Okay that was much faster than I expected, I expected us to be down for at least a week.

So what happened? As mentioned in my earlier post, some absolute asswipe of a person uploaded some extremely vile stuff over on a large instance. The admins were quick to let everyone know and we all purged the info. We here were not affected because the offending community was not subscribed here, but I purged the last 24 hours worth of images to be safe.

I won’t go into all of the details right now, but previously I hosted this happily on a micro PC at home. When content is federated it means it’s duplicated onto my server and served from there, which is real bad if I’m hosting it from my home, means that essentially they could come busting down my door, which is why I reactively posted that post and took everything down while I investigated.

What’s changed is that we’re now fully hosted on the cloud, completely outside of my home. I’ve enabled pretty much every guardrail I can in the short time and have been in constant contact with other instance admins.

I won’t go into all of the details of how this is hosted, but the one clear thing is that we’re now behind Cloudflare, which has free CSAM reporting enabled, which means if anything ever crosses over it will be auto-blocked and reported on, which of course I’m happy to help feds catch assholes who post that at all.

So we’re up again for a while, we’ll take it as it goes. Lemmy will be adding in new guardrails to also stop federating images (no changes to you folks, but essentially means I wouldn’t have a copy of any image like that, it’d be on the hosting server).

Anyway, that’s all, sorry for the swears today and how angry I sound. Someone decided to post some horrible shit, some instance owners are dealing with actually seeing it with their eyes, I lost the back half of my weekend to it.

If anyone wants to help with hosting costs, it’s not very much but I’m expecting about 20/month at our current size. No one should feel obligated, but if you’d like to I set up a simple buy me a coffee, if anyone feels inclined.

-Scrubbles

  • charles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
    2·
    1 year ago

    I had thoughts about starting my own server, but the risk of CSAM and federation seemed too high. I’m glad you were able to take care of it and that the overall instance admin group is taking great strides to protect everyone.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It was definitely a nail biter. Apparently the image itself was pretty horrifying, the people who saw it were saying things like “can’t vat it out of my head”, legit PTSD. So we’re lucky it didn’t come over here, but yes there’s some official letters going to the devs demanding more tools for us to block it from the start.

      I’ve reached out to the ncmec to get an account started for us to block it before it ever comes in. So shitty that we even have to do this