On The Safety of Publicly Open-Registration Solid Servers

Given the talk of the hosted server for the solid community, I'd just like to point out that any server setup will & must have both CSAM and other illegal content filtering/scanning.

Running an open-registration solid server without those is basically like running an open FTP server in many ways: anyone could be uploading anything to it, and the server operators do ultimately have legal responsibility for the content on their solid servers.

What would perhaps be better is time & energy making it possible to spin up a quick development environments, which would be more ephemeral and less likely to be a target for abuse, as that'd be limited in abuse vectors.

This comes to mind because I'm currently working on trust & safety and moderation tooling for the Fediverse, and CSAM has been a major talking point over recent months, especially as some bad actors have been deliberately flooding servers with CSAM (both real and computer generated), and violent gore content.

Just asking for an email for sign up likely isn't enough... if the software you used supported S3 compatible storage, you might be able to use Cloudflare's CSAM scanning solution.

But honestly, the better answer is disposable developer environments via an easily runnable local server, rather than public open-registration servers. 

The code running platforms like CodeSandbox, Glitch, and Repl.it all had similar issues where fraudsters and scammers used their free services for hosting scam websites to steal people's credentials & private information, and all have since implemented content scanning & filtering.

Yours,
Emelia

Received on Monday, 2 October 2023 02:28:20 UTC