So what have they been doing to nuke the csam images, editing the database directly?
Often just nuking all image uploads made during a certain time period. Which is why old image threads in Lemmy have time periods littered with broken images.
I don’t understand why Lemmy needs to have a built-in image server at all. Reddit didn’t have one for the longest time and it was fine. Sure, I don’t think anyone would be particularly happy with going back to Imgur etc., but it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.
It’s a trade off for us.
You risk CSAM, and have to shoulder the storage costs.
But you also help to reduce link rot, as the images are kept on the site, rather than an external image host that might explode/go VC one day.
Some instances do just disable the image server part (I think lemm.ee used to and still only allows small images?)
I mean I don’t know why we need images at all, this stuff worked fine when it was just a BBS
Uphill both ways.
They definitely should remove it, at least until moderation tools are available.
Yes
Often they delete all images during the time frame of a CSAM attack, as that has been the only real feasible way to ensure images weren’t left behind. Though I think a few images have started using AI detection methods to remove images like that automatically (read up on that here and here), also Pict-rs now has a Log linking uploaded images to the user, so now images can be purged with the users.
Admins can purge posts manually which actually deletes them. Or use tools like db0’s lemmy-safety that tries to automatically search for CSAM and wipe it.
I think the problem here is the user didn’t finish their post which means the photo was uploaded but not associated with a post and therefore not purgeable that way.
That last problem was fixed in an older version of the software. If you upload, but don’t post, it will now be deleted after a time.
You can test this pretty easily by just leaving your browser open with an image uploaded and trying to post it later.
So when I accidentally uploaded those Death Star plans…
Don’t worry. There was some little minor thing about a vent but is reported as fixed since it was discovered.
I’m on the side of the Death Star engineers. Nowhere in the spec was it required that Death Stars be Jedi-proof.
How exactly does Lemmy remain in compliance with laws regarding, for example, a user’s right to have all data associated with their account deleted (right to erasure, etc), or ensure that it is only kept for a time period reasonable while the user is actively using your services (data protection retention periods, etc)?
It’s not a big deal for me, just strange to think Lemmy of all places would be built to be so anti user’s data rights. The user is ultimately the one that decides what is done with their information/property, after all.
Lemmy is not a singular software or website, every instance on its own need to ensure compliance with their respective laws where they are domiciled.
But if instance A is domiciled in the EU, and the content mirrored to instance B in Zimbabwe, where no right to be forgotten exists, then a user of instance A can’t invoke any laws beyond what the local admin can control.
That’s amazing for high availability of content - it’s essentially mirrored in perpetuity - but a nightmare for privacy advocates. AFAIK there haven’t been any court cases related to deletion requests, so that’s still virgin territory.
Instances located in Zimbabwe still have to comply with the GDPR, as the law applies to any entity that processes EU citizen’s personal data, regardless of where this happens. Instance B would also have to comply with a deletion request, or whatever EU member state the citizen is from will impose a fine and seize assets if necessary.
redacted
deleted by creator
Uhuh, suuureeeee. Tell that to any number of fines that has yearly been issued by my country’s GDPR oversight agency on ordinary citizens.
GDPR only applies when people file reports and when there are lawsuits. There’s literally no shortage of articles of people fined for GDPR violations, all people need to do is search for them.
When someone files the inevitable court case, please let me know. I have some admin behavior bullshit I will be willing to personally get in contact with the lawyers about that I think could help it.
deleted by creator
You confuse things. Just read: https://www.compliancejunction.com/gdpr-guideline-for-companies-with-less-than-250-employees/
If you think that your company can simply ignore the introduction of the GDPR and continue as before, well, think again. Any company that is found not to be complying with regulations of GDPR can be penalized with heavy fines, or a company may have to suspend or stop processing personal data. In fact, many companies are not yet ready for GDPR because they figure this legislation will not influence their company.
DPR compliance is as important for companies with less than 250 employees as it is for large multi-national corporations. Consequently, many companies have chosen to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to address to the GDPR requirements or appoint a consultancy company to get their GDPR preparations started before delegating the role to an existing employee. For further information about this option, please refer to our article “Do Small Companies Need to Appoint a DPO under GDPR?”
Not sure how you think individual people can get fined under the GDPR but companies with less than 250 employees can’t. This is just about the only exemption:
Article 30 of GDPR is about a data inventory record and provides one potential exception for Organisations with less than 250 employees. This is a limited exemption which states that Organisations with less than 250 employees may be exempt from maintaining a data Inventory or record of processing activities. This Exemption is a minor exemption and only applies for Organisations with less than 250 employees in certain circumstances where there is no processing that is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is only occasional, excludes special categories of personal data and personal data related to criminal convictions. The Full text of Article 30 is below. This limited exemption should in no means be interpreted by Organisations with less than 250 employees as an authorisation to ignore overall GDPR Compliance.
suck my balls
… At this point, you realize you are just grasping at straws, right? And ones you are seriously misunderstanding, given your previous less than 250 employees statement.
