Tesseract hides any post containing the phrase "censoring me"

3 months ago by GemAlarm to c/lemmy

Also /c/modabuse. Also /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Also lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, comrade, ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.

None of this is in the source code. It's downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.

If you're just tuning in

Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you've used a Lemmy site that didn't look like stock Lemmy, there's a fair chance it was this.

Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can't see it, can't configure it, and aren't told it's there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it's "incompatible," which is not true.

I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.

There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn't in the git repository. It's unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.

Verify all of it in ten seconds

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \
  | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

That's the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There's a stale fallback copy at /data/policy.dat as well.

It filters criticism of moderators

  • lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse — listed
  • lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards — listed
  • lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk — listed
  • community regex power ?tripping?
  • keyword censoring me

Call the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.

It filters words

The 32 community name patterns include Communis(t|m), Conservativ(e|es|ism), Leftis(t|m), Libertarian(ism)?, ^Green Part(y|ies), Zionis(t|m), (Police|Cops), guillotine and billionaire.

Keywords include comrade, ACAB, neoliberal, proletaria(n|t) and death to.

Filtered communities on instances that aren't blocked: lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, lemmy.today/c/news, lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada, lemmy.ca/c/usa, infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.

The 552 users aren't bots

67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.

355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.

Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.

I have the list and I'm not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.

And it lies about it

When the instance block fires you get: "Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract."

Nothing is incompatible. It's a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it's what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.

For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.

Admins can't switch it off

Tesseract has env vars for PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST, PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST and the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist. enableToxicMode bypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.

Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.

Before someone says it

A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.

The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who've never read it and users who don't know it's there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: "it's a spam list" answers every individual question and none of the whole.

And /c/modabuse is not spam.

Asks

  1. Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
  2. Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
  3. Tell users when something's been hidden. One line.
  4. Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.

It's AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That's the licence working as designed. But forking isn't disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.

If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance's name, to users who don't know it exists.

Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.

Axolotl_cpp 112 points 3 months ago

regex "^Article is paywalled.?$", "ACAB", ... "anarchistic", "biz@agoda.com", "billionaire [cock|dick]", "boot ?lick(ing|ers?)", ... "censoring me", "chatgip+ity+", "child-?rap(ing|ist)", "comrade", "conformist turd", "corpo ?(turd|slut|tech)", "death to", "dvdfab.cn", "enlightened centrist", "(epstein|epstien|pedo|pedophile)

Sooo, they are pro-pedos, pro-billionares, pro-paywalled articles, anti-communism and anti-conservatism and get offended by "enlightened centrist"

Yup, they pretend to be centrist or smth
Disgusting

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MysticMushroom1776 73 points 3 months ago

I don't think you should defend him. Integrating spam defense is a cover to censor his ideological opponents. The best lie is the one wrapped in truth. You shouldn't frame any of what he did as being for good reasons. He hid it from the rest of us, made it look like an error message, and took steps to stop people from patching it out.

That's no what someone with good intentions does. That's what someone who knows it's wrong but tries to hide it does. Including spam domains in it can be seen as a way of hiding the rotten stuff and it gives trolls like him something to point at when it gets criticized "It's a spam blocklist, you must be a freeze peach troll if you're against that".

This is giving him too much charitability:

A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. “It targets the left” doesn’t survive the data and I’m not going to pretend it does.

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prole 36 points 3 months ago

It's honestly wild how many people on lemmy are giving this person the benefit of the doubt. As if they did it with good intentions.

Are people on this site really this naive?

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Cowbee 14 points 3 months ago

Yes.

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cavitationfetishist2 12 points 3 months ago

You could assume naïveté if they gave that benefit of doubt to everybody, but they don't.

They're just authoritarians and 'anti communists'.

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cavitationfetishist2 3 points 3 months ago

Given their misogynist brigading of comments criticizing the guilty party's politics and pointing out that this is just their perfect practice, I'm willing to say they are not. If you can consider .world users people, which is quite a stretch.

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prole 2 points 3 months ago

If you can consider .world users people, which is quite a stretch.

How about we don't dehumanize people.

Especially for simply using a different instance than you (literally the most populated one). That's dumb.

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cavitationfetishist2 1 point 3 months ago

I would never dehumanize people! .world users, though...

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mathemachristian 20 points 3 months ago

Especially considering it's this guy

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prole 5 points 3 months ago

Jesus Christ, this just makes me thankful that I never have to interact with that instance.

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eldavi 6 points 3 months ago

it's on multiple instances and i suspect yours as well.

