In about 48 hours Musk will ‘reveal’ the X rebranding freakshow was actually a ‘market test’ and they’ve gained ‘invaluable user data’ on what totally wasn’t another CEO tweet tantrum that some poor bastards had to try to translate into corporate policy.
That would be on brand for Musk, but I think he will stick with this one as it was his dream for a long time. After all he did buy back x.com domain from PayPal after he merged with PayPal back in the day.
After reading it, I’m still unsure what all they consider to be CSAM and how much of each category they found. Here are what they count as CSAM categories as far as I can tell. No idea how much the categories overlap, and therefore no idea how many beyond the 112 PhotoDNA images are of actual children.
112 instances of known CSAM of actual children, (identified by PhotoDNA)
713 times assumed CSAM, based on hashtags.
1,217 text posts talking about stuff related to grooming/trading. Includes no actual CSAM or CSAM trading/selling on Mastodon, but some links to other sites?
Drawn and Computer-Generated images. (No quantity given, possibly not counted? Part of the 713 posts above?)
Self-Generated CSAM. (Example is someone literally selling pics of their dick for Robux.) (No quantity given here either.)
Personally, I’m not sure what the take-away is supposed to be from this. It’s impossible to moderate all the user-generated content quickly. This is not a Fediverse issue. The same is true for Mastodon, Twitter, Reddit and all the other big content-generating sites. It’s a hard problem to solve. Known CSAM being deleted within hours is already pretty good, imho.
Meta-discussion especially is hard to police. Based on the report, it seems that most CP-material by mass is traded using other services (chat rooms).
For me, there’s a huge difference between actual children being directly exploited and virtual depictions of fictional children. Personally, I consider it the same as any other fetish-images which would be illegal with actual humans (guro/vore/bestiality/rape etc etc).
If we took this to its logical conclusion, most popular games would be banned. How many JRPGs have underage protagonists? How many of those have some kind of love story going on in the background? What about FPS games where you’re depicted killing other people? What about fantasy RPGs where you can kill and control animals?
Things should always be legal unless there’s a clear victim. And communities should absolutely be allowed to filter out anything they want, even if it’s 100% legal. So the lack of clear articulation of the legal issues is very worrisome since it implies a moral obligation to remove legal but taboo content.
Mastodon is a piece of software. I don’t see anyone saying “phpBB” or “WordPress” has a massive child abuse material problem.
Has anyone in the history ever said “Not a good look for phpBB”? No. Why? Because it would make no sense whatsoever.
I feel kind of a loss for words because how obvious it should be. It’s like saying “paper is being used for illegal material. Not a good look for paper.”
What is the solution to someone hosting illegal material on an nginx server? You report it to the authorities. You want to automate it? Go ahead and crawl the web for illegal material and generate automated reports. Though you’ll probably be the first to end up in prison.
I get what you’re saying, but due to federated nature, those CSAMs can easily spread to many instances without their admins noticing them. Having even one CSAM in your server is a huge risk for the server owner.
This could be a really big issue though. People can make instances for really hateful and disgusting crap but even if everyone defederates from them it’s still giving them a platform, a tiny tiny corner on the internet to talk about truly horrible topics.
Again if it’s illegal content publically available, officials can charge those site admins with crime of hosting. Everyone just has a duty to defederate.
Those corners will exist no matter what service they use and there is nothing Mastodon can do to stop this. There’s a reason there are public lists of instances to defederate. This content can only be prevented by domain providers and governments.
phpbb is not the host or the provider. Its just something you download and install on your server, with the actual service provider (You, the owner of the server and operator of the phpbb forum) being responsible for its content and curation.
Mastadon/Twitter/social media is the host/provider/moderator.
I'm about to move away but currently I cheat Comcast out of gig pro in the Boston area for the price of regular gig service, $90/mo for fiber to the basement, 2gig symmetric sfp+ and a separate 1gig symmetric rj45. Highly recommend if you can avoid paying the full $300/mo price (not sure if the full price has changed in 5 years but that's what it would have been if I didn't confuse the fuck out of customer support to get them to incorrectly bill me). I've tested both lines simultaneously and was able to max out both at a combined 3gig up/down using 2 simultaneous speed tests.
