GitHub - db0/fedi-safety: A script that goes through a lemmy images in storage and tries to prevent illegal or unethical content
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A script that goes through a lemmy images in storage and tries to prevent illegal or unethical content - db0/fedi-safety

I noticed a bit of panic around here lately and as I have had to continuously fight against pedos for the past year, I have developed tools to help me detect and prevent this content.

As luck would have it, we recently published one of our anti-csam checker tool as a python library that anyone can use. So I thought I could use this to help lemmy admins feel a bit more safe.

The tool can either go through all your images via your object storage and delete all CSAM, or it canrun continuously and scan and delete all new images as well. Suggested option is to run it using --all once, and then run it as a daemon and leave it running.

Better options would be to be able to retrieve exact images uploaded via lemmy/pict-rs api but we’re not there quite yet.

Let me know if you have any issue or improvements.

EDIT: Just to clarify, you should run this on your desktop PC with a GPU, not on your lemmy server!

  • veroxii@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    This is extremely cool.

    Because of the federated nature of Lemmy many instances might be scanning the same images. I wonder if there might be some way to pool resources that if one instance has already scanned an image some hash of it can be used to identify it and the whole AI model doesn’t need to be rerun.

    Still the issue of how do you trust the cache but maybe there’s some way for a trusted entity to maintain this list?

    • irdc@derp.fooEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      How about a federated system for sharing “known safe” image attestations? That way, the trust list is something managed locally by each participating instance.

      Edit: thinking about it some more, a federated image classification system would allow some instances to be more strict than others.

      • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafeEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I think building such a system of some kind that can allow smaller instances to rely from help from larger instances would be extremely awesome.

        Like, lemmy has the potential to lead the fediverse is safety tools if we put the work in.

      • huginn@feddit.itEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Consensus algorithms. But it means there will always be duplicate work.

        No way around that unfortunately

        • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          11 months ago

          Why? Use something like RAFT, elect the leader, have the leader run the AI tool, then exchange results, with each node running it’s own subset of image hashes.

          That does mean you need a trust system, though.

          • huginn@feddit.itEnglish
            0·
            11 months ago

            Yeah that works. Who is the leader and how does it change? Does Lemmy.World take over because it’s largest?

            • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              Hash the image, then assign hash ranges to servers that are part of the ring. You’d use RAFT to get consensus about who is responsible for which ranges. I’m largely just envisioning the Scylla gossip replacement as the underlying communications protocol.

  • snowe@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Hey @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com, just so you know, this tool is most likely very illegal to use in the USA. Something that your users should be aware of. I don’t really have the energy to go into it now, but I’ll post what I told my users in the programming.dev discord:

    that is almost definitely against the law in the USA. From what I’ve read, you have to follow very specific procedures to report CSAM as well as retain the evidence (yes, you actually have to keep the pictures), until the NCMEC tells you you should destroy the data. I’ve begun the process to sign up programming.dev (yes you actually have to register with the government as an ICS/ESP) and receive a login for reports.

    If you operate a website, and knowingly destroy the evidence without reporting it, you can be jailed. It’s quite strange, and it’s quite a burden on websites. Funnily enough, if you completely ignore your website, so much so that you don’t know that you’re hosting CSAM then you are completely protected and have no obligation to report (in the USA at least)

    Also, that script is likely to get you even more into trouble because you are knowingly transmitting CSAM to ‘other systems’, like dbzer0’s aihorde cluster. that’s pretty dang bad…

    here are some sources:

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Note that the script I posted is not transmitting the images to the AI Horde.

      Also keep in mind this tool is fully automated and catches a lot of false positives (due to the nature of the scan, it couldn’t be otherwise). So one could argue it’s a generic filtering operation, not an explicit knowledge of CSAM hosting. But IANAL of course.

      This is unlike cloudflare or other services which compare with known CSAM.

      EDIT: That is to mean, if you use this tool to forward these images to the govt, they are going to come after you for spamming them with garbage