We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won't help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @Striker@lemmy.world the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn't his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what's next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It's been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn't the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

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[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the FBI or eqivilant keeps a record of hashes for a known CASM and middleware should be able to compare to that. Hopefully, if a match is found, kill the post and forward all info on to LE.

[–] malloc@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Interesting. But aren’t hashes unique to a specific photo? Just a single change to the photo would inevitably change its hash.

I think Apple was going to implement a similar system and deploy to all iPhones/Macs in some iOS/macOS update. However was eventually 86’d due to privacy concerns from many people and the possible for abuse and/or false positives.

A system like this might work on a small scale though as part of moderating tools. Not sure where you would get a constantly updated database of CSAM hashes though.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Interesting. But aren’t hashes unique to a specific photo? Just a single change to the photo would inevitably change its hash.

Most people are lazy and stupid, so maybe hash checking is enough to catch a huge portion (probably more than 50%, maybe even 80% or 90%?) of the CSAM that doesn't bother (or know how) to do that?

[–] TechnoBabble@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I'm almost positive they've been developing an image recognition AI that will make slightly altering csam photos obsolete.

Here's hoping.

[–] dipshit@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

A hash would change if even one bit changed in that file. This could be from corruption, automated resizing by any photo processing tools (i.e., most sites will resize photos if you give them one too big), saving a lossy file time again (adding more jpg), etc.. This is why there aren’t many automated tools for this detection. Sites that have tried by using skin tones in a photo have failed spectacularly.

I’ve never heard of this FBI middleware. Does anyone have the link to this? I’d like to understand what tools are available to combat this as I’ve been considering starting my own instance for some time now.

[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my utopia world, the FBI has a team updating the DB.

The utopia algorithim would do multiple subsets of the picture so cropping or watermarking wouldn't break the test (assume the 'crux' of the CSAM would be most likely unaltered?) , maybe handle simple image transformations (color, tint, gamma, etc.) with a formula.

[–] reev@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

What you're talking about is digital (aka forensic) watermarking.

[–] MsPenguinette@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

IMO scanning images before posting them to a forum is a distinct and utterly completely different world than having your photo collection scanned. Especially in context and scale