Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child performing sexual acts with an adult.

The explicit nature of these images, the gut-wrenching shock and horror, the disgust and helplessness were very overwhelming to me. Those images are burnt into my mind and I would love to get rid of them but I don’t know how or if it is possible. Maybe time will take them out of my mind.

In my strong opinion, Beehaw must seek a platform where NO ONE will ever have to see these types of images. A software platform that makes it nearly impossible for Beehaw to host, in any way, CSAM.

If the other admins want to give their opinions about this, then I am all ears.

I, simply, cannot move forward with the Beehaw project unless this is one of our top priorities when choosing where we are going to go.

  • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
    39·
    1 year ago

    People keep talking about going to another platform. Personally I think a better idea would be to develop lemmy to deal with these issues. This must be a fediverse wide problem. So some discussion with other admins and the developers is probably the way to go on many of these things. Moreover you work with https://opencollective.com/, can they help. Beyond this, especially CSAM, there must be large funding agencies where one could get a grant to get some real professional programming put into this problem. Perhaps we could raise funds ourselves to help with this too.

    So frankly I would like to see Beehaw solve the issues with lemmy, rather then just move to some other platform that will have its own issues. The exception may be if the Beehaw people think that being a safe space creates too big a target that you have to leave the Threadiverse to be safe. That to me seems like letting the haters win. It is exactly what they want. My vote will always be to solve the threadiverse issues rather then run away.

    Just my feeling. There may be more short term practical issues that take precedence and frankly it is all up to you guys where you want to take this project.

    • snowe@programming.devEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      The solution is to use an already existing software product that solves this, like CloudFlare’s CSAM Detection. I know people on the fediverse hate big companies, but they’ve solved this problem already numerous times before. They’re the only ones allowed access to CSAM hashes, lemmy devs and platforms will never get access to the hashes (for good reason).

      • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        They will still need to have a developer set this up and presumably it should be added as an option to the main code base. I thought I heard the beehaw admins were not developers.

        There are a number of other issues that are driving the admins to dump lemmy. Same applies there.

        • snowe@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Not sure what you mean. You do not need to be a developer to set up CloudFlare’s CSAM detection. You simply have email the NCMEC, get an account, then check a box in CF, input some information about your NCMEC account, and then you’re good to go.

          • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            How does the scan happen? It has to be linked in some how. Are you saying that choosing cloudflair as your CDN that will flag at distribution time? Or at upload time?

            • snowe@programming.devEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              If you use CloudFlare as your proxy then all your instances traffic gets routed through CF before ever making it to your server. If someone tries to upload CSAM it will immediately be flagged (before ever making it to your server). CloudFlare then quarantines it and automatically files a report with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. There’s more to the prices, but the point is that putting it in the lemmy software is not a good solution, especially when industry standard proven solutions already exist. You don’t have to use CF. You can also use solutions from Google, FB, Microsoft, Thorn, etc.

      • thySatannic@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Wait… why is no access to csam hashes a good thing? Wouldn’t it make it easier to detect if hashes were public?! I feel like I’m missing something here…

        • snowe@programming.devEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Giving access to CSAM hashes means anyone wanting to avoid detection simply has to check what they’re about to upload against the db. If it matches then they simply modify the image until it doesn’t. It’s literally guaranteed to make the problem worse, not better.

          • sarmaleEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Question, from what I saw it seems like every CSAM image ever is assigned a new hash. Isnt it unscalable to asign a separate hash for everything? does that mean that most CSAM images were detected before?