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

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

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)

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webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
We Evolve!

There something really satisfying about witnessing a community starting to talk about serious a issue and days later see things already improved.

Lemmy is now the internet, glory to all volunteer devs. Lets make it the best place we possibly can!

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XaeroDegreaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m curious… How does one even test such a thing before distributing it without having offending files to test against.

Like during the development process of this project, how on earth can you test it properly? 😂

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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web

IP Internet Protocol

nginx Popular HTTP server

[Thread #93 for this sub, first seen 31st Aug 2023, 04:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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fiveoar@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is fantastic work to an immediate problem. Thank you.

There is something amazing about someone just sharing a solution like this without expectation of anything back, and even if this isn’t the best right solution, it contributes to the global commons, and improves society.

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rentar42@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It's great that there's now a tool, but this kind of issue is why I'm not considering self-hosting a fediverse service: due to the nature of the beast even a single-user instance effectively becomes a publicly accessible distributor of content that others created/uploaded. I'm sure this could be restricted somewhat (by making the web UI inaccessible for the public), but the federation means that other instances need to be able to get content from the server. That's way to much legal risk for me.

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- db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Actually the other instances don’t pull content. You push it out instead. Basically if you don’t run pict-rs and you don’t allow user registreations, you’re safe for everything except potential copyright infringement from some text someone might post. If you make your webui inaccessible to anyone but your IP, you protect against even that.
  
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  - rentar42@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    what stops other instances from pushing bad stuff to you? even if someone I follow posts illegal stuff, it'll end up on my server.
    
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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Thanks for adding this. I guess I now have my weekend planned for moving Pict-rs to a server with a fast enough GPU and try this out 🤔

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- db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You don’t need to move pict-rs to a GPU server. In fact that would be prohibitedly expensive long-term. I suggest you just use your PC to run this against your current pict-rs server, or just rent a GPU server for this time.
  
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  - poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I am home-labbing, so I have a server with a smaller Nvidia GPU available. I hope the 3GB vRAM it has will be sufficient.
    
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doot@social.bug.expert ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
seems like clip-interrogator isn’t explicitly supported on apple silicon, I’ll give it a try later

thanks for making this!

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sapient_cogbag@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Something that might be useful long term is trying to train an AI and release weights to identify CSAM that admins can use to check images. The main problem is finding a way to do this without storing those kinds of images or video :/

My understanding is that right now, the main mechanisms involved use several central databases which use perceptual hashes of known CSAM material. The problem is that this ends up being a whackamole solution, and at least in theory governments could use these databases to censor copyrighted or more general “unapproved” content, though i imagine such a db would lose trust quickly and I’m not aware of this being an issue in practise.

One potential solution is “opportunistic training” where, when new CSAM material gets identified and submitted to the FBI or these databases by various server admins, a small amount of training is done on the AI weights before the image or video is deleted and only a perceptual hash remains. Furthermore, if a picture is reported as “known CSAM” by these dbs, then you do the same thing with that image before it gets deleted.

To avoid false positives, you also train the AI on general non-CSAM content.

Ideally this process would be fully automated so no-one has to look at that shit - over time, ypu’d theoretically get a neural net capable of identifying CSAM reliably with few or no false positives or false negatives ^.^. Admins could also try for some kind of distributed training, where each contributes weight deltas from local training, or each builds up LoRA-style improvement modules and people combine them to reduce bandwidth for modification sharing.

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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Is there a reason it needs a PK vs just being able to point it at a local folder and running as a user with wrote access?

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- db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Most lemmy servers do not have a GPU, so that would make it too slow. But I plan to provide this option soon if people want it.
  
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Fewer Letters	More Letters
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP	Internet Protocol
nginx	Popular HTTP server