cross-posted from: https://jamie.moe/post/113630
There have been users spamming CSAM content in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world causing it to federate to other instances. If your instance is subscribed to this community, you should take action to rectify it immediately. I recommend performing a hard delete via command line on the server.
I deleted every image from the past 24 hours personally, using the following command:
sudo find /srv/lemmy/example.com/volumes/pictrs/files -type f -ctime -1 -exec shred {} \;
Note: Your local jurisdiction may impose a duty to report or other obligations. Check with these, but always prioritize ensuring that the content does not continue to be served.
Update
Apparently the Lemmy Shitpost community is shut down as of now.
So, from memory there has been:
- This recent attack
- Regular DDOS attacks
- Frequent attempts to spam community creation
- That one time the instance got hacked and set to redirect to shock sites
Am I missing anything?
This seems like more than just a few trolls. Maybe someone really doesn’t want to see user-owned social media take off.
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I see where you’re going with this, but no, people really are just absolutely horrible. The fact is that with other social media they’re just already very set up in managing this so we never see it. Lemmy wants to be open, this is the flipside of that openness.
It’s generally easy to crap on what’s ‘bad’ about big players, while underestimating or undervaluing what they are doing right for product market fit.
A company like Meta puts hundreds of people in foreign nations through PTSD causing hell in order to moderate and keep clean their own networks.
While I hope that’s not the solution that a community driven effort ends up with, it shows the breadth of the problems that can crop up with the product as it grows.
I think the community will overcome these issues and grow beyond it, but jerks trying to ruin things for everyone will always exist, and will always need to be protected against.
To say nothing for the far worse sorts behind the production and more typical distribution of such material, whom Lemmy will also likely eventually need to deal with more and more as the platform grows.
It’s going to take time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way a federated social network eventually can exist is within onion routing or something, as at a certain point the difference in resources to protect against content litigation between a Meta and someone hosting a Lemmy server is impossible to equalize, and the privacy of hosts may need to be front and center.
The solution in this case is absolutely AI filters. Unfortunately you won’t find many people willing to build robust model for that. Because they’d be those getting the ptsd you mention.
Iirc, ptsd is something only certain characters get. We should probably focus on finding people who really have no problem watching rough content. I have ptsd so I probably am not the right person for the job.
I don’t want to try. I have pretty low barrier. I set up NSFW filter on lemmy because I found disturbing the furry content that was common some time ago… I don’t want even to try anything worst than that
Can absolutely relate. Just seeing nsfw if you‘re not anticipating it is very weird.
Yup. Nope.
Pictrs is just completely disabled now. Rather be safe, then sorry.
Is disabling Pictrs as simple as stopping the Docker container?
Yup.
I sent a step further, and commented out the pictrs related configuration from the lemmy.hjson too.
Is this why I couldn’t upload a meme to the Lemmy World servers earlier today?
Fuck…
Yeah… Just wow. I disabled pictrs and deleted all its images, which also means all my community images/uploaded images are gone, and it’s more of a hassle to see other people’s images, but in the end I think it’s worth it.
Through caching every image pictrs was also taking up a massive amount of space on my Pi, which I also use for Nextcloud. So that’s another plus!
Note, apparently, lemmy will get pretty pissy if pictrs isn’t working… and the “primary” lemmy GUI will straight-up stop working.
Although, https://old.lemmyonline.com/ will still work.
And- I am with you. My pictrs storage, has ended up taking up quite a bit of room.
There has to be a more elegant way of dealing with this in the future, like de-coupling between Lemmy-account hosting (which effectively means acitivypub-fediverse account) and Lemmy-communities hosting.
Does that disable image saving and processing for one’s instance?
Yup.
So far, mostly everything appears to work still. But, trying to upload an image, just throws an error.
SyntaxError: Unexpected token ‘R’, “Request er”… is not valid JSON
I don’t see a way to actually “gracefully” disable it, but, this works.
Edit- don’t just stop pictrs.
Lemmy gets very pissy… and b reaks.
I went ahead and just deleted my entire pictrs cache and will definitely disable caching other servers images when it becomes available.
Anyone know if this work is tracked anywhere? I’m suddenly really suspicious of continuing to run my own instance.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3897
It does say “thumbnails” but as far as I know, Lemmy (or pictrs) makes a copy of the full image too. I don’t know if this PR includes full images.
big F in chat for those of you dealing with this. my #1 fear about setting upand instance.
It impacts everyone when this shit happens. It takes time for mods/admins to take down. And you can’t unsee it.
I hope nobody else has the misfortune of stumbling on that shit
There have been studies which found playing tetris for an hour or two after seeing something traumatic can prevent it taking root in our longterm memory.
I tried it once after accidentally clicking a link on reddit that turned out to be gore, I can’t remember exactly what it was now (about 9 months later) so it must have worked
This advice is a few hours too late for me. Hope it helps others
I just posted an article explaining the study to the ‘You Should Know’ community, so hopefully some of the people who need to see it do so
Don’t worry, life with hold many more traumas
Cue Homer Simpson: This is the worst thing you’ve seen in your life so far
That’s pretty genious. One way to work with trauma is moving the eyes from side to side along to a moving light. It’s basically to force the brain to work through something that used to stall it. So tetris, since it is highly reactive and logical, also needs spatial thinking, should very much force the brain to work instead of stalling.
Can you please link a study?
Yeah you really can’t. I’m pretty desensitized from earlier internet with death and other shock gore content but had managed to avoid CSAM until today. It was a lot worse than I expected, felt my heart drop. Worse, my app autoplays gifs in thumbnail so it kept going while I was reporting it.