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mathemachristian 5 points 3 months ago path: 0 24907380 24907466 24910488 24913070 24917947, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
prole -1 points 3 months ago

Oh, I was referring to hexbear. After viewing the link and briefly seeing the cancer, it made me glad that my instance defederated

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ea6927d8 72 points 3 months ago

I thought piefed's main developer crusade was pathetic enough. This is something else.

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GreyCat 5 points 3 months ago

You elaborate on the piefed part ? I'm out of the loop

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ea6927d8 6 points 3 months ago path: 0 24902376 24917844 24920080, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
FirmDistribution 69 points 3 months ago

this is one of the most unhinged things I've seem on an open source project 😐

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eldavi 3 points 3 months ago

it used to be par for the course in the foss world as you could see torvalds' rants targeting some developers and i suspect it never went away.

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chrisbit 62 points 3 months ago

Thanks for your work uncovering this. Imposing this broad and undisclosed censorship upon the user is unacceptable, so we have stopped hosting Tesseract on our instance.

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Cowbee 21 points 3 months ago

Congrats! Db0 forked it in case you want to go back to a similar interface, but I think it's still getting the censorship parts removed.

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alapakala 2 points 3 months ago path: 0 24908780 24909761 24918026, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1
chrisbit 9 points 3 months ago

We would consider it if it has the blocklist function removed. Whether the fork gets ongoing maintenance is a concern though.

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eldavi 13 points 3 months ago

imagine how many other things like this exist in the fediverse and haven't yet been discovered; i bet most never will be.

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Zwrt 14 points 3 months ago

Correction. This is actually good news.

imagine how many other things like this exist on the fediverse corporate web and haven't yet can never be discovered.

At least here in open source town we get to detect and tackle this shit

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Swedneck 6 points 3 months ago

better yet: we KNOW corporate social media is fucking riddled to the bone with filters, hell people talk about "The Algorithm" (praise be) all the time.

And it's just considered normal. It is how it is. Who cares.

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eldavi 1 point 3 months ago

a huge majority fo the people in the open source town aren't aware that these things keep popping up and think it's just another "tankie conspiracy" unless their own instance admins share it fully... which is uncommon.

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davel 13 points 3 months ago

I doubt there are very many, because most people don’t do these kinds of things, not even le evil tankies.

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eldavi 1 point 3 months ago

It only takes one to be successful.

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Rentlar 61 points 3 months ago

Like I would have zero problems with developers that do this, if they could come out clearly and document/announce: "I don't like these accounts or words, if you do then this is what you do to change it or shut it off."

Stuff like Lemmy's word list, Piefed's default blocklist, you can turn off or change the words. Even if I think the daily vote quota is a stupid default on setting, if you're a Piefed admin and don't like that, set the limit to 10000, 99999999 or whatever. I usually have tons and tons of sympathy for FOSS devs, take their side and give the benefit of doubt in grey areas. They work for free and share it for free so I don't expect perfection or how I would want things to be.

Undocumented shit like this, intentionally hidden is way past the line, and I have no patience for it whatsoever. You never know when this could be somehow used as an attack vector.

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ada 36 points 3 months ago

That's exactly where I'm at. I don't align with a lot of the choices Rimu makes for Piefed, but I am 100% for him designing a tool that works for him, even when the defaults he chooses don't align with my preferences. As long as I have the option to disable/change them as an admin, then I'd rather see a passionate dev creating tools that they want to use than a burned out dev creating something their heart isn't invested in.

Unfortunately, tesseract isn't that...

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Rentlar 20 points 3 months ago

One note/minor correction, it is in the git repo: https://github.com/...

You can see when asimons04 changed the static base64 filter .dat file. The changes happen in completely unrelated or nondescript commits. Looking at the commit when it was implemented, it does say filter, but the error messages and code comments creating the folder indicate "cache" folder creation, when the variable name and function is for the policy, which might technically be correct, is misleading and is quite suspect to me.

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wizardbeard 9 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I really wanted to believe this was just a personal filter list that got included accidentally, but there's no fucking shot. The way it's implemented and intentionally obfuscated means there's no way in hell this isn't entirely intentional.

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Swedneck 4 points 3 months ago

I'd add on that stuff like this should NOT be the default (unless that is specifically what you advertise your software for, and even then you should give a clear option to disable or change it), because users (even admins using the software for their instance) will generally not configure things much.
What should be done is have it as an opt-in, or prompt the user to pick an option.

If one believes their blocklist/filter is in good faith and beneficial to others and to the world in general, then one shouldn't feel a need to force others to use it, only inform them that it exists.

