorious website, it can at times feel like shoveling water out of a boat while it’s still leaking. Efficient and robust tooling makes a very big difference, but it’s not waterproof. Mods cannot be appreciated enough.

howsetheraven, 9 months ago

Would someone be able to ELI5 why lemmyshitpost has this problem but other communities don’t or at least seemingly? I would think if they can do this to one lemmy.world community, wouldn’t they be able to do all?

RanchOnPancakes, 9 months ago

Very confused by that as well. Its odd.

aidan, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

My understanding from what I remember is that the community was largely where one user was posting pro-Republican memes(but I might be misremembering the community) so I suspect it was the targeted effort to shut up that. (If I am remembering the community correctly).

Edit: Nevermind the community I was thinking of was !shitposting

givesomefucks, 9 months ago

Oh yeah…

Lots of Democrats are willing to post CSAM to stop one random idiot on Lemmy from posting fucking “pro republican memes”

aidan, 9 months ago

I didn’t say democrats, I said one person. I don’t know their ideology, and like I said I don’t remember if that was the same community- and can’t check.

givesomefucks, 9 months ago

Oh, you’re that rightwing teenager who wants to abolish education that got a mod spot in one of the politics subs because you said you wouldn’t remove right wing propaganda…

Now I understand what you’re doing here. Spreading rightwing propaganda.

aidan, 9 months ago

I’m not a teenager, I don’t want to abolish education. I’m not spreading right-wing propaganda, I’m stating why it could be that it was localized to this community. I think you could and at some point may have 4chan users or whoever do this same thing to other communities. But 👍 discredit me as a person rather than what I put forward (not as a fact, just as I said clearly as a vague memory).

PS. It depends what you’re definition of right wing is.

Rawdogg, 9 months ago

What kind of lowlife piece of shit do you need to be to post some shit like that? Some people will stoop to the most depraved levels just to fuck with strangers, it’s horrifying

havokdj, 9 months ago

Brother, I know what you mean but this is a question you already know the answer to.

Roflmasterbigpimp, 9 months ago

I’ve actually never seen anything of this stuff so good job!

uranibaba, 9 months ago

Same here, this is the first I’ve heard of it.

UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN, 9 months ago

BTW search doesnt work on here. Cant actually get it to open different comminities.

douglasg14b, 9 months ago

Isn’t there semi-automated tools that can detect CP?

Those might be an automated solution to at least cut down on the volume.

The same can go for banned images. These can automatically be identified with perceptual hashing, and automatically be denied when uploading.

Rolive, 9 months ago

The one thing AI would be good for… Humans shouldn’t have to see that shit.

Zeth0s, 9 months ago

Humans have to see that shit to train ai. That is why it is so difficult to find a model for that

kylian0087, 9 months ago

Honestly what a shit job you must have when working with that stuff. it is sad and a difficult thing.

NuclearArmWrestling, 9 months ago

A lot of the mods for big providers like FB require counseling after the horrible crap they see (not just CSAM, but also terrible things like animal abuse and mutilation, etc). Unfortunately, the big companies have outsourced much of it to other countries where there aren’t as many worker protections, traumatizing people and replacing them when they can’t meet some arbitrary metric.

shotgun_crab, 9 months ago

You’d need data to train an AI… Yeah that won’t happen

HikingVet, 9 months ago

IIRC there is a database that law enforcement uses during investigations to obtain access to these groups (they obtain consent from the victims to use the material).

joshuaacasey, 9 months ago

the one thing you do not do with this shit is use AI (too much risk of false positives. I mean, I remember Facebook’s AI thought that an onion was nudity (probably thought it was a boob).

But tools do exist. PhotoDNA by Microsoft. Although much more user-friendly implementation if you use Cloudflare, related links:

• blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/
• prostasia.org/…/csam-filtering-options-compared/
• prostasia.org/project/hall-of-fame/

Zeus, 9 months ago

the “risk” of false positives comes down to the consequence. if the consequence is being stuck in the slammer, don’t use ai. if the consequence is you can’t upload the image unless you manually appeal, or even maybe have to use an external image host; i think ai is fine

edit: ah bugger, wrong acct. ah well(please tag @zeus if you want me to see your response)

cley_faye, 9 months ago

There are. They are easy to abuse too, and cause a lot of other issues, along with not being 100% efficient. Apple tried that and was met with appropriate backlash. There are many issues : training data is one, but also it is impossible to rule out false positive/false negative automatically, and it is relatively easy (for now) to doctor pictures to pass through. A nefarious actor could easily bypass these. There’s also the case of false positive that can very quickly push some bystander under the bus, and knowing how moderate and understanding internet is… yup.

It is also risky, as this will effectively be a censorship tool; they are often setup in the pretense of “helping”, but once they’re up, it all depends on who steers it. Such responsibility can hardly fall on moderators/admin of lemmy, and it would also be problematic to handle them on a more nationwide (or more) level, since it would give incredible censorship power to authorities.

And a bigger bottom-line is that working hard to prevent these kind of content from reaching us, while it have an obvious upside, also does nothing in respect to the actual issue of the content existing and being created.

tl;dr: there is no easy solution that doesn’t come with one hell of a string attached to it.

On the other hand, it is quite hard to hide yourself from authorities online, and this kind of behavior (I hope, somehow, that the people that posted these only do so to be toxic to lemmy and not to actually disseminate content) should lead to some action from authorities, getting to actual people and subsequently moving upward the stream to actually act on it. Hopefully.