I’ve mostly forgotten and it wasn’t on my mind until I saw this thread (happened less than 24hr ago) but even the slightest reminder is oddly upsetting. Wish I’d thought of the Tetris thing.
blocked lemmyshitpost some time age because it is trash anyway
To be clear, if no one on a given instance sub to that particular /c, the content won’t federate to said instance, correct?
At this point, the community is clean. So unless more is posted, then you should be good. If someone searched for the community and caused a preview to load while the content was active though, then it could be an issue.
Cool. Thanks. I cleaned up anything from the past 2 days, to be safe, and blocked that community.
Likely scum moves from reddit patriots to destroy or weaken the fediverse.
I remember when Murdoch hired that Israeli tech company in Haifa to find weaknesses is TV smart cards and then leaked it to destroy their market by flooding counterfit smart cards.
They are getting desperate along with those DDOS attacks.
Could be, but more likely it’s just the result of having self hosted services, you have individuals exposing their own small servers to the wilderness of internet.
These trols also try constantly to post their crap to mainstream social media but they have it more difficult there. My guess is that they noticed lemmy is getting a big traction and has very poor media content control. Easy target.
Moderating media content is a difficult task and for sure centralized social media have better filters and actual humans in place to review content. Sadly, only big tech companies can pay for such infrastructure to moderate media content.
I don’t see an easy way for federated servers to cope with this.
Yeah exactly. This is the main reason I decided not to attempt to self host a Lemmy instance. No way am I going to let anyone outside of my control have the ability to place a file of their choosing on my hardware. Big nope for me.
Is it possible to prune pictrs by community name?
Not really. You could technically locate the images and determine precisely which ones they are from their filenames, but that means you actually have to view the images long enough to pull the URL. I had no desire to view them for even a moment, and just universally removed them.
As mentioned in my edit above though, ensure you are in compliance with local regulations when dealing with the material in case you have to do any preservation for law enforcement or something.
There is a purge community option available for admins but that did nothing.
From what I was informed, purging a post doesn’t remove the associated cached data. So I didn’t take any chances.
Likely Spez’s personal jailbait collection
I got lucky. I am not subscribed to this community, and I am the only person on my instance. But what if I was subscribed and hadn’t seen this post? This is too much responsibility for me.
I just shut down my instance until we can disable cached images. If that never happens, then I’m not bringing it back up.
Shout-out to https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate. I moved my subscriptions over in a minute or two, and now, other than not having my post history, it’s exactly the same.
It is coming, don’t worry.
Do we have a PR or issue tracking that? That’s a pretty major item I’m looking forward to
Good, hopefully next release
If the source deletes the post. Won’t that remove it from all the instances ?
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That’s sounds like a feature request.
Why do these deranged fucks do this
You really think the trolls would pass up on this golden opportunity?
Archive.org gets crapped up this way, too. Repulsive people posting repulsive stuff, “troll” is too kind a word.
This isn’t trolling, this is just disgusting crime.
The crime happened in the past when the children were abused. This is some weird amalgam of criminal trolling.
Edit: yeah yeah I get that csam is criminal, that’s why I called it an amalgam. It’s both trolling and criminal.
Some sick fuck out there kept the files
Depending on jurisdiction, I am not a lawyer, etc etc, but I’d imagine with fairly high degree of probability that re-distribution of CSAM is also a crime.
The crime happened in the past when the children were abused.
That’s true. You could look at it that way and stop right there and remain absolutely correct. Or, you could also look at it from the eventual viewpoint of that victim as a human being: as long as that picture exists, they are being victimized by every new use of it, even if the act itself was done decades ago.
Not trying to pile on, but anyone who has suffered that kind of violation as a child suffers for life to some extent. There are many who kill themselves, and even more that cannot escape addiction because the addiction is the only safe mental haven they have where life itself is bearable. Even more have PTSD and other mental difficulties that are beyond understanding for those who have not had their childhood development shattered by that, or worse, had that kind of abuse be a regular occurrence for them growing up.
So to me, adding a visual record of that original violating act to the public domain that anyone can find and use for sick pleasure is an extension of the original violation and not very different from it, IMO.
The visual records are kind of a sick gift that never stop giving, and worse still if the victim knows the pics or videos are out there somewhere.
I am well aware not everyone sees it this way, but an extra bit of understanding for the victims would not go amiss. Imagine being an adult and browsing the web, thinking it’s all in the past and maybe you’re safe now, and stumbling across a picture of yourself being raped at the age of five, or whatever, or worse still, having friends or family or spouse or children stumble across it.
So speaking only for myself, I think CSAM is a moral crime whenever it is accessed, one of the most hellish that can be committed against another human being, regardless of the specificities of the law.
I don’t have a problem with much else that people share, but goddamn I do have a problem with that.
It’s still a crime. Taking the pictures is a crime. Sharing the pictures is also a crime.
Ok retard
spreading child pornography is in fact illegal in most of the world
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I was looking into self hosting. What can I do to avoid dealing with this? Can I not cache images? Would I get in legal trouble for being federated with an instance being spammed?
Someone else here mentioned not running "pictrs” at all
Refer to this comment chain from this same thread https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/comment/577589
I literally am going to give up social media in general if this doesn’t stop
Seen it last night late around 3am shit made me sick I honestly almost cried but I just closed the app and tried not to think about it
Whatever the goal is it’s a stark reminder that there is monsters creeping in the shadows every where you go
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How would I exclude any files that I uploaded, though?
You don’t, those are the collateral damage.
IMO it’s better to just nuke every image from the last 24 hours than to subject yourself to that kind of heinous, disgusting content