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Rentlar 1 point 3 months ago

Following best practice would be ideal, I agree with you, but for FOSS projects I can settle for best effort, and ability to configure/correct any serious errors if it is brought up constructively. Every dev has their own biases and they make tools to fit their needs, not necessarily everyones. Like if it was by accident that a personal filter was pushed to all instances, and then immediately fixed when made public, personally, I could forgive the dev for the mistake. But available evidence shows this was not a mistake, and intentionally hiding things this dev didn't like, pushing the upstream changes without telling anyone.

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davel 2 points 3 months ago

Stuff like Lemmy’s word list

Lemmy’s slur filter is disabled by default. It’s opt-in at the admin level, and most instances don’t opt for it, including your own I believe.

I don’t know why this molehill keeps being made into a mountain.

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gh0stcassette 2 points 3 months ago

Like I would have zero problems with developers that do this, if they could come out clearly and document/announce: "I don't like these accounts or words, if you do then this is what you do to change it or shut it off."

Given that the list very clearly targets queer users for being queer (entire lemmy.blahaj.zone instance blocked), you are being far too charitable with an obviously bad faith actor.

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Rentlar 1 point 3 months ago

If they come out and say they don't like blahaj.zone for bigoted reasons, let them, don't support their project, done. I'll defend blahaj.zone's strictly enforced any pronoun policy as much as a dev who clearly chooses to include or exclude certain instances by default, as long as the intentions are clear, not hidden away and easily rectifiable for your needs. What I am saying is a breach of trust is worse than bigotry, which itself is worse than mere ideological disagreements. A < B < C.

You can read into how you like the presence of certain instances/words/users on the blocklist, but putting BZ on a blocklist = bigot seems to me like a jump to conclusion.

you are being far too charitable with an obviously bad faith actor.

Like I said, I afford FOSS devs lots of grace and benefit of doubt, that's just me, if the issue was solely over the choice of instances being blocked by default, I'd excuse it, but that isn't the main issue. Call me too charitable, sure, it's in my nature and you don't have to be me.

The issue is the blocklist was hidden away in base64, not documented anywhere, while constantly being updated, without any justification (like pulling from a public spamlist), and was secretly affecting every server's Tesseract frontend. It was the trust that the so-called "Toxic mode" could remove all filtering, but it didn't, and the trust that connection errors were simply configuration problems and not intentionally obfuscated filtering routines, these formed the trust that was broken.

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gh0stcassette 1 point 3 months ago

You can read into how you like the presence of certain instances/words/users on the blocklist, but putting BZ on a blocklist = bigot seems to me like a jump to conclusion.

I will, and I consider you willfully ignorant for not doing so. Consider the probability distribution of likely motivations for drawing up a secret blacklist that specifically targets queer communities and anyone to the left of "let's hunt immigrants for sport". The majority of that distribution is gonna be bigotry.

Like I said, I afford FOSS devs lots of grace and benefit of doubt, that's just me, if the issue was solely over the choice of instances being blocked by default, I'd excuse it, but that isn't the main issue. Call me too charitable, sure, it's in my nature and you don't have to be me.

Interesting choice to give the developer who already violated user trust by imposing a secret blacklist the benefit of the doubt on their bigotry. Seems like that would lose them the benefit of the doubt if you were being intellectually honest.

It was the trust that the so-called "Toxic mode" could remove all filtering, but it didn't, and the trust that connection errors were simply configuration problems and not intentionally obfuscated filtering routines, these formed the trust that was broken.

Requiring users to enable "toxic mode" in order to access queer spaces isn't evidence of bigotry to you?

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Rentlar 2 points 3 months ago

Interesting choice to give the developer who already violated user trust by imposing a secret blacklist the benefit of the doubt on their bigotry.

I never did that, sorry I kind of suggested I did in my last reply, when I meant in general to devs that don’t break peoples' trust. In a vacuum, a configurable blocklist with biased defaults is acceptable, even if I wouldn't set it myself that way. Their work, their choice. However, it is specifically the concealment of the biased defaults that is the breach of trust which calls into question the dev's motivations.

Requiring users to enable "toxic mode" in order to access queer spaces isn't evidence of bigotry to you?

Alone, no, that would be mere speculation, if combined with the shady practice or if you have antiLGBTQ quotes then yes, I could say that fact potentially supports that conclusion. Consider that blahaj.zone is not the only LBGTQ+ safe space on Lemmy (see beehaw !lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org). Any admin or dev could have beef with Ada, not with queer folks, that could be motivation to block blahaj.zone. I never gave the tesseract dev that grace, because that blocklist with blahaj was never publicized, until the clandestine filter list was discovered and decoded.