CookieJarObserver, 9 months ago

We should just track these people and send them the police directly, way more efficient than Symptom control.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago

Apple is building the tech, too they arent sharing it with the world for humanitarian purposes like this.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago

Apple willingly made that tech, however its designed to get the individual in trouble by looking at the photos from their personal device and snitching on its owner (leaking them in the process). They can easly adapt it into a tool for social media, but it goes against their beleafs.

guts, 9 months ago

PhotoDNA.

bigkix, 9 months ago

Saw that one post (unfortunately). How come people who spread content like that in the “open” internet (not darkweb) don’t get arrested?

Kolanaki, 9 months ago

They would need to be reported with some credible and actionable evidence to the appropriate authorities. Just having the material they are posting isn’t enough. If they are taking precautions, it’s gonna be hard to figure out who and where they are from what the site would be able to log while they use it.

T156, 9 months ago

The legal system also takes time. The material could be disseminated fairly widely before an investigation would be started and completed. Especially with bots. Hundreds of bots are a lot faster than a team of humans.

pewgar_seemsimandroid, 9 months ago

GET OUT THE 4CHAN

elbarto777, 9 months ago

I hardly know anything about the subject of the dark web, but my take is, they operate from the dark web. They open temporary email accounts, then free computing or free hosting accounts, or are part of a bot net. The rest is relatively easy.

Law enforcement monitors the dark web, though, so if they make a stupid move (and they will), they will eventually get caught.

GuyDudeman, 9 months ago

God I hope they get caught.

ricdeh, 9 months ago

Will they though? Not necessarily, as no police department can do anything about state terrorism. If Russian hackers attack Western infrastructure, the FBI or whoever cannot go there and arrest them.

elbarto777, 9 months ago

I was talking about domestic crimes. But sure, you’re correct, unless it’s considered an act of war.

UnfortunateShort, 9 months ago

Just had like 90 (probably unrelated) arrests in one state in Germany. There are just way too man to arrest them all.

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

I’m in the US and grew up here. My dad is a piece of shit pedophile who exploited me for several websites. None on darkweb but at the time, they didn’t really need to be.

Word got out and cops came to interrogate ME the person who was the victim in this situation. They also blamed me for what was going on (how? I don’t know, I was a teen who was being exploited underage but cops gonna cop) and they basically intimidated me into dropping out of school and taking the blame for my dad because the other option was that I be sent to a home as an orphan.

My dad got away with a slap on the wrist basically because cops in the US don’t do their job. They even cover for people. I ended up literally running away from home.

I think the issue is that people see this topic as all outrage - I mean, look at the comments here. Everyone is so mad they can’t even think straight. And I’m personally noticing that some of the outrage doesn’t even seem to be directed at the right people. Like everyone is super willing to shit on pedos left and right but I wonder if they would be willing to listen to someone who has been knee deep in this shit before and were innocent because they were being exploited by a pedophile.

Like a lot of comments say “disgusting” but then don’t say anything about how the person that it happened to must feel. Everyone’s upset they saw something but they don’t seem to be upset about who they saw it happening to.

Like I wonder who they think hurts more in this situation. The person who was made into a victim or the people who just saw it happen.

sunaurus, 9 months ago

I’m sorry for your experience and I hope you’re doing better now. It’s very important to note that the major victims in this “attack” are absolutely the abused children. That’s exactly what makes this the most disgusting attack on Lemmy to date.

OsrsNeedsF2P, 9 months ago

First, thank you for your comment and I’m glad you posted it.

Second, I want to take a moment to clarify what people mean when they say “disgusting” - at least for me - it’s not a matter of “oh my god I saw something awful, my day is ruined, that’s disgusting”, it’s instead “oh my god I can’t believe that happened, that’s disgusting”. The nuance is that the “disgust” is against the people who allowed it to happen - The perpetrators, the cops who did nothing, the people who shared it, and the world that allowed it to happen.

Again, thank you for sharing your story, it’s a great reminder of what the actual issue at hand is. Much love!

cubedsteaks, 9 months ago

Exactly, that was my point. People are upset with the perpetrators - and no one really seems to be empathizing with the victims.

HelloHotel, 9 months ago

Darkweb as a proxy to the clear web. Its a ligitimate tool used for horriffic things somtimes. Tor is a huge double edge sword.

If these people were distrobuting, the most open stratigy would hide in plain sight. Like say the dark corners of some well known mainstream, but negligent social media site. These people are here to terrorize.

Draconic_NEO, 9 months ago

Usually they do, eventually (even on the darkweb).

Though it does take time to pin them down sometimes because many criminals take steps to hide their identities and make it very difficult.

Lots of people though are caught easily and quickly, hopefully these guys will be like that and will get caught quickly and put away for good.

Clbull, 9 months ago

To me this is a flaw of federation in general and I really think the solution should be to defederate yourselves from other instances until further notice, and only federate with trusted communities.

With how Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) is currently set up, what’s stopping malicious actors from just creating another Lemmy instance of their own then targeting another community until you’re forced to close that one like you did with Lemmyshitpost.

infinipurple, 9 months ago

I mean, you have a point, of course, but the aim of these digital terrorists is precisely to take Lemmy down. These attacks are happening across many different instances and the long-term solution cannot just be to give up.

But if all the instances work together on a federated solution, we might have a chance to keep Lemmy alive long enough that a) this sort of thing will naturally die down, and b) the collective efforts will allow bad actors to be identified and stopped no matter where they’re coming from.

mvirts, 9 months ago

Don’t forget this happens with sites like Facebook and reddit but they pay people to clean up and sweep it under the rug. At least the visibility shines light on the problem.