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but they also have illegitimate uses that (what I understand to be) a one-man team is likely not prepared to deal with

This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs. But they block viewing under VPNs as well, which you only do if your sole purpose is logging IP addresses of viewers. In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don’t only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed, they also associate it with the site from where the request was initiated (your Lemmy instance).

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Chozo@fedia.io ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs.

With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.

In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don't only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed

I'm 99% sure it doesn't work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox.

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- hisao@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.
  
  At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn’t matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn’t make any difference here.
  
  I’m 99% sure it doesn’t work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don’t believe is enabled by default.
  
  I’ve seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don’t know what’s their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I’m not sure if it’s disabled or it’s the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.
  
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  - Chozo@fedia.io ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn't matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn't make any difference here.
    
    My understanding is that it's for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it's not as useful when the user's on a VPN.
    
    I've seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don't know what's their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I'm not sure if it's disabled or it's the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.
    
    Yeah, I've also noticed that Catbox links don't seem to generate previews on Mbin, as well, so I suspect that may be a Catbox block of some sort. That's interesting... I wonder if that causes a Lemmy instance to attempt a live preview instead of giving you a cached one. If so, that seems like something that probably shouldn't be in place, IMO.
    
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    hisao@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    My understanding is that it’s for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it’s not as useful when the user’s on a VPN.
    
    Don’t think even the most extreme actors go that far, link could be opened accidentally, etc…
    
    Anyway, from what another poster here linked, it looks like Catbox might actually not be banning any VPNs at all on its own, this might be some kind of middleware/routing infrastructure issue.
    
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