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db0 61 points 3 months ago

Godfuckingdamnit. I was wondering why the system kept blocking our instance even after I removed it from the blacklist. I suspected some sort of lookup but I was out of time and couldn't find it with a quick search. This is so much worse than I expected.

Where does it dowload it exactly? I found the line loading policy.dat, but I can't find any calls to tesseract.dubvee.org.

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CommanderCloon 17 points 3 months ago

Some other people said it's in the github but obfuscated as base64

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db0 10 points 3 months ago

Ye there's a local version but not a remote which is what I was concerned about

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frongt 8 points 3 months ago

I would just take that frontend down entirely if you're still hosting it. It's basically malware at this point.

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db0 10 points 3 months ago

I've already forked and hosting my own version

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alapakala 0 points 3 months ago path: 0 24907251 24913019 24913709 24918005, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 2
db0 8 points 3 months ago

I've disabled it in code. One doesn't delete files willy nilly

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nutomic 52 points 3 months ago

Wow this "policy" has 3700 lines in total. It must take a lot of time to create and maintain it. How does someone even find the time for that?

I tried to access some blocked users and communities via tesseract.dubvee.org and it simply shows a generic "Not Found" error. So this is impossible to figure out for the average user. Even for developers it would be hard to figure out if the JSON file was hidden a bit better.

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Flax_vert 21 points 3 months ago

They put a specific regex thing after my name, specifically, just in case I ever make accounts with the same username but different numbers after it?

They also alphabetically sorted it all which was very nice of them.

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davel 40 points 3 months ago

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml, explain yourself:

$ curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy | base64 -d | gunzip \
>    | gron | grep -iP '(davel|cowbee|yogthos)'
json.userRegexes[466] = "^davel$";
json.userRegexes[2187] = "^yogthos$";
$
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ShinkanTrain 26 points 3 months ago

Sorry Cowbee, you're still on this council but your title as Chief Misinformator has been transferred to geneva_convenience.

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Cowbee 11 points 3 months ago

A shame, Geneva blocked me because they couldn't handle being called out as ultraleft and essentially taking everything Bad Empanada says as holy.

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4am 8 points 3 months ago

Good lord people are still falling for Bad Empanada?

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Cowbee 6 points 3 months ago

Yes. Geneva I see as a well-meaning radlib with better political instincts than most. Can decently be on the right side, but without coherent political training of their own, they get caught in streamer worship.

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davel 2 points 3 months ago

BE has some phenomenal takes, and some of his essays are exemplary. It’s easy for a Western baby leftist to assume the rest is equally good.

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whatiswrongwithyou 14 points 3 months ago

Inside… job?

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Cowbee 3 points 3 months ago

I swear it isn't...

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Cowbee 10 points 3 months ago

I'm legitimately hurt.

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Edie 8 points 3 months ago

You're not in it.

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Cowbee 6 points 3 months ago

Oh I'm misreading it, lol. Was I intended but not added?

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Edie 14 points 3 months ago

No. davel is searching for you himself and yogthos in the "policy".

It's in the format of a terminal. The $ is a "prompt symbol" or what you might call it, essentially it shows at the start of every input line in a (ba)sh terminal. davel has then typed in a prompt, getting a copy of the policy from the website (with curl), decoding it from base64, unziping it, reading the json with gron, and "grepping" (searching) gron's output for davel or cowbee or yogthos. The two next lines are then the output, the lines that match that search. And then a new line ready for a new prompt.

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Axolotl_cpp 2 points 3 months ago
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mathemachristian 39 points 3 months ago path: 0 24906666, hotness: undefined, score: 39, children: 6
ripcord 19 points 3 months ago path: 0 24906666 24908710, hotness: undefined, score: 19, children: 1
mathemachristian 14 points 3 months ago

yes

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db0 10 points 3 months ago

Now it goes to startrek.website

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ripcord 9 points 3 months ago

Still goes to that image for me.

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NigelFrobisher 4 points 3 months ago

Wait, “the majority of people calling for violence don’t even live here” - Does he think people live on the Fediverse?

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mathemachristian 4 points 3 months ago

He is talking about US. He is telling non-USians to shut up about US politics if they don't agree with him.

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Flax_vert 38 points 3 months ago

Mum, I'm on the list!

