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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Which software is that?
It's called Lemmy-Safety of Fedi-Safety depending on where you look.
One thing to note, I wasn't able to get it running on a VPS because it requires some sort of GPU.
This is good to know. I know that you can get a VPS with a GPU, but they're usually rather pricey. I wonder if there's one where the GPU's are shared, and you only get billed by how much the GPU is used. So if there is an image upload, the GPU would kick on to check it, you get billed for that GPU time, then it turns off and waits for the next image upload.
I don't think there are services like that, since usually this means deploying and destructing an instance, which takes a few minutes (if you just turn off the instance you still get billed).
Probably the best option would be to have a snapshot, which costs way less than the actual instance, and create from it each day or so yo run on the images since it was last destroyed.
This is kind of what I do with my media collection, I process it on my main machine with a GPU, and then just serve it from a low-power one with Jellyfin.
Unfortunately, for this usecase, the GPU needs to be accessible in real time; there is a 10 second window when an image is posted for it to be processed [1].
References
You can actually run it in async model without pictrs safety and just have it scan your newly uploaded images directly from storage. It just doesn't prevent upload this way, just deletes them.
You're referring to using only fedi-safety instead of pictrs-safety, as was mentioned in §"For other fediverse software admins", here, right?
yep
Could you point me towards some documentation so that I can look into exactly what you mean by this? I'm not sure I understand the exact procedure that you are describing.
The software is setup in such a way that you can run it on your pc if you have a local gpu. It only needs like 2 gb vram
That is a cool feature, but that would mean that all of the web traffic would get returned to my local network (assuming that the server is set up on a remote VPS), which I really don't want to have happen. There is also the added downtime potential cause by the added point of failure of the GPU being hosted in a much more volatile environment (ie not, for example, a tier 3 data center).
Not all web traffic, just the images to check. With any decent bandwidth, it shouldn't be an issue for most. It also setup in such a way as to not cause a downtime if the checker goes down.
Oh? Would the fallback be that it simply doesn't do a check? Or perhaps it could disable image uploads if the checker is down? Something else? Presumably, this would be configurable.
It stops doing checks. Iirc you can configure it yes
It's not only the bandwidth; I just fundamentally don't relish the idea of public traffic being directed to my local network.
You don't get public traffic redirected. It's not how it works
Yeah, that was poor wording on my part — what I mean to say is that there would be unvetted data flowing into my local network and being processed on a local machine. It may be overparanoia, but that feels like a privacy risk.
I don't see how it's a privacy risk since you're not exposing your IP or anything. Likewise the images are already uploaded to your servers, so there's no extra privacy risk for the uploader.
"Security risk" is probably a better term. That being said, a security risk can also infer a privacy risk.
Why would it be a security risk?
For clarity, I'm not claiming that it would, with any degree of certainty, lead to incurred damage, but the ability to upload unvetted content carries some degree of risk. For there to be no risk, fedi-safety/pictrs-safety would have to be guaranteed to be absolutely 100% free of any possible exploit, as well as the underlying OS (and maybe even the underlying hardware), which seems like an impossible claim to make, but perhaps I'm missing something important.
You mean an exploit payload embedded in an image, and pwning a system parsing that image through python PIL? While there's never a 100% chance of anything, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than this coming to pass and at that point you're at more security risk at using the internet altogether.
I will preface by saying that I am not casting doubt on your claim, I'm simply curious: What is the rationale behind why it would be so unlikely for such an exploit to occur? What rationale causes you to be so confident?
Image processing libraries are used at the forefront of almost all web services, including lemmy and are extraordinarily robust. I really don't have the time to go at this in depth, but if you are familiar with this stuff you will know how extraordinary such an exploit would be and its existence would be causing massive chaos all over the world.
Ah, yeah, my bad this was a lack of clarity on my part; I meant all image traffic.
https://github.com/db0/fedi-safety and the companion app https://github.com/db0/pictrs-safety which can be installed as part of your lemmy deployment in the docker-compose (or with a var in your ansible)