Image uploads are now disabled on lemm.ee due to malicious users

This is sick. Kudos to mods for dealing with this garbage. I hope the posters are all hunted down and punished.

I think this is a great move until we have something rock solid to prevent this. There are tons of image hosting sites you can use (most of which have the resources to already try to prevent this stuff) so it shouldn’t really cause much inconvenience.

I'm sorry that you and the people on this instance are being subjected to that shit. It's always despicable but on top of that it just seems absurd to target lemm.ee -- a deliberately unprofitable platform -- with such illegal means.

We had to deal with something similar on lemmygrad a while ago. All power to you for destroying these annoying bastards.

condolences for having to deal with this and full support of your actions.

I know there are automated tools that exist for detection CSAM- given the challenges the fediverse has had with this issue it really feels like it'd be worthwhile for the folks developing platforms like lemmy and mastodon to start thinking about how to integrate those tools with their platforms to better support moderators and folks running instances.

My honest reaction to this:

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fucking disgusting, and I'm sorry you and your mods, admins and users were subjected to this

No apologies necessary.

I honestly think this is the reason why message boards generally don't have the feature to attach images to posts anymore.

This is really sad and disgusting. It affects the whole platform but especially smaller instances that can't keep up. Despite being a lemm.ee user, I was particularly upset about thegarden.land shutting down because of that spam. It had my favourite gardening community on here.

I really hope this gets sorted out, and the spammers end up where they belong.

This is foul and I am extremely sorry for the users and mods who were sent the CSAM. It isn't something they should expect to deal with in a voluntary role for their communities and it can be traumatic. I hope they are given time and space to process their emotions.

Damn this sucks.

This is why we can't have nice things.

its better to be safe, than to risk it with the spammers, hopefully this matter will get resolved quickly

It's honestly sad that some well-intentioned laws can be used to attack online platforms.

Did you alert authorities?

Perfectly fine. People can upload images elsewhere and then just link to them. Most image upload sites will have all those protections in place already. A good stopgap until Lemmy gets those mod tools

This might be a good thread to ask:

Does anyone know if any of the Lemmy apps support direct imgur uploads for Lemmy?

I remember RIF used to do that for reddit back in the day before reddit supported direct image hosting.

Gotta do what you gotta do. Here's hoping the culprits get a swift boot.

If you're concerned about legal liability I think it's worth noting that there is some protection for websites in this matter. For the most part as long as you're taking "reasonable action" against it you're not liable, and that most laws take into consideration the resources of the site dealing with the uploads.

Not pleasant for users though of course. And the speed at which its handled is obviously a concern.

That's fucking disgusting. Take any measures you can to prevent that shit from being on the site.

Thank you sir. I appreciate the dedication to the community to subject yourself to the moderation. Hopefully we can squash this before it goes too far, farther than it has anyway..

This is a very good decision, I worried about this problem from the very beginning that I learned about the Fediverse. Research must definitely be done to find CSAM detection tools that integrate into Lemmy, perhaps we could make a separate bridge repo that integrates a tool like that easily into the codebase.

I hope every disgusting creature that uploads that shit gets locked up

Permanently Deleted

That's disgusting! You made the right thing, sorry you admins and mods have to put up with that shit, I hope instance owners that are being attacked are reporting it to local authorities.

Thank you for the efforts you are making. This is a serious situation; more than just dealing with bad actors, you are viewing traumatic images.

Please, for your sanity and well being, prioritize your self care. Things like this linger in the psyche much longer than you would expect.

This sucks, but given the circumstances it's sadly an understandable and necessary course of action.

I think its necesary, no problem.

People like this are despicable

Mastodon/Lemmy should work together on some tool for this, it would probably make it easier, and they both have problems with it now

Thanks for taking care about that.

Honestly, Im bit confused, I can still see image uploads posts like: https://lemm.ee/post/5858721

I guess I was lucky I didnt see morbid posts, just want to be sure Im safe now. Is it safe enough to just browse lemm.ee local?

Well, that sucks i wanted to share some cute pics i took of my cats

How does one disable image uploads on their server? I want to disable it for a while

Thank you for your vigilance and action! 🫡

Seems fair enough, good on you for the speedy action.

Are the lemm.ee servers not located in a region that protects online forums from the content that its users post?

If anyone wants to have a faster way of uploading images to Imgur on iOS, here‘s a shortcut for that.

Guessing there's no way to track down the uploaders?

Personally, I would love it if all NSFW pictures were banned. There's deepai.org's nsfw detection bot. No idea if it costs money to use the api or not.

https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/nsfw-detector

Seems like this is still disabled, is it now in play for the foreseeable future? What about setting a time frame in which no images can be posted until it's surpassed? Or maybe have an approval required for adding the avatar and banner?

Just checking -- Is this still in effect?

I assume this is why I can't change the banner on the community I moderate (on lemm.ee).

I totally understand why this had to happen. I'm just looking for a status update.

Any chance that gravatar support could be implemented? This would allow some basic functionality without hosting content on lemm.ee servers.

whats the over/under wager that it was retaliation for the recent "h e x b e a r" shit?

Better shut the internet down then. This will only continue to worsen now that anybody can generate whatever images they want with AI assistance. Such image hashes will not be in CSAM databases (if AI generated imagery is even CSAM)