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marcie 24 points 3 months ago

Where's the list I need to know if I'm a cool kid 😔

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ZeroHora 24 points 3 months ago

You're not in the list. Your bot salary will be reduced this month, work harder next time.

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marcie 13 points 3 months ago

😭😭

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Swedneck 2 points 3 months ago

please sir, may i have some tokens before my context window-

Hello, how may i help you?

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Flax_vert 8 points 3 months ago

Run the command db0 provided. I can't find you unfortunately.

path: 0 24911453 24911739 24911819, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0
goferking0 7 points 3 months ago

I'm just curious when or why I was added 🤔

path: 0 24911453 24914955, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 2
Flax_vert 4 points 3 months ago

Check your modlog related to dubvee. Developer is that admin.

path: 0 24911453 24914955 24916602, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1
goferking0 6 points 3 months ago

Absolutely nothing so they just go off what they saw in a random comment

path: 0 24911453 24914955 24916602 24919948, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
ZeroHora 37 points 3 months ago

I saw a funny weirdo saying that this person is just blocking "extremists". How in the fuck doing this shit is not extreme extremist radical liberalism??????? They like the status quo so much that they don't want to see people complain about it LMAO

path: 0 24909420, hotness: undefined, score: 37, children: 3
jerkface 16 points 3 months ago

Blanket suppression of political topics tends to benefit the right.

path: 0 24909420 24915948, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 2
ZeroHora 13 points 3 months ago

Benefit the status quo, so yeah benefits the right.

path: 0 24909420 24915948 24916106, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 0
frongt 4 points 3 months ago

I've read the list. It almost exclusively targets left-leaning topics.

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DupaCycki 35 points 3 months ago

Looking at what is blocked, it just looks like someone very much aligned with the government came up with the list.

path: 0 24906959, hotness: undefined, score: 35, children: 2
TiredTiger 23 points 3 months ago

If this isn't an op, then that's even more pathetic, honestly. Imagine doing this shit for free.

path: 0 24906959 24912210, hotness: undefined, score: 23, children: 1
eldavi 11 points 3 months ago

following leftist & radlib influencers on social media makes me suspect that the brainworms implanted by almost a century's worth of efforts -- like cointelpro -- have taken root into western culture since many of those brand new influencers didn't exist weeks/months before have a sudden swell of subscribers/voters and their channels are dedicated to contradicting the leftist/radlib influencers instead of their own organic content.

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umbrella 30 points 3 months ago
path: 0 24905689, hotness: undefined, score: 30, children: 1
mathemachristian 14 points 3 months ago

not-listening

path: 0 24905689 24906069, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 0
echolalia 30 points 3 months ago

"It targets the left" doesn't survive the data

I mean, sure but, isn't that like pointing out you've banned vegans to your BBQ ribs restaurant along with (insert group here)

path: 0 24905273, hotness: undefined, score: 30, children: 6
ShinkanTrain 64 points 3 months ago

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread

path: 0 24905273 24905560, hotness: undefined, score: 64, children: 4
eldavi 8 points 3 months ago

soup kitchens for the rich and soup kitchens for the poor is equality... lol

path: 0 24905273 24905560 24913091, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 3
Sanctus 5 points 3 months ago

The trick is the rich never have to sleep under bridges, or beg in the streets, or steal bread.....

path: 0 24905273 24905560 24913091 24915846, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 2
davel 7 points 3 months ago

I assume eldavi understands this, but it never hurts to spell it out for bystanders.

path: 0 24905273 24905560 24913091 24915846 24915974, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 1
Flax_vert -1 points 3 months ago

Apparently I'm left wing now? People can't make up their mind!

path: 0 24905273 24911490, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 0
wizardbeard 28 points 3 months ago

As of around 7 hours ago, there's a closed issue on the repo's tracker from someone upset they were on the secret list, and the maintainer closed the issue stating that they'd make an official statement once everyone cooled off. Also that the issue tracker wasn't the right place for that discussion.

This indicates that they are aware of the threads about this stuff here on Lemmy.

Please don't dogpile the issue tracker, and give an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail. Trust that if they're a piece of shit it won't take long for them to confirm it (again) loud and clear. Not saying this isn't a whole big bunch of bullshit, just that they should at least get a small opportunity to respond with their side.

If you hand someone a shovel and they use it to dig their hole deeper instead of filling it in, it's even more fun to watch them fall in.

path: 0 24923373, hotness: undefined, score: 28, children: 3
gh0stcassette 5 points 3 months ago

Trust that if they're a piece of shit it won't take long for them to confirm it (again) loud and clear. Not saying this isn't a whole big bunch of bullshit, just that they should at least get a small opportunity to respond with their side.