It’s not much, but I would advice you to read the second answer here, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29052/do-web-applications-as-hobby-projects-need-to-comply-with-the-gdpr , and seriously think about whether a site with many more users and much more personal data, specially those receiving revenue streams in the form of donations and with a team made up of more than one person https://team.lemmy.world/ , would be more or less likely to be accountable to the GDPR under a court of law than a personal blog.
Ruud should probably be getting in contact with https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/contact/informatie-en-meldpunt-privacy-imp or on the telephone Monday to Thursday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on 088-1805250 if he hasn’t already.
Doesn’t matter. Lemmy instances are technically “entities” so the law applies to them. You don’t have to be a business, just “anything that processes EU citizen’s personal data”.
citizen
Actually I believe it’s “residents”. You don’t need to be a citizen.
suck my balls
Because Federation is a terrible idea
But think of Reddit, they can delete a post but a bunch of archived websites will still have it. That doesn’t make Reddit non-compliant
Or do.
OH NO,
Anyway…
What is the name of this genre? Asking for a friend.
AI prompt in the bingilator was “the fall of Rome, but the Romans are all sailor moon and the barbarians are slime monsters”
If weird nonsense is what you want then check out !imageai@sh.itjust.works
Guess more from this “genre”
Those slimez are adorbs
Don’t be fooled, they’re killing machines
Prompt: “Some nut on Lemmy wanted to make an AI picture with the prompt, “the fall of Rome, but the Romans are all sailor moon and the barbarians are slime monsters” for some reason.”
Congratulations, @M0oP0o@mander.xyz, you’re Jesus.
Oh, these are just left overs from past fancies.
They can get way weirder:
Why is that one just a banana lmao
This light novel has already been greenlit for becoming an anime btw. “I was hit by a truck and transported to another world where I became a slime tamer jesus and took over the empire with my harem of magical girls.” It’s going to be a hit.
umm what’s going on with the one on the right with a blue skirt
She’s got a slime in there, duh. Don’t you understand the genre at all?
もちろん
Rcan you do sumfing with Master Belch from Earthbound replacing the slimes?
Also, adorably evil
What exactly is a KYC selfie? Is it a photo of an ID card? I figured out WUI is WebUI. The author uses some strange acronyms I never heard before.
It’s very American that they can steal your identity with just one photo. My European state issued ID has data on both sides, so if someone would take a photo of it won’t be enough for anything. Also if you loose it you just get a new one and noone can use the old one for anything.
KYC is Business/Finance lingo - “Know Your Client”.
Yeah the fact that exposing one number/piece of information puts you at risk to a significant amount of other information about you being exposed is peak USA.
KYC = Know Your Customer, a team I just learned recently. It’s primarily related to financial transactions, to make crimes like money laundering or terrorism financing harder. Up until relatively recently this was something that primarily happened face-to-face, and it doesn’t seem like good controls have been developed for online use.
I think some ID cards are single-sided, some are double-sided. One of the big problems is most Americans only have a state-issued ID, not a federal one, and the standards vary from state to state. They’ve tried to address this some with minimum standards for state IDs (mainly driver’s licenses) under a program called Real ID (enacted after 9/11 hijackers got state-issued IDs for false identities), but it was still optional for certain purposes, at least until recently. In my state for a long time when renewing your driver’s license it was optional to do the extra paperwork for a Real ID, but then there would be a note on the top that it was not valid for federal identification purposes, such as accessing certain government facilities or boarding an airplane. Since I have a passport I’ve never bothered with it, but it looks like this year getting a Real ID is mandatory when getting or renewing a driver’s license in my state.
Minnesota just extended it to 2025 again. I can’t get into federally secure buildings, but I can board a plane.
And until I can’t, I’m not going to. Part of me likes to think they haven’t mandated it yet because I’m holding out.
Which is really because of pure laziness than actual protest
It’s mostly a religious thing. The “left behind” Christians believe a federal ID is the “Mark of the Beast”.
deleted by creator
Probably “know your customer” selfie. Might be a picture of their ID, a picture of themselves, or a picture with both them and ID.
Author here. A “KYC Selfie” is a selfie photo where you hold-up a State-issued photo-identity document next to your face. This is not a US-specific thing; it’s also used in the EU.
I used to work for a bank in Europe where we used KYC seflies for authentication of customers opening new accounts (or recovering accounts from lost credentials), including European customers. Most KYC Selfies are taken with a passport (where all the information is on one-side), but if your ID has data on both sides then the entity asking you for the KYC seflie may require you to take two photos: showing both sides.
Some countries in the EU have cryptographic authentication with eIDs. The example I linked-to in the article is Estonia, who has made auth-by-State-issued-private-key mandatory for over a decade. Currently MEPs are deciding on an eID standard, which is targeting making eIDs a requirement for all EU Member States by 2016.
I recommend the Please Identify Yourself! talk at 37c3 about the state of eID legislation as of Dec 2023 (and how to learn from India, who did eID horribly wrong):
I’m a developer of a Lemmy client. When you upload an image to a Lemmy instance, the instance returns a “delete token”. Later, you can ask the instance to delete the image attached to the delete token. So as long as you keep hold of the delete token for a specific image, you’re able to delete it later.
