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I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to all of the users here who liked lemmy shit posting. I feel like I let the situation grow too out of control before getting help. Don't worry I am not quitting. I fully intend on staying around. The other two deserted the community but I won't. Dm me If you wish to apply for mod.
Sincerest thanks to the admin team for dealing with this situation. I wish I linked in with you all earlier.
Please, please, please do not blame yourself for this. This is not your fault. You did what you were supposed to do as a mod and stepped up and asked for help when you needed to, lemmy just needs better tools. Please take care of yourself.
This isn't your fault. Thank you for all you have done in regards to this situation thus far.
Contact the FBI
This isn't as crazy as it may sound either. I saw a similar situation, contacted them with the information I had, and the field agent was super nice/helpful and followed up multiple times with calls/updates.
This doesn't sound crazy in the least. It sounds like exactly what should be done.
yha, what do people think the FBI is for... this isn't crazy. They can get access to ISP logs, VPN provider logs, etc.
This is good advice; I suspect they're outside of the FBI's jurisdiction, but they could also be random idiots, in which case they're random idiots who are about to become registered sex offenders.
You might be surprised to discover that the USA does not believe their laws end at their borders. That is why Kim Dotcom was arrested by the FBI in NZ for violating US law.
In this case I doubt any LE agency abroad wouldn't like the tip off.
The FBI has offices in alot of other countries and work with local law enforcement.
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/international-offices
Can't really hide from them unless you live in North Korea or Russia
Not that I'm familiar with Rust at all, but... perhaps we need to talk about this.
The only thing that could have prevented this is better moderation tools. And while a lot of the instance admins have been asking for this, it doesnβt seem to be on the developers roadmap for the time being. There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesnβt inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.
Lets be productive. What exactly are the moderation features needed, and what would be easiest to implement into the Lemmy source code? Are you talking about a mass-ban of users from specific instances? A ban of new accounts from instances? Like, what moderation tool exactly is needed here?
This is flat out disgusting. Extremely questionable someone having an arsenal of this crap to spread to begin with. I hope they catch charges.
The amount of people in these comments asking the mods not to cave is bonkers.
This isnβt Reddit. These are hobbyists without legal teams to a) fend off false allegations or b) comply with laws that they donβt have any deep understanding of.
Yeah, you've got to think of this place like the big forums of 20 years ago, they're just run by a tiny handful of regular people, and having to deal with solicitors and other such stuff is entirely out of the question.
If something's bad, you lock it down and purge it until it's not bad any more. Unfortunately that's the best you can do with such minimal resources as a regular member of the public, and for those that don't like it, there's other forums out there.
This isn't one single huge monopoly thing like Reddit, you either stay or leave forever, if you don't like how one is being run, just sign up on a different one. Takes the stress out of it :-)
There are just two full-time developers on this project and they seem to have other priorities. No offense to them but it doesnβt inspire much faith for the future of Lemmy.
this doesn't seem like a respectful comment to make. People have responsibilities; they aren't paid for this. It doesn't seem to fair to make criticisms of something when we aren't doing anything to provide a solution. A better comment would be "there are just 2 full time developers on this project and they have other priorities. we are working on increasing the number of full time developers."
Imagine if you were the owner of a really large computer with CSAM in it. And there is in fact no good way to prevent creeps from putting more into it. And when police come to have a look at your CSAM, you are liable for legal bullshit. Now imagine you had dependents. You would also be well past the point of being respectful.
On that note, the captain db0 has raised an issue on the github repository of LemmyNet, requesting essentially the ability to add middleware that checks the nature of uploaded images (issue #3920 if anyone wants to check). Point being, the ball is squarely in their court now.
I agree with you, I'd just gently suggest that it's borne of what is probably significant upset at having to deal with what they're having to deal with.
Fucking bastards. I don't even know what beef they have with the community and why, but using THAT method to get them to shut down is nothing short of despicable. What absolute scum.
