- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
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To both host 130+ TB of data, and push 1 petabyte of traffic per month on any cloud provider would be, quite frankly, impossible.
Uhhh I’m sorry but catbox isn’t some special case here. Cloud providers are literally built to do this. Netflix literally hosted off of AWS for years. Also using cloudflare or another provider to reduce your needed bandwidth would make the costs sooooo much cheaper. And it probably would have stopped patreon from deleting them off of the platform since CF has CSAM detection and quarantining.
There’s plenty to be said about hosting things yourself, both good and bad, but in this case routing through CF really would have stopped a lot of this and reduced costs massively.
Have you evaluated the costs? I would think that one-time purchases + electricity bill are much cheaper than a subscription.
CSAM detection through CF is free.
You still have to sign up (be a customer) for any plan to even use Cloudflare in the first place, and the free plan quota is 1GB per month.
Is there a really a quota on the CSAM detection, or do you mean catbox would only get a free 1GB of storage? No one’s saying that Cloudflare would give away 1 PB of traffic for free, obviously catbox would have to pay for it. Still though, Cloudflare or another CDN adds a lot of value which would be hard to replicate.
At that volume, you need to scale a lot, which is what CDNs are designed to do. Moving 1 PB a month in traffic would be like a sustained upload speed of 3 Gbps for an entire month, which is huge for any ISP, and cost a lot. You’d probably need to divide the traffic going out which means multiple ISP connections, and more machines for redundancy. Probably at that scale, connections are coming from all over the world, so to reduce latency, you’ll need locations in multiple continents to serve quicker. As you can probably tell, this becomes more than just one time purchases and electricity costs.
CDNs have dedicated fiber links between geographic locations and negotiated volume discount rates on bandwidth with other ISPs. From a cost and a reliability perspective, it means you can deliver content for less than hosting it all on your own.
Crossposting from the other thread
I wonder what kind of of csam detection they have. If they’re only relying on hash matching, they’ve gonna get fucked from novel genai csam. This is why stuff like the fedi-safety exists which they could use as well
Hash matching is really easy to get around. Literally modify 1 bit of the image or just re-encode the video and you’ve gotten around it.
Yes, it’s the bare minimum precaution you can implement. But at the same time, it’s the bare minimum precaution you can implement. There’s really no excuse for not doing it, and it catches a shocking number of images.
They’ll be using perceptual hashes, not file hashes.
Just noticed this on !technology@beehaw.org, which lemmy.world is defederated with. As I’ve seen a number of people using catbox.moe to host content posted on here before, thought it’d be of broader interest than to just the beehaw.org crowd.
deleted by creator
Catbox has been super inconsistent in whether it even loads for the past year or so. Last few months it hasn’t worked at all. Thought it might be my app but either way I’d be glad to see lemmy move away from it.
The photos perfectly elaborate, though… They didn’t really get screwed, someone uploaded “animated child sexual abuse photos.” Which is not only illegal but against the TOS of Patreon. From the photos shared it looks like this isn’t the first time it’s happened, either, and Patreon clearly doesn’t want anything to do with it.
Not really sure how this equates to them “being screwed.” They’re responsible for what people upload to their host (they clearly understand that) which is why public uploads like this without restriction aren’t a great idea.
Yeah, it really comes back to the idea of if a file hosting service is responsible for what the user uploads, which is an argument that has been going on since the beginning of the internet. Ultimately, yes, I think they are. I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded, but on top of that, there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. If someone is uploading CSAM, then law enforcement needs to go after them. Maybe they’ll actually do something people appreciate, instead of killing minorities.
You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.
(1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].
47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230
Which is exactly why I said TOS and not the US laws. I don’t really agree with the laws here either, because they create a safe harbor for illegal ends, but I understand that it is a lot easier, and arguably better, to self-police the content. That is what Patreon is doing. They view it as a violation of their TOS to generate revenue on a site that knowingly and willingly hosts CSAM. I’m with Patreon on this one. This wasn’t the first offence, and there is no way that the person that runs the site doesn’t know that material is on there. Pleading ignorant isn’t going to work. Running anonymous file hosting, no matter how good your intentions, is going to bring out the worst of the internet, guaranteed. If you can somehow get around that logic, you’ve got a bright future with the NRA.
We’re talking Patreon rules not US law.
This is not only incorrect (this particular law doesn’t apply here), but I can easily prove it beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Backpage was shutdown despite their willingness to comply with the law because they were found to “facilitate” CSAM. Omegle was also temporarily shutdown for the same reasons. There have also been quite literally dozens of prosecutions of website admins on the dark web for offering a platform for CSAM despite them arguing in court that they had no control over what their users uploaded and quickly moderated the content when discovered. In the end none of it matters–as a provider of a service you are required to make it difficult to share CSAM, not just comply with the law when someone catches you with your pants down.
It bedevils me that people are so laissez-faire about literal fucking CP–AI generated or not.
