That’s some really evil shit: lemmy.world/post/49794261
So Tesseract (an alternative Lemmy client) downloads a blocking/filtering list from its servers, something that most people likely weren’t aware of. This “feature” was introduced November last year (version 1.5.0) and is described as “Tesseract attempts to filter out as much baseline toxicity as possible” in the settings option allowing it to be disabled (Edit: this option is only available if a seemingly undocumented environment variable is set).
The list currently contains 544 (!) individual users and 2282 (!!) regular expressions applied to user names. Among the expressions censored in user names are: Democrat, Republican, Israel, ElonMusk, trump, amerika and billionaire. There is also the regular expression usa?(.*)?terrorist which seems to be intended for the phrase “USA is a terrorist state.”
The list also contains 97 censored communities and 32 regular expressions applied to community names. Finally, there are 352 (!) “forbidden” domains and 296 filtered phrases including proletariat, epstein class, Jesse Welles and “Hi, I’m an AI engineer based in Japan”. The author also dislikes 👉👈 emoji.
Judging by the project’s issues some people only just found out that they are being censored and are wondering why.
Wladimir Palant
in reply to Wladimir Palant • • •It gets even “better.” Tesseract dev shut down the project and removed the repositories. They are said to have posted a farewell message which contained JavaScript code that was sending 2000 requests to the Lemmy instance of the user who uncovered their secret blocking list (that message is no longer online).
I wonder what the thought behind this was. He must have been aware that DDoS requires way more traffic. Also, this kind of attack is trivial to attribute these days.
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72962926