It started with splurging on gigabit pro, the obscure fiber service they will only sell if you call a special number, have a back and forth with a small property manager, and wait for them to check your proximity to fiber and get approval from their finance department on top of a $1000 install fee (discountable to $500). Once I had gigabit pro (6 months and several approvals later), things got started as a result of repeatedly humoring the comcast salespeople every time they called to try to upsell me to cable TV. Since none of the residential salespeople were familiar with gigabit pro, which is installed and managed by the business side "metro-e" division of comcast, they were always shocked to see I was being billed $150/mo and assured me they could get me TV bundled and reduce my price (gigabit pro is often discounted so I was getting 2 years at 50% off the standard $300/mo price, I was actually planning on cancelling as soon as that ran out because there would also be an early cancellation fee). They would spend like an hour trying and failing to get the billing system to bundle in TV because I assume the residential billing system is probably only set up to bundle TV with residential high frequency cable internet packages. Eventually they would give up and tell me they would reach back out. Sometime later, I would get another sales call from someone else offering a TV bundle and the whole thing would repeat again.
I think I spent a total of 6 hours on the phone across several occasions spanning a month or more (multitasking of course) just being entertained that they couldn't figure it out when one day the salesperson got their manager to override the billing system and they re-entered my plan from scratch. Every step of the way I told them I was happy with my speed (I was hoping that way they wouldn't notice I was managed by the metro-e team) and would only agree to bundle if they also dropped the 2 year contract I was in, and they agreed. So when they re-entered my plan, they erroneously entered in regular gigabit service. Since there would be no speed change I guess they didn't even look at the modem provisioning let alone notice that my "modem" was listed as the Juniper fiber switch that is normally rented out for fiber service.
Later I cancelled the TV part of the plan and was just left with the gig pro fiber service while my internet bill went down to the normal gig price. Not being completely satisfied I later called a few more times trying to negotiate my bill even lower. When I finally succeeded at negotiating my bill a few more dollars lower over live chat support, they made the mistake of sending me an xfinity combo modem/router self install kit - maybe because I didn't have a modem attached to my account that the system understood. I decided to just try to activate it and see what would happen, surprisingly I was able to activate it on my account while the fiber service was still active. I took advantage of having an actual returnable modem and swapped it out with a purchased modem to get rid of the modem rental fee which I was originally made to pay for the fiber switch, which further lowered my bill. So to this day I have 2gig symmetric SFP+ with an additional 1gig symmetric rj45 powered by fiber as well as the standard cable modem with an additional 1gig non-symmetric connection for a total of 4 gigabit download and 3.035gig upload.
To top that all off for several years I gave 1 gig out of the 4 that I now have combined to our neighbors through a moca adapter so for a large portion of my time here I have only paid $40/mo split with 4 total roommates, so my monthly portion would be $10/mo
TL;DR: I splurged like a $500 install fee to get gigabit pro which is super obscure and took 6 months to get all the approvals, then I kept interacting with customer support and salespeople while taking advantage of their confusion and the fact that the residential folks don't interface with the business fiber / metro-e folks to reduce my bill by tricking them into billing me standard residential price with a TV bundle that the salespeople REALLY want to sell you on, then I continued haggling for a few more dollars off resulting in them sending me a normal modem, which I set up and immediately swapped out with my own modem for even more money off. I also ended up splitting this extremely haggled bill with our neighbors (in addition to roommates) so my monthly portion has ended up being $10 since these 4 gigabits are split among 9 people who combined rarely even exceed 1 gig.
I had a similar but not really experience with one of my businesses where they messed up and I basically got business gigabit and four TVs and sports for something ridiculously low (business wise) of like $120/mo.
