this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Discussion about the aussie.zone instance itself

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Broken images (aussie.zone)
submitted 2 years ago by lodion@aussie.zone to c/meta@aussie.zone
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Due to some disgusting behaviour, I've kicked off the process of deleting ALL images uploaded in the last day.

You will likely see broken images etc on aussie.zone for posts/comments during this period of time.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for an instance. I'd rather nuke all images ever than to host such content.

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[–] MortyMcFry@aussie.zone 40 points 2 years ago

Best decision. Totally understand

[–] yoz@aussie.zone 35 points 2 years ago

You got my support.

[–] Mountaineer@aussie.zone 34 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That CSAM exists is horrible.
That people would maliciously spread it as some sort of prank puts an extra disgusting veneer on this whole thing.
I hope at least some of these "it's just a prank bro!" people get caught by the police and get shown just how funny society finds them.

[–] palitu@aussie.zone 16 points 2 years ago

Somehow they had the files though...

[–] Commiejones@hexbear.net 19 points 2 years ago

Thanks for keeping us all safe. I'm sorry you had to deal with what ever it was.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 18 points 2 years ago

Good work. As some other people have said on other instances, make sure you’re not just regular deleting the images as that just removes the references to them. You’ll need to overwrite them with white noise.

[–] Dex067@aussie.zone 13 points 2 years ago

thanks for all your hard work

[–] ParanoidPizzas@aussie.zone 12 points 2 years ago

What a nightmare. Good work nuking it

[–] uiiiq@lemm.ee 11 points 2 years ago

Understandable. I’m thankful for your work. This hopefully won’t happen again.

[–] Caspase8@aussie.zone 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I fully support what you are doing but I'm not sure I completely get it. If the attack was against a community on another instance, why do you have to wipe images on this instance? Are images posted on all federated instances stored on the Aussie.zone server?

[–] lodion@aussie.zone 47 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The way lemmy caches images isn't well documented. Some third party images are not cached, others are. I don't want to risk it.

Nuking it from orbit, only way to be sure.

[–] palitu@aussie.zone 8 points 2 years ago

Yeah, and not the sort of thing you want to look at to see if you should keep or not.

[–] Caspase8@aussie.zone 5 points 2 years ago

Ok I see. Thanks for the good work. Hopefully we'll never have to deal with this again.

[–] spiffmeister@aussie.zone 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is there anything in place to stop those sorts of posts being made here?

As I understand it lemmys mod tools aren't great but there must be some way of stopping this behaviour.

[–] trk@aussie.zone 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Figure you're across this, but this is a little worrying:

https://lemmy.ca/post/4273025

Surprised orphaned photos don't already get purged automatically.

[–] lodion@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago

Sadly this isn't new, its been known about for quite some time. Slightly irresponsible for that person to post and make a big noise about it without creating a github issue though. Ideally the lemmy devs will add code to automatically purge orphaned images. Hopefully this public noise around it will hurry this up.

I see this much like the extraneous data being stored in the database previously; low hanging fruit for devs to optimise and make hosting an instance less resource intensive. Yes there are possible legal risks for uploads that are not referenced on lemmy, but the reality is this could happen deep in a comment thread or a user profile anyway.