Given the fact that he deliberately targeted trans/queer people with this list, I am uninterested in giving him the benefit of the doubt, and very much hope everyone switches to the db0 fork and he loses his whole project over his bigoted hubris.

path: 0 24923373 24939025, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
wizardbeard 1 point 3 months ago

Fair enough. I was more just trying to say that dogpiling on the guy wouldn't change anything.

As far as them showing their ass again, I'm pretty sure that by the time you made this comment, they had already made their "public statement". And doubled down.


They claim that the targeting of trans/queer places was due to the violent rhetoric they saw going on in the spaces. Surely it's against deserving targets, but this guy feels that calling for the death of people isn't ok no matter the target. Theoretically if there had been spaces not allowing that, they wouldn't have blocked those ones.

We won't know because the spaces that do exist do also allow it. Personally I think that people should be able to express those extreme emotions, and that other people shouldn't be forced to see it if they don't want to. Personal filters, potentially based off crowd-sourced lists are what makes sense to me. My issue with this whole thing is that they did it secretly, and did not actually give users options to opt-out. Then at that point there's not even a point about arguing what the motivations were.

But as it stands, the guy's an ass. And confirmed it in less than 12 hours.

path: 0 24923373 24939025 24963602, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
ayyy 4 points 3 months ago

The benefit of the doubt should be given when there is some doubt to be benefitted from. There is no doubt this person is pushing an agenda in the shadiest way possible.

path: 0 24923373 24941788, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
kolektyw_szmer 25 points 3 months ago

As an instance admin crew we want to voice our protest over our entire instance not being on the list. We feel we had failed our users.

One of them managed to get on the individuals list tho, for posting one single thing; "To predict the future we must look at the past. How Rome slave economy could be a 1:1 parallel to artificial worker economy.".

path: 0 24926729, hotness: undefined, score: 25, children: 1
spicehoarder 9 points 3 months ago

That is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read.

path: 0 24926729 24930447, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
UpperBroccoli 22 points 3 months ago

Guess that means that in a small way, I am now immortalalized in a git repository.

path: 0 24911360, hotness: undefined, score: 22, children: 1
Flax_vert 7 points 3 months ago

Welcome to the club 🤝

path: 0 24911360 24911457, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0
iByteABit 21 points 3 months ago

Let them shoot themselves on the foot, they are only providing more evidence that their ideology is the one that needs to control the narrative or else it shatters at the first sign of critical thought

path: 0 24908193, hotness: undefined, score: 21, children: 11
eldavi 1 point 3 months ago

are they still shooting themselves in the foot if there are currently 5 such examples, but we've only detected one and by accident?

path: 0 24908193 24913342, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 10
iByteABit 12 points 3 months ago

Piefed was also detected, and also I'm not sure what your point is. Personally I'm sticking with the original software and the instance I'm on knowing that there's no such ideological firewall with fake 404 errors so I don't find out. People who agree with the Piefed and Tesseract dev's worldviews can go there and enjoy their bubble if that's their thing

path: 0 24908193 24913342 24916989, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 9
Dojan 1 point 3 months ago

Wait, Piefed does this too?

path: 0 24908193 24913342 24916989 24939302, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 8
eldavi 3 points 3 months ago

@iByteABit@lemmy.ml

piefed is on track to become one of the largest instances in the fediverse and this response proves why -- this information is buried in the instances that are friendly to tesseract's developers and; it seems; in the same ways that the mainstream media hides fascism in the western world or genocides in palestine.

path: 0 24908193 24913342 24916989 24939302 24984518, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 7
9point6 20 points 3 months ago

Lol the keywords list is hilarious, imagine publishing a list of things that rustle your jimmies.

path: 0 24918031, hotness: undefined, score: 20, children: 0
ellypony 18 points 3 months ago

Oh my god it's actually way worse they're using incredibly broad regular expressions to blacklist users. There's a whole section for it.

If you just happen to have the same text in your username as a previously blacklisted user, you're blacklisted automatically too. For example:

"^Fleure", 

If your username is Fleure_1998 or FleuresArePretty you're going to be blacklisted.

Isn't there a less draconian way to manage alt-account spam? This is casting the net over the whole ocean and eventually if that user regex list gets big and broad enough it'll be near impossible to not be shadowbanned by default.

