The creator of Newgrounds has considered adding ActivityPub support to join the fediverse but is worried it would make their hosting fees untenable by “serving files to millions of people on third party apps“. Can anyone with more knowledge on how this works help them?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1537550/3#bbspost27933331_post_text
Having Newgrounds on the Fediverse would be incredible. Newgrounds has a huge art community, many features not available on any platform and has been around the longest (1999)
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Yeah I’ve thought a tiny bit about this but it gets dodgy with things like csam.
How do we address some one uploading stuff that would get you arrested?
I would hav thought stuff like Lemmy would have configurations to eg.: not allow to upload images locally, only hotlink.
Anyway, an alternative is “zero knowledge” storage, where you don’t know what you are storing (hence, you can’t “choose” what to host or not host either). Another alternative is disjoint storage, where two different servers store different halves of a file (eg.: an Odd Bytes server and an Even Bytes server), but this means now it’s necessary to hit more servers to recover a file.
But the sensible thing to do IMO is to apply “common carrier” concept. The water distribution company is not, to my knowledge, held liable when something happens like you fill a bucket of water and share it with someone else.
No but they are liable if there is lead in the water, even if they don’t know it.
There’s gotta be some kind of limited liability for this kind of thing. I mean, banks wouldn’t be liable if someone put csam in a safe deposit box or (assuming they don’t x-ray packages) UPS shipping csam in a sealed package. I think there just needs to be reasonable safeguards against it but I don’t know if any of that is built into the software.
Issue here is that what’s in a safe deposit box isn’t also being shared/distributed. It is locked away.
If, however, they made copies of the contents of a box and put it in other boxes … and it came out somebody used that for CSAM then there probably would be some kind of liability.
Besides CSAM there’s also copyrighted material, etc which section 230 kind of covers but even then gets tricky since there’s a duty to respond to DMCA takedowns in order to get safe harbor protections.
It’d be a little more like someone going to a Kinko’s (or whatever like that exists anymore) and using their copiers to copy CSAM.
Exactly. And in such a scenario it becomes an issue for Kinkos
Unfortunately we are at a point where Cisco Cloudflare and Google are held liable for filesharing-related domains their DNS relays are resolving IPs for…
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I could also see this turning into a form of DoS attack. I’m sure there’s very little leeway in ignoring “bad faith” reports so if you have an instance you could be responsible for investigating thousands of reports per day. And if you take the safe route and remove anything that’s reported, until deemed safe, you might as well turn off your instance.
Maybe nobody keeps a complete file? That way no one machine can keep a complete copy of anything let alone access it if it was stored in a single chunk of storage cryptographically? There’s already so much risk for hosts here not sure there’s a way to be safer without invasive technologies.
Probably arrange it such that not one person/server knows what the stored bytes are. There can be a server where the bytes/blocks get reconstructed where one can check for the bad stuff.
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That doesn’t solve the cost problem. Now all the traffic is going through that intermediate server, and someone has to pay for that.
The had moved on to legal liability for csam, not hosting costs
Still, hosting costs were the reason for discussing legal liability. Such a server also increases centralization which isn’t ideal.
Depending on if you have DMCA safe harbor protection