Lemmy-ui (the official frontend) will give you the option to delete an image again shortly after uploading it. However, it’s not possible to remove the image after actually creating the post, as the delete token associated with that post isn’t remembered anywhere on the Lemmy backend.
As for other Lemmy clients, YMMV. The client I work on (Mlem) deletes images if you remove them from a post before posting it, but has the same pitfall as Lemmy-ui in that it won’t delete the image if you’ve already created the post.
It would be possible to locally save the delete tokens of every image you upload, so that you can request that they be removed later. I don’t know of any clients that can do this yet, though (if someone knows of one, feel free to mention it).
Edit: clarity
as the delete token isn’t stored anywhere on the backend.
Backend of the app or the lemmy server? if it is not stored on the lemmy server then there will be no way to delete it even if the app stores the token.
Also using a singular token that never expires to modify user content sounds like a bad idea. image operations like upload and delete should probably tied to the user credentials.
Backend of the app or the lemmy server? if it is not stored on the lemmy server then there will be no way to delete it even if the app stores the token.
Apologies, I worded that badly. Lemmy uses an image hosting service called pictrs to manage the images you upload, which is largely separated from the rest of the Lemmy backend. Pictrs of course stores the delete tokens matching each image, but Lemmy doesn’t associate those tokens with the posts or comments they originated from as far as I know.
That makes sense, probably why image deletion was so hard on lemmy.
If you want this to be fixed, please tell the devs on the relevant GitHub Ticket
For some reason they think I’m literally the only person who wants it? At least that’s what they keep saying as the reason for why they won’t work on it.
It would be possible to locally save the delete tokens of every image you upload, so that you can request that they be removed later. I don’t know of any clients that can do this yet, though (if someone knows of one, feel free to mention it).
@sjmarf@sh.itjust.works I’m told Boost does this.
I hate to use it, but this is why I still find imgur useful. It works.
Some stuff on Lemmy just doesn’t have a robust feature set yet. Especially around content moderation.
Image previews will still be cached, i believe.
Not sure what quality lemmy would cache them at, i presume its configurable
This got me curious on how many images are on all Lemmy instances combined and how much storage it all takes up.
I can tell you that for lemmy.ca we use 778gb
Holy fucking shit balls. I contemplated seeing up an instance on a £5 VPS. Hmmmm, I think my scale is a bit off.
If it’s just a private instance, your storage needs will be way less. We use object storage, so it’s actually pretty cheap (like $5-10 a month iirc). We’re not storing that all on the server disk.
I’m running a quite small instance and currently the full media storage is 234GB. That being said I pay $3 per month for the storage on Cloudflare R2 so that’s fine. You could get more for cheaper probably with a service like Backblaze B2.
The main database (non-media) currently takes up 36GB.
Huh, less than I expected.
deleted by creator
You can consider almost anything publicly posted to Lemmy as permanent. As I keep saying, please be careful.
I do think a way to automatically store the uploaded image urls and associated delete keys under your user is a necessary feature.
For personal image hosting I use postimage, but any external host that lets you modify/remove images under your account will do.
What happens when you share a link to an image? Does Lemmy just save the link or does it make a copy of the image?
The link. It only saves the image if you upload it directly, since converting it to a link, and embedding the link is how Lemmy handles image uploads.
Isn’t this in violation of the gdpr?
If that were the case, wouldn’t the entire Fediverse be against it? Since they can’t really be deleted because it gets sent everywhere.
I suspect it is the case.
The issue doesn’t seem to be the Fediverse itself, rather the fact that images uploaded to Lemmy are handled in a separate program that isn’t linked to it in a way you can delete from by just deleting posts. The images aren’t marked as owned by you, so can’t be deleted again. You’d need some way of storing those image deletion tokens against your account, so you can manage them yourself and be able to delete them again.
And this would have to include images that you uploaded and didn’t make a post about. As far as I can tell they’re just left there on the server forever. Not even sure if it tells you which user uploaded it, although it might log by IP address. I haven’t looked too deeply into the code but there’s potential for abuse there.
Damnit. I wish I known that an hour ago. I guess my butthole pic will live on with the internet for an eternity.
It really is a nice butthole
Great, now you made me want to check their profile to see if they did indeed uploaded a picture of their butthole.
I am saved by my ultra slow internet and going to have to take your word for it.
“That’s America’s butthole.”
Yea i remember coming across this issue on git the devs were being angry at the poor lad.
How dare you make us follow the rules!
What ?
He was telling the devs to follow the gdpr and they said “nah it’s not a priority”.
Oh yeah i remember that too in the end the devs seem to be bullying him and just assigned him on the project and i don’t think the guy even knows tge language he needs to write (forgot which one ruby or rust is my guess).
I’ll be honest, didn’t realize this was news to anyone online in general. What is posted online stays online, particularly if you wish it didn’t. Most especially if you make a stink about it.
