cross-posted from: https://jamie.moe/post/113630

There have been users spamming CSAM content in [email protected] 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.

  • aseriesoftubes@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Someone is trying really hard to hurt Lemmy by continually attacking the most popular instance. Is this all coming from right-wingers upset that their nazi instances were defederated across basically the whole fediverse?

    • Kungolicious@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My tin foil hat is telling me it’s one of the other social media companies funding a hacking group to do it. They stand to have the most to lose, and they’ve seemingly decided to enjoy changing the narrative regarding multiple topics. Lemmy stands directly against what the bigger social medias stand for.

      I have no evidence to back this though. As a business owner I just know that things become very consistent when people are being paid, and very inconsistent when they aren’t. These attacks are seemingly very consistent/organized.

      • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You think a company that is posed to go public is going to attack a competitor with a minuscule amount of traffic with extremely illegal material that could put them in prison for even having?

        • Kungolicious@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Reddit? No. I was thinking moreso Meta. They have the deeper pockets and a proven track record of breaking privacy laws to their own benefit.

            • fsmacolyte@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              So then why was Meta trying to get Threads to be on the Fediverse? Of course they’re aware of any potential threats, no matter how small.

              • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Why reinvent the wheel if someone’s just going to hand you the backend? Lemmy is no threat to them.

                • fsmacolyte@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  The threat is a new sustainable community that’s sheltered from advertising that people could leave Factbook/Instagram/whatever and go to.

          • orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Meta was talking about adding Mastodon federation to their Threads app. So I very much doubt it.

            They’d probably take an Embrace, Expand, Extinguish approach.

        • KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          You would pay a third party to do it. And keep details extremely vague so you have plausible deniability.

      • Steeve@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        You have a massively inflated view of Lemmy’s importance in the social media market.

        • GONADS125@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The longer it continues, the more likely that scenario is IMO. Bitter alt-right extremists would probably start losing interest after a short while, whereas social media competitors would stand to gain from long-term interference.

      • AssPennies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’d go with state actors first.

        When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax…), or yet another that will sell out it’s host country’s citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).

        But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you’d need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don’t like the idea of lemmy, and it’ll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.

        • aseriesoftubes@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yep, that’s a great point.

          Add to that the fact that mainstream social media companies wouldn’t touch DDoS and CSAM attacks with a 100-foot pole, even if they contracted with a third party. Both of these attacks are highly illegal and would surely ruin a publicly traded company (or one that’s trying to go public, like Reddit).

          And don’t forget Russia in your list of state actors who are threatened by the unrestricted flow of information. They definitely don’t want their citizenry to be informed of how disastrously their invasion of Ukraine is going, or what a murderous scumbag Putin is.

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          1 year ago

          You don’t get a lot of upvotes and sure we don’t know but it isn’t like the NSA infiltrated (in person) left wing groups and more.

          It’s definitely a possibility that someone doesn’t like decentralised content enough to put some meager efforts against it.

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This makes the most sense to me. It’s a pretty vitriolic attack, therefore I don’t think it’s simply a troll while at the same time I don’t believe it’s any corporate social media.

    • Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Considering all the alt-right garbage that was popping up there the last couple of days this seems at least plausible. I sometimes envy their ability to utterly destroy anything they touch.

      • SeducingCamel@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I’m sure you’d love to link to some examples

        See people claim this constantly with no proof

        • Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world
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          You want me to link posts that the mods removed? That seems like an unrealistic expectation. You could always check the post pinned to the top of lemmyshitpost where they describe the recent problems, but I suspect you didn’t ask for proof in good faith

          • SeducingCamel@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Ah that’s actually my bad, I thought you were replying to a different comment in reference to hexbear

    • CryptoRoberto@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t put it past the hexbear crazies throwing a tantrum. They claim to be left wing… Sure seem more like fascist trumper types though. Maybe it’s just that they’re all incels and incels all seem about the same.

      • Fylkir@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Throwing a tantrum about what exactly? They’re one of the oldest-running Lemmy instances. Until now they were running a fork based on a pre-Federation version of the codebase.

        You believe they did a bunch of work migrating their database only to then negate that work by destroying the community they wanted to Federate with?

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Well something to keep in mind is that hexbear isn’t one person … it’s a whole community that’s developed independently for a while. So it’s reasonable to expect that there’d be variation in the behaviours of members in the same way there’s variation on the rest of lemmy. From what I’ve gathered, not all hexbear members are keen on the re-federation, and some aren’t too keen on being “well-behaved” around politically opposed users (ie “libs”), though hexbear admins and other users have promised moderation and that such isn’t part of the core hexbear values.