ALSO WHY IS YURI BLOCKED HELLO?????

path: 0 24937399, hotness: undefined, score: 18, children: 0
pineapplelover 9 points 3 months ago

Sad to see I'm not on the list

path: 0 24923550, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 3
Count042 6 points 3 months ago

Same.

path: 0 24923550 24923649, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 1
thespcicifcocean 2 points 3 months ago

You should feel bad.

path: 0 24923550 24923649 24936830, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
thethunderwolf 4 points 3 months ago

same

path: 0 24923550 24937681, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
whatiswrongwithyou 9 points 3 months ago

That’s an epic level of gaslighting. Hell yeah.

Bonerfried dude’s rock situation.

path: 0 24919583, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
chunes 9 points 3 months ago

"These rapscallions are hindering my ability to express myself."

path: 0 24921135, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
ZombiFrancis 9 points 3 months ago

Based on the skew of what's on the blacklist, it'd have been more efficient for Tesseract to run off a whitelist only for FHF corporate approved.

path: 0 24921825, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
nsrxn 9 points 3 months ago

of my hundred fediverse IDs, I somehow didn't get a single mention in the user list. a few folks I recognize did, and fewer of those probably deserved it.

edit:

check that. I found a few.

path: 0 24908686, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 6
prole 14 points 3 months ago

of my hundred fediverse IDs

Uhhhh... why tho

path: 0 24908686 24910502, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 5
nsrxn 2 points 3 months ago

I've been on the fediverse about a decade. I make a habit of picking up an id on most new servers I find. sometimes it helps with federation issues. I think I can take credit in particular for the tighter federation of scribe.disroot.org with the rest of lemmy, for instance.

there are other benefits I don't really care to explicate.

path: 0 24908686 24910502 24913221, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 4
HCSOThrowaway 1 point 3 months ago

there are other benefits I don’t really care to explicate.

Ban evasion, propaganda, etc.

path: 0 24908686 24910502 24913221 24913303, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3
Zwrt 1 point 3 months ago

Finding a malicious reason for something is never difficult.

I have an alt for my more less artistically expressive alter main ego. I just want to keep it separate from this general doomscroller account. (I could not have demonstrated the single biggest downside so well if i had tried)

One more as a backup for that alt when the smaller instance has technical issues.

One more on that big instance which i never liked but was accepting new registrations when my original main instance went down.

One more on my own instance which is still in experimental level.

path: 0 24908686 24910502 24913221 24913303 24927471, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2
ptu 7 points 3 months ago

My blocklist is mostly furry and yiff communities

path: 0 24905933, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0
tacosanonymous 6 points 3 months ago

What is a "user regex"?

path: 0 24932602, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 3
HK65 10 points 3 months ago

A regex that can match different usernames I presume.

A regex or regular expression is a language to declare patterns to be matched.

You see that "communis(t|m)"? That's a simple regex that matches both "communist" and "communism". You can make one for every pattern imaginable, like a username and every number combination afterwards and so on.

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tacosanonymous 4 points 3 months ago

Cool. Ty

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Lee 2 points 3 months ago

A regular expression (a sort of language for pattern matching) that matches users. IOW there's patterns to filter users, not just communities and instances.

path: 0 24932602 24934157, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
far_university1990 5 points 3 months ago

List of funny thing:

  • "0811( |-)?4555588" anynone know that number?
  • "billionare [cock|dick]" wrong regex brace
  • "comrade"
  • "guill?otine" !historymemes@piefed.social will cry
  • "Hi, I'm an AI engineer based in Japan"
  • "italian plumber" what has mario done to you?
  • "Perchance" this even capitalized
  • "^GirlsFrontline" afraid of some boob?
  • "^Yuri|^WholesomeYuri" afraid of lesbian?
  • me not on list :(
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thespcicifcocean 4 points 3 months ago

Hey! I'm on that list! Awesome!

path: 0 24936813, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
Surp 3 points 3 months ago

Am I on the list

path: 0 24917961, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
_cnt0 2 points 3 months ago

Kind of disappointed I'm not on the list.

path: 0 24916637, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
danhab99 2 points 3 months ago

Can I ask to be added to this list for posterity reasons?

path: 0 24950307, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
Ilovethebomb 1 point 3 months ago

I'm just glad to be included, I feel so special.

path: 0 24961181, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
VeganCheesecake -3 points 3 months ago

This all sucks, but also, please stop using LLMs to write long (or any) texts. It ends up sounding silly.

path: 0 24904113, hotness: undefined, score: -3, children: 14
ripcord 32 points 3 months ago

I don't think this is AI.