I hope the devs take this seriously as an existential threat to the fediverse. Lemmyshitpost was one of the largest communities on the network both in AUPH and subscribers. If taking the community down is the only option here, that's extremely insufficient and bodes death for the platform at the hands of uncontrolled spam.
We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.
It's likely that we'll be seeing a large number of instances switch to whitelist based federation instead of the current blacklist based one, especially for niche instances that does not want to deal with this at all (and I don't blame them).
Basically ruins the fediverse concept, as it will ultimately lock out all small instances of self hosted instances, which really is a shame.
Sounds like the 4chan raids of old.
Batten down, report the offender's to the authorities, and then clean up the mess!
Good job so far ^_^
Thank you for your work to keep that despicable trash out of our feeds. Sorry you have to deal with it. Fuck those losers.
Genuine question: won't they just move to spamming CSAM in other communities?
How does closing lemmyshitpost do anything to solve the issue? Isn't it a foregone conclusion that the offenders would just start targeting other communities or was there something unique about lemmyshitpost that made it more susceptible?
It stops their instance hosting CSAM and removes their legal liability to deal with something they don't have the capacity to at this point in time.
How would you respond to having someone else forcibly load up your pc with child porn over the Internet? Would you take it offline?
I assume you've contacted the FBI, but if not PLEASE DO.
Most people in the world don't live in that one very specific country, it's somewhat presumptuous to assume they do, and I'm a bit tired of those assumptions only ever coming from people from a very specific place.
I put up with it for a long while without saying anything, but it's been 15 years and they're doing it more now than ever. I'm kinda... worn down now.
Can't we all just accept that the world is vast and amazing, and exists beyond our own borders? :-(
Please get some legal advice, this is so fucked up.
Thank you so much for all of the effort and time all of you are putting into this situation. Having to deal with bad actors is one thing, but you are now dealing with images that are traumatizing to view.
Please, for your sanity and overall well being, PLEASE take care of yourself. Yes, it sucks about having to close !lemmyshitpost, but self-care and support are of the utmost importance.
good thing you did it the way you did nobody should have to look at awful stuff like this. keep your mind healthy nobody should have to deal with that
Thank you for all your work. It sucks that there are people who would do shit like this. Please don't forget to take care of yourselves as well.
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.
Is it possible to (at least temporarily):
whilst longer term solutions are sought? This would at least ensure poor mods aren't exposed to this shit and an instance could be more positive they're not inadvertently hosting CSAM.
These bad actors are wierd, most who spread CSAM dont want to be known about by the masses, these posts are implied to be attempting to be visible as their posting in a well known community. It feels Sus.
Keep up the good work keeping us safe, keep your therapist and/or support network in the loop about this so they can catch you if you fall.
Looks like Google has some tooling available that might help: https://protectingchildren.google/tools-for-partners
Probably other options too.
Saw that one post (unfortunately). How come people who spread content like that in the "open" internet (not darkweb) don't get arrested?
This is so fucked, but this brings up a question -- is this something to be concerned about for instances federated with lemmy.world? As in, if something like this is uploaded to a community that the instance federates with, their instance will now have a copy as well?
yes
Many instances deleted all pictures for the last 24-48h as a precaution or shut down entirely.
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.
This sucks, but we were probably due to have a Grand Registration Security Hash-Out at some point; going forward, any instance that wants others to federate with it is probably going to have to have a system in place to make it impossible for jackasses like this to create endless spam accounts.
It's one of the few things Reddit handles the situation better by being a centralized entity with a dedicated workforce filtering out these content. It's a shame it has to be this way, but I understand why it has to be done.
Ya'll are going through one of the worst situations I could imagine, but I'm confident you will figure it out and come out better for it. Keep your heads up. (P.S. - Sorry about the scat, lol)
Wow, this is awful. Huge cudos to y'all for holding on through this. It's obviously a deliberate attack on the fediverse by malicious actors.
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?
