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Lemmy Safety now supports cleaning local pict-rs storage from CSAM

I posted the other day that you can clean up your object storage from CSAM using my AI-based tool. Many people expressed the wish to use it on their local file storage-based pict-rs. So I've just extended its functionality to allow exactly that.

The new lemmy_safety_local_storage.py will go through your pict-rs volume in the filesystem and scan each image for CSAM, and delete it. The requirements are

  • A linux account with read-write access to the volume files
  • A private key authentication for that account

As my main instance is using object storage, my testing is limited to my dev instance, and there it all looks OK to me. But do run it with --dry_run if you're worried. You can delete lemmy_safety.db and rerun to enforce the delete after (method to utilize the --dry_run results coming soon)

PS: if you were using the object storage cleanup, that script has been renamed to lemmy_safety_object_storage.py

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48 comments
  • I think there’s potential here for a centralised database of metadata (hashes, time-stamps, usernames) so it’s easier to stamp this out as a connected community. As has been noted, as long as you’re working in good faith, most government authorities won’t prosecute people running platforms like a Lemmy instance. But joining together to show solidarity might make it easier to prove that good faith, especially for smaller instances.

    • The tools has a lot of false positives as it casts a wide net to catch the actual positives. There's no human review involved, so you can't use these hits to mark usernames and time-stamps unless someone goes thjrough the hits and finds actual CSAM.

      • That’s reasonable, I wouldn’t want anyone to have to do those manual checks. However, wouldn’t false positives be relatively rare for a single username? Could correlational data of repeated flags within a certain timeframe be used to single out bad actors?

        • Yes, correlating single usernames would be a good way, but currently the script cannot connect images to posts

48 comments