Among other things, I used to write like this for years before LLMs were a thing.

path: 0 24904113 24908563, hotness: undefined, score: 32, children: 13
prole 17 points 3 months ago

This was my reaction to all of the "don't use LLM for your post" comments as well... I didn't get that vibe at all.

But I guess nowadays we need to avoid writing well and using proper grammar so as to not be confused with LLM.

Fucking backwards ass shit. Certainly this won't make people even more stupid.

path: 0 24904113 24908563 24910551, hotness: undefined, score: 17, children: 2
ripcord 13 points 3 months ago

Using formatting with headers to make things more readable is also a no-no

path: 0 24904113 24908563 24910551 24913211, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 0
Swedneck 2 points 3 months ago

Fucking backwards ass shit. You're damn well on the right track: LLMs tend to avoid swearing (it's kinda funda-fucking-mentally at odds with how most companies want them to be used), so i think we should respond by cursing like sailors, especially creative swears with wordplay and shit.

It doesn't guarantee it's not LLM writing but if nothing else it's more entertaining.

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Arcanepotato 10 points 3 months ago

Lmao right? LLM learned to from somewhere.

path: 0 24904113 24908563 24914638, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 1
davel 6 points 3 months ago

They can take my em dashes from my cold, dead typing fingers.

path: 0 24904113 24908563 24914638 24916198, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
VeganCheesecake 1 point 3 months ago

There's a lot of specific sentence fragments that read very LLM to me. In the end, that of course isn't proof, and there definitely are people who's style is very close to what LLMs output today.

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4am 13 points 3 months ago

LLMs were trained on things written on the Internet, where lots of authors took a “faux-officiant” style where things need to look like an official report or newscast transcript but have headings like “If you’re just tuning in” for humor.

Tech bros created a world we can’t trust so they could do their crimes in the open and we would have reason to doubt the evidence

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VeganCheesecake -2 points 3 months ago

Yes, darling, I'm not illiterate. I don't think every long, grammatically correct text with sub-headings is generated. Sometimes I even write long-form text myself.

What tripped me up here is:

  • the use of "— listed" for some of the things... listed,
  • the two short definitive sentences here

    355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.

  • the way an already obvious but irrelevant point is overstated here

    Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.

  • the way something obvious from context is stated in a dramatic way here

    I have the list and I'm not posting it.

  • "Doesn't survive the X" is a very Claude sentence for me. It is also a statement I feel isn't entirely supported by fact, since the mayority of the active users and communities here are leftist.

    A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.

  • X is not Y statement, with X and Y being actions done by entirely different parties, which doesn't really make sense contextually.

    But forking isn't disclosure,

  • They stated they'd put the full list in the comments, which they didn't do, and which also doesn't jive with the earlier statement about hiding individual usernames. Also, the unedited feels superfluous.

    Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.

Sorry for the shitty formatting, I am writing this on the train to have something to do after my headphones died. Also, there isn't any definitive proof here, but all of this contributes to the generated feel.

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HieroProtagonist -44 points 3 months ago

Sounds reasonable to filter out the weirdest parts of Lemmy...

path: 0 24909907, hotness: undefined, score: -44, children: 10
irelephant 26 points 3 months ago
path: 0 24909907 24910300, hotness: undefined, score: 26, children: 5
HieroProtagonist -11 points 3 months ago

And?

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brbposting 4 points 3 months ago

No shade (promise):

Is the simplest possible of reading of this correct, “it makes sense to filter my weird instance“? Or maybe it was just a short way to reply to something that felt like a gotcha since nobody likes to feel the way a gotcha makes us feel (regardless of validity)?

(I could be missing something)

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HieroProtagonist 0 points 3 months ago

Of course it's the simplest reading: lemmy.ML is a weird instance with rather weird users, filtering THAT out (and some more) will be a benefit for the Fediverse as it prevents new users from being too much weirdet out

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ButteredBread 4 points 3 months ago
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Cowbee 20 points 3 months ago

The queer and leftist users? No, it doesn't, especially not as an undisclosed hard-coded censor.

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TORFdot0 12 points 3 months ago

With user consent maybe, not obfuscated in the source code and hiding that things are being censored from the end user.

I don’t like a lot of content on here but I maintain my blocklist myself and don’t need an ideologue to big brother it for me. (Even if I were to agree with the ideology)

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Swedneck 2 points 3 months ago

I assume you realize that saying this implies you consider everything on that list weird, which makes you look like a dick.

path: 0 24909907 24945205, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1
HieroProtagonist 0 points 3 months ago

Well... I AM probably a dick, so...

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lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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