          It’s social media, afterall … and people can be rather shit and ruin it for the rest of us. In the end, the core service provided a social media platform isn’t the hardware, sys-admin-work or software (however necessary they are) … it’s the moderation work.

          The moderation keeps the place sanitary enough for people to actually want to be here … however much we may have problems with particular actions of our moderators, we should really support and praise them at every turn.

        • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          At least a handful of users on hexbear had made their intention clear during the first week of re-federation, they were looking to cause chaos on Lemmy for there own pleasure. I don’t know if they were banned and/or their comments deleted.

        • CryptoRoberto@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Big difference between a few users who did a bunch of work and the toxic goonsquad the majority of the userbase turned into.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        they’re all incels and incels all seem about the same.

        Downvote from me there. I’ve seen plenty of examples of hexbear people being nice, interesting and good sports. They definitely seem to have more of shitposting culture than is normal on mainstream lemmy. But all in all it’s seemed fun to me from what I’ve seen.

        Beyond all that, this is just superficial and prejudicial. If you had some examples to link to or more substantial insights to share as to why it’d be “them”, that’d be worth reading.

        Otherwise, they’re an instance. Not one person, I’m sure some on hexbear are assholes and some awesome.

        • CryptoRoberto@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          So, so shocked someone it’s from lemmygrad that is defending the notoriously toxic “communist” tanky trollfest instance.

          • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Sorry, not from lemmygrad. And I’m on lemmy.ml because I joined before the Reddit migration and “Privacy and FOSS” (the focus of lemmy.ml) made a lot of sense for a lemmy instance/community.

            Beyond that … more superficial, prejudicial hate mongering without any description of why or for what purpose. Sorry, I don’t think it’s worth reading … a downvote from me … and, just being real for a moment … at the moment it’s more likely that you’re a member of a “notoriously toxic … trollfest”.

            Ironically, IME, I’ve seen significantly more troll-like tankie hate than I do tankie-trolling. I keep asking for receipts/links to tankie trolling here, as I’m genuinely curious to see it and understand what people are so upset about (please don’t explain to me what’s so upsetting unless it’s culturally thorough or coupled with some links+descriptions) … but no one has been able to do so.

            • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              Most people from hexbear provide sources, which is better than can be said for all the tankie hate.

      • Jerbil [he/him]@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Half of them would have preferred not to federate in the first place, so it doesn’t make sense to accuse them of retaliating. The tinfoil hats people on here wear about that instance are worse than anything the users post lol.

  • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • kromem@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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              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

  • enbee@compuverse.uk
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    1 year ago

    big F in chat for those of you dealing with this. my #1 fear about setting upand instance.

    • jeffw@lemmy.world
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      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

      • Bleeping Lobster@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

      • thrawn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Not_Alec_Baldwin@lemmy.world
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          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.

          • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            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.

  • itsdavetho@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • Oneobi@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • OrbitJunkie@lemdro.id
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      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.

      • maxprime@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
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    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.

    • Clbull@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is this why I couldn’t upload a meme to the Lemmy World servers earlier today?

      Fuck…

    • PastThePixels@lemmy.potatoe.ca
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      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!

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
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        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.

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
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        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.

  • owiseedoubleyou@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    How desperate to destroy Lemmy must you be to spam CSAM on communities and potentially get innocent people into trouble?

    • heyoni@lemm.ee
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      Maybe you’re a dev on the Reddit team and own a lot of shares for what you know is about to go public?

  • DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com
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    1 year ago

    To be clear, if no one on a given instance sub to that particular /c, the content won’t federate to said instance, correct?

    • Jamie@jamie.moeOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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?

  • idle@158436977.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I went ahead and just deleted my entire pictrs cache and will definitely disable caching other servers images when it becomes available.

  • Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz
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    Self hoster here, im nuking all of pictrs. People are sick. Luckily I did not see anything, however I was subscribed to the community.

    • Did a shred on my entire pictrs volume (all images ever):

    sudo find /srv/lemmy/example.com/volumes/pictrs -type f -exec shred {} \;

    • Removed the pictrs config in lemmy.hjson

    • removed pictrs container from docker compose

    Anything else I should to protect my instance, besides shutting down completely?