I later needed to add a TV and the rep put me on hold and then came back and said something to the effect of, “Here’s the deal… apparently we messed up your contract so your current price is locked in for 2 years. If you add this, we have to redo it, and it will go up to $450/mo. I would suggest you don’t add a TV.”
So I didn’t. I bought a $12 adapter off Amazon and just split the cable line instead.
I expected a curious story about how elves enchanted your modem and now you feared to gaze upon it lest the spell be broken, not this fucking necronomicon vs the infinity stones shit.
I’m just lost, you broke the matrix, I can’t begin to figure this out.
Going to at least ask about gigabit pro, live in silicon valley, used to work at google, can’t get fucking fiber to save my life, it’s like a greek tragedy, but you have given me the courage to try again.
Haha I'm glad you found it inspiring - I only ever intended for it to be a temporary exercise in overkill networks but I love squeezing ISPs for what they're worth and I just kept getting lucky.
Beware that getting multi gig wan is a very good excuse to overkill your network with 10gig firewalls, switches, and the latest bleeding edge draft-standard-based wifi gear, on the plus side you will always have a retort when someone online says you could never need mgig home gear because surely your wan can't be more than a gig anyway.
I’m at 10g internal for what matters, with a unifi dream machine, so 10g firewall could work, my limiting factor has always been that fucking uplink :(
Visiting a rural island off the coast of sweden in a few weeks. Better fiber for cheaper. Than down the street from fucking google.
Oh fuck you so much comcast. Bless you sir, blessings upon you and your house.
I was on 100/40 FTTN (but getting full speed due to a good line, lucky me) and earlier this year I took up the free upgrade to FTTP, went super smoothly and the install was even done neatly.
Yes I’m with Aussie BB, they’re getting big and starting to act like a bigger ISP, but the service is still top notch.
I know that people like to dump on Cloudflare, but it’s incredibly easy to enable a built-in CSAM scanner with CloudFlare.
On that note, I’d like to see built-in moderation tools using something like PDQ and TMK+PDQF and a shared hashtable of CSAM and other material that may be outlawed or desirable to filter out in different regions (e.g. terrorist content, Nazi content in Germany, etc.)
It looks like it scans and flags on the outbound (user download of the image), so as long as it sits in front of your instance, it should work just fine.
You’re still responsible for removing the material, complying with any preservation requirements, and any other legal obligations, and notifying CloudFlare that it’s been removed.
It would be ideal if it could block on upload, so the material never makes it to your instance, but that would likely be something else like integration with PhotoDNA or something similar.
People are wary about how internet got more and more centralized behind cloudlare. If you’re ever getting caught in cloudlare’s captcha hell because they flag your IP as suspicious, you’ll get wary too because you suddenly realized how big cloudlare now when half of the internet suddenly ask you to solve cloudlare captcha.
But, no, however the sentiment makes sense and as I am trying to disperse / decentralize most everything I can these days, including getting away from Google services, for example, this does make sense as well.
Lemmy.world had to start using CloudFlare because some script kiddies were DDOSing it. Some people were complaining that it encourages centralization, etc.
Personally, I love it. The service you get even at the lowest level of payment ($20/mo) is great. And what you get for free can’t be compared.
I don’t want much, I just want deletion to be propagated reliably across the fediverse. If someone got banned for CSAM and their contents purged, I want those action propagated across all federated instances. I can’t even delete my comment reliably here on Lemmy since many instances doesn’t seem to get the deletion requests.
I'm located in a van in New Zealand so I only use mobile data. I pay NZ$40 (US$25) per month for "unlimited" data, which is all I can eat but capped at 1Mbps. I can stream 720p barely, but I mostly torrent. I typically use about 60-80GB a month.
This seems like a very normal thing with all social media. Now if the server isn’t banning and removing the content within a reasonable amount of time then we have major issues.
Seems like if you talk about Mastodon but not Twitter or Facebook in the same post it makes it feel like one is greater than the others. This article seems half banked to get clicks.
Of course this is a ruling out of Western Texas. Thankfully Google can appeal to a more sane court and hopefully get this obvious patent troll’s verdict thrown out.
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