this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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I mentioned this before but I’m sorry that I didn’t see who I was responding to. I usually respond on the internet to ideas, not people. Today I’ve been responding a lot to the idea that CSAM is easy to fix and that for reasons unknown it just hasn’t been done with lemmy and the way it’s being done with lemmy isn’t “the right way”.
GeoIP databases aren’t perfect, which is another problem entirely. It’s better than pulling the plug on the entire internet, sure, but it has its own problems.
I was responding to the idea of gating csam content via geoip as “yikes” because I can’t find myself personally allowing CSAM in some countries, because it’s “legal” in those countries. This is a moral argument I’m making, but I am happy imposing the US law as it relates to CSAM being illegal (not US law such as FOSTA/KOSA, etc.. those are a different can of worms entirely) on other countries. Or to put it another way, as an admin, if I get an email saying “actually bro in country xyz we get to abuse children”, it won’t sway me into allowing that content in that country. IF someone in that country wants to put up a site for that country, that’s their problem (and if I could intervene and prevent them from doing so, I would).
Right, it's definitely not an easy fix and Lemmy doesn't even operate the way other sites do but today I'm learning that using these instances seems to be easily exploitable.
The reason I mentioned region banning is because it definitely worked. There weren't people uploading 10000 images of CSA cause if you tried to, you'd get banned so hard that you'd ruin it for other people posting near by.
I agree. Honestly, if I was in charge in anyway - those countries just wouldn't be allowed access. And that does happen. I use to work for an app where we had people working in the Philippines who couldn't access the app itself. We had to just give them info and they would feed it to the customers. And it was because their country is blocked from viewing the app in the first place. They're just straight up not allowed to use it there.
Like I'm totally with you. Fuck MAPs, fuck all of em. If some archaic country still participates in something that is obviously harmful to people - yeah, impose these laws on them. Tell them to fuck off until they stop this shit.
And lets be real. It's gonna be years before they ever stop.
That’s an interesting point. I didn’t take into account that 4chan might use region banning as a way to shame other anons by removing access from their country. That’s an interesting approach and I guess that’s something that lemmy admins could use in their toolbag. Users would absolutely hate it more than a simple community being banned, but whatever works or at least helps decrease the amount of this in existance.
Oh right, and it wasn't country based. I'm in a large city and only the downtown region of my city was banned. If I went back home, I could easily get on the site and post.
Yeah, there isn’t any geographic information required when giving out ip addresses. Companies like MaxMind maintain a large “GeoIP” database that tries to match IP address with location and is pretty good, but isn’t 100%. VPNs also make the situation worse, as it sounds like with 4chan someone could vpn to a country they didn’t like, post CSAM and get that country banned. It also means users can circumvent the banings with VPNs. All of this makes the entire region banning pretty useless. It’s value comes likely comes from users who don’t know how to use VPNs, but do know what 4chan is.
And then there was the issue with people distributing CSAM via sprays on counterstrike servers. Just joining a server would mean downloading those sprays onto your machine without your knowledge, just so they could be visible in game (which is more or less how the web works anyway, but the point here was that someone could create hundreds of sprays with CSAM and then even if not used, every player would have that content somewhere on their computer.
Edit: not sure why I brought up the counterstrike thing. I think I was trying to make the point thats unfortunately sometimes this material seems to be weaponized. All around awful.
Yeah I mean, I only mentioned how they do this on 4chan with region bans because they have worked. Believe or not but people don't just get VPNs to spam CP there.
They use to do that back in like what... 2005 ish? Maybe even into like 2008, or around that era? In all my years wasted on that site, no one was just spamming CP and getting away with it. It was always taken down quickly and the bans were put in place and the spamming of illegal content stopped.
And people there definitely use VPNs but to do things like torrent or pirate usually. They aren't all dumb, they just have bad morals in general over there.
I'm familiar with the CS sprays you're talking about! This was an issue in other games too where you could upload images as a spray to put on a wall in a game. I believe my ex and I use to spray the image from Goatse in one of the earlier Call of Duty games.
My ex ran his own server though. If someone uploaded CP, he would just ban them.