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So it’s another way to pay fighters using the money of lenders?

What, is the government running low on funds?

And a one-year contract? That’s a little much for a small three-day operation.

It does. Kinda.

The police are seldom allowed to be in possession of CSAM, except for in terms of grabbing the hardware which contains it in an arrest. The database used in modern detection tools is maintained by NCMEC which has special permission to do so.

And of course there are risks, but it’s just digital data. Unless you are creating more, you’re not actively harming anyone. And law enforcement absolutely needs that data to take some of the most obvious steps to prevent it being spread further.

Obviously, someone has access, but to get to the actual media files wouldn’t be simple. What typically happens, is that anyone wanting to detect CSAM, is given a hashed version of the database. They can then scan their systems for CSAM by hashing any media they are hosting, and seeing whether there are any matches.

Whenever possible, people aren’t handling the actual media. But for any detection to be possible to begin with, the database of the actual media does need to be maintained somewhere.

AI is a touchier subject, as you can’t train a model to recognize CSAM not already in the database using hashes, so in those cases you have to work with actual real media. This is only recently becoming a thing.

It also leaves open the possibility for false positives. An oft cited example is parents taking pictures of their own children for innocent reasons, or doctors and parents handling images for valid medical reasons. In a system that flagged such content, it would mean someone else would be seeing that “private” content because it was flagged.

There are laws around it. Law enforcement doesn’t just delete any digital CSAM they seize.

Known CSAM is archived and analyzed rather than destroyed, and used to recognize additional instances of the same files in the wild. Wherever file scanning is possible.

Institutions and corporation can request licenses to access the database, or just the metadata that allows software to tell if a given file might be a copy of known CSAM.

This is the first time an attempt is being made at using the database to create software able to recognize CSAM that isn’t already known.

I’m personally quite sceptical of the merit. It may well be useful for scanning the public internet, but I’m guessing the plan is to push for it to be somehow implemented for private communication, no matter how badly that compromises the integrity of encryption.

There are. In most states.

He’s having the suits filed specifically in one of the few states that don’t.

You do realize Bluesky also tacks on .bsky.social? (Though with a dot instead of a second @)

And even without other instances, ATProto already allows people to sign up using domains they own.

The closest you can get to using Lost_My_Mind as you Bluesky handle is by aquiring a domain like lost_my_mind.com. And that still wouldn’t prevent someone else from signing up using lost_my_mind.net.

And that’s before pointing out that Impersonation and mistaken identities isn’t a solved problem on twitter, either.

Bluesky is succeeding because its a smooth and familiar experience that obfuscates away the complexity of how it works.

Absolutely nothing about how the ActivityPub network works conceptually prevents it from being an equally smooth experience, given the work were put in.

Your first six paragraphs hit the mark, but the following rant about the “username univerasility problem” ain’t it.

No.

But they don’t need to be. They’re essentially just indexers.

If two relays index all the same content, then any services using either will be “interconnected” in the sense that any users can see each other and interact with each other.

Each relay host can choose what parts of the network they want to index, and as far as I can tell, any services could use multiple relays if they like.

I know.

ATproto has some interesting advantages, and eventually the idea is for anyone to be able to host any microservice component of the network, including relays other than the one run by Bluesky.

The relays don’t need to be centralized. They are indexers that provide functionality to others parts of the ATproto network.

The problem is that there isn’t really any incentive to do so… Any additional instances or new apps running ATproto can just rely on the one big indexer provided by Bluesky, instead of running each microservice component themselves.

I won’t be joining in until I can actually run a real instance on my own.

I don’t plan on doing that, but the important part is knowing that I could.

No.