Due to some disgusting behaviour, I’ve kicked off the process of deleting ALL images uploaded in the last day.

You will likely see broken images etc on aussie.zone for posts/comments during this period of time.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for an instance. I’d rather nuke all images ever than to host such content.

  • Mountaineer@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    That CSAM exists is horrible.
    That people would maliciously spread it as some sort of prank puts an extra disgusting veneer on this whole thing.
    I hope at least some of these “it’s just a prank bro!” people get caught by the police and get shown just how funny society finds them.

  • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Good work. As some other people have said on other instances, make sure you’re not just regular deleting the images as that just removes the references to them. You’ll need to overwrite them with white noise.

  • uiiiq@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Understandable. I’m thankful for your work. This hopefully won’t happen again.

  • Caspase8@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    I fully support what you are doing but I’m not sure I completely get it. If the attack was against a community on another instance, why do you have to wipe images on this instance? Are images posted on all federated instances stored on the Aussie.zone server?

    • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneOPM
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      1 year ago

      The way lemmy caches images isn’t well documented. Some third party images are not cached, others are. I don’t want to risk it.

      Nuking it from orbit, only way to be sure.

  • spiffmeister@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Is there anything in place to stop those sorts of posts being made here?

    As I understand it lemmys mod tools aren’t great but there must be some way of stopping this behaviour.

    • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      It seems that lemmy.world has decided to move to application based sign ups - which may slow some people down, but from a mod perspective the only options available are bans of custom length, removing comments/posts and locking posts

      • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneOPM
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        1 year ago

        Yes lemmy’s modding features are… lacking. However there are some non-lemmy services availble to stop this sort of thing that I’m looking into.

        • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          What I’d really like is a “freeze community” button, so if stuff starts getting out of hand we can lock all of the posts and deal with it. But what we really need is a proper CSAM filtering tool on instances to reject posts before they get cached all over the fediverse

          • Nath@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            Trouble is the target communities have (so far) not not been on our instance. There’s little we can do about what a user from another instance posts onto another instance. We see that content through federation, but don’t directly control it.

            • No1@aussie.zone
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              1 year ago

              Federated moderation? I’m spitballing, but if you could nominate instances that you ‘trust’ you get a virtual mod team to attack these issues, and spread across TZs.

              if the mod tools aren’t there yet, we’ll I guess it’s moot…

              Something like LemmyA instance is banning ZCommunity. They are in my trusted mods, so follow what they are doing. No doubt a simple thought, with many cases not considered (different trusted servers with opposing mod settings)…

              It would probably be better to have virtual mod replication to be incident based…

    • Lodion 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneOPM
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      1 year ago

      Sadly this isn’t new, its been known about for quite some time. Slightly irresponsible for that person to post and make a big noise about it without creating a github issue though. Ideally the lemmy devs will add code to automatically purge orphaned images. Hopefully this public noise around it will hurry this up.

      I see this much like the extraneous data being stored in the database previously; low hanging fruit for devs to optimise and make hosting an instance less resource intensive. Yes there are possible legal risks for uploads that are not referenced on lemmy, but the reality is this could happen deep in a comment thread or a user profile anyway.