"Mastodon has been awarded a €614k service agreement by the Sovereign Tech Fund"

[simonzerafa@infosec.exchange]

@bagder

That would buy a few Threadripper workstations, for programming of course

[gsuberland@chaos.social]

@bagder finally, they can afford 8GB of DDR5

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@bagder Unfortunately it looks like at least part of this is to be spent on surveillance infrastructure...

[bms48@mastodon.social]

@bagder Think they'll fund diverse implementations for BGP security? I'm looking at the RPKI+ROV+ASPA stack. Crossing my fingers...

[cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family]

@dalias @bagder I’m sorry, what? Either you fundamentally misunderstand the service agreement or are being intentionally misleading.

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@cassidy @bagder "Automated content detection" and a system for outsourcing it (which, if your instance is using it, would expose everything you post to that third party).

[cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family]

@dalias @bagder automated content detection at the Mastodon server level is an extremely basic trust and safety feature that has been sorely missing. It’s the tooling that lets a server admin, say, “actually people can’t use our site to host and distribute known child sexual abuse materials, and we aren’t forcing volunteer moderators to look at child sexual abuse materials all day!”

I encourage you to read about hash mapping, as that is the sort of detection we’re talking about.

[cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family]

@dalias @bagder it’s on the same level as a CDN: yes, technically a CDN can see all your data! Which is why you, as a user, choose to trust your server admin and the infrastructure (like CDNs and T&S tooling) that they use. If you don’t trust your server admin or their infrastructure choices, then you can use a different server; that’s kind of a super power of the fediverse.

[cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family]

@dalias @bagder And just like a CDN, every Mastodon server re-deploying and re-hosting all of the load for all media on the network is probably not the smartest move resource-wise, especially as running a Mastodon server is already difficult and expensive at scale. So, yes, like the plans to make media handling shareable between instances, there is a plan to make T&S tooling sharable between instances.

[cassidy@mastodon.blaede.family]

@dalias @bagder this is all important work to make Mastodon and the larger fediverse scale more easily and safely—and to help keep literally illegal-to-host content off of the network (or more specifically, off of the servers where it is illegal).