And in spite of literally all of that, none of this has anything to do with US law. It’s Patron policy. They don’t want to service someone who constantly has issues with CSAM, and they have every right not to offer their services to catbox.
Section 230 is not relevant here
I’ll gladly give you a reason. I’m actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights.
Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless:
- The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it’s safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content)
- The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too)
Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here’s some examples:
- Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms.
- You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site.
- A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached.
This isn’t just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them:
“When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier.”
Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don’t just want to focus on the beginning:
I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded
Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation.
there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal.
The problem isn’t necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It’s easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won’t be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with.
There’s no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people’s access tokens and impersonating their ID)
I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who’s sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it’s certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends.
I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn’t the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
Ultimately, yes, I think they are.
There’s no opinion to be had. You are absolutely morally and legally responsible for what your users upload. Period.
Shit, I down voted you for whining about down votes.
How Libertarian of you.
If you are downvoting me without giving a reason, I just have to assume you are Libertarian, and that’s being generous.
Shit, I down voted you for whining about down votes.
they gave a reason for their downVote so no, they’re not assumed to be a libertarian
Right, they are confirmed.
If we’re randomly declaring things with zero basis except our wounded pride, I’m declaring you the prettiest unicorn to ever grace the boards and I shall brook no challengers to your glorious reign-bow.
…
I’ll figure out how this reflects my wounded pride later.It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.
Okay, I got the link: https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/cybertiplinedata2024/2024-notifications-by-ncmec-resulting-content-removal.pdf
Whereas Catbox’s average removal time is 1.93 days, CloudFlare’s is 1.92. Alibaba’s is 4.39. Amazon’s is 5.23. Google’s is 5.52. Fastly’s is 5.63. GoDaddy’s is 8.77.
Seems like you’re completely missing my point. I’m not implying that catbox doesn’t remove this content, or cooperate with authorities. I’m saying that Patreon chooses to not offer their services to projects which continually have this issue in the first place…
Show me a hosting platform that doesn’t.
Literally any uploader that requires an account to upload. Any one. Any provider that requires registration will be infinitely more compliant and well suited to deal with these issues than one that doesn’t.
How?
What do you mean by “continually” having this issue if Catbox already removes offenses much faster than most major content providers? And my impression is Patreon said such handling was sufficient in 2021.
- They have this issue.
- They comply with the law.
- Time goes on.
- They have this issue.
- They comply with the law.
What exactly are you confused about? The definition of continually? To be complaint with CSAM laws you have to actually make changes to your platform to ensure the same situation doesn’t happen again. Catbox doesn’t do that. They will eventually be prosecuted.
And my impression is Patreon said such handling was sufficient in 2021.
And it was. Because when pressed to make changes to ensure that it was more difficult to share CSAM, they refused. They were shutdown and then finally made the changes allowing them to operate again. In the same way that Catbox isn’t doing anything to actually stop CSAM from being shared on their platform. Compliance with the law after you’re caught with this type of content isn’t enough. They will eventually all be arrested for “facilitating” CSAM just like any of those dark web forums are.
If there were a real issue, Patreon would send a real reply explaining what is needed to Catbox’s screenshotted inquiry instead of boilerplating “you can make a new Patreon in two months if you don’t violate the guidelines”.
Compliance with the law after you’re caught with this type of content isn’t enough
Tell that to Imgur. You’re asking Catbox to have a 100% detection rate which is impossible. How would you make these changes?
they refused
heh‽ where are you getting this from? can i have some? There isn’t even any indication the Patreon has ever been shut down before.
If there were a real issue, Patreon would send a real reply
They did send a real reply. Just because you can’t and/or refuse to understand it doesn’t mean someone messed up. I get that you’re butthurt that your favorite place to upload shitty memes is in trouble, but it’s their own fault and I refuse to feel sorry for them.
What are the further steps needed to comply specified by Patreon or by you? (And your Ad Hominem is completely baseless. Check my post history if you will)
We also work closely with NCMEC to review and remove CSAM content within 48 hours of receiving the report. You can review our statistics with the NCMEC content removal report here: <link my tesseract OCR did not pick up> We have previously interacted with Patreon with regards to this content in March 2021, and brought ourselves in compliance with Patreon’s request.
—Catbox’s screenshotted reply, met with a boilerplate “you may create a new patreon compliant with our guidelines in 2 months” response
I’d love to read it but Tumblr is fucking ass.
This pop up won’t go away. I’m still gonna donate but fucking christ stop using Tumblr
Edit: the “no thanks” isn’t making it go away, I guess it’s broke or I got fat thumbs.
Weird, I don’t get anything like that on the blog post. Here’s the link to donate:
Edit: Okay I managed to get it on Microsoft Edge. The no thanks button works for me, though, and you can still scroll the parts outside the popup box.
catbox is blocked by my ISP anyways due to the csam issue
