[geek_at]

Can confirm. I had a public demo of my open source image hosting solution [1] (where you can resize images and videos by just entering a different URL) up for years without problems, until idiots started uploading CSAM (Children sexual abuse material).

Luckily I found out before law enforcement did [2] so I proactively talked to my federal bureau for months generating Excel sheets of IPs and access times and devices and countries. I didn't see many of the images myself, basically just looked at one upload per IP which was like three in total and forwarded all uploads of that IP to the police but man.. what the hell is wrong with people. 4 digit number of uploads of CSAM.

[1] https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/pictshare [2] https://blog.haschek.at/2018/fight-child-pornography-with-ra...

[ivan888]

The process of properly reporting and working with authorities seems daunting. (Anecdotally,) It sounds too easy to implicate yourself for a technical violation of the law by (even unknowingly) hosting this content, or accidentally transferring it to one of your personal devices. Much worse following the advice of your local police to print out images which would be completely illegal! On the other hand, if the process was too lenient on reporters, hosting a file sharing service that "gets abused" with illegal content might turn into the ultimate scapegoat for illegal content users/creators/brokers

Nice job going through the reporting process and I'm glad you blogged about it to share with others