I run a website where people can upload files. Not everyone uploads nice files. Every time someone downloads such a file from my site with their antivirus enabled, it's now my problem to discover which fifteen block lists the whole domain has newly been put on. People don't treat big tech this way; you don't think "oh, there's malware on Github, let me just report github.com as a suspicious website that nobody should be able to visit anymore"
The correct answer is probably the abuse contact shown in the WHOIS data. That's programmatically accessible and thus scales
Unpopular opinion, but I think that any website owner accepting uploads from strangers should bear responsibility for those uploads. You cannot just say "not mine, I just distributed it".
UPDATE: Unpopular because it means there's a lot of work for the owner to moderate the files. And large sites like facebook are notorious for very bad moderation. It's not like we mandate them to hire N moderators per M users.
When running an actually competent LLM is as cheap as a $10/mo cloud server (for the moderation), I'll actually agree with this sentiment. Probably wont be unpopular long beyond that point in time.
There's a middle ground for this though. Platforms like Youtube, Facebook, etc, have no excuse anymore. They can literally scan with these models they have available and handle it. So write the legislation based on their capacity so you don't screw the one dude just trying to support some indie game devs in a small community or something.
I'd be fine if that were the law. What really frustrates me is the double standard where I can't host something that Microsoft or Wetransfer can without repercussions
Usually the file is already gone by the time they finished reporting it, but otherwise delete and ban the uploader if it's a valid report. Criminals don't seem to use my site for malware spreading, though, because all uploads expire after a number of hours. Much better to put it somewhere that's stable until the victim clicks on it, like Google Drive or whatnot. You'd say Google is also responsible for infecting innocent victims right?
So far as I can tell, the malware uploaded to my site is when people use it as a virtual usb stick; transferring files to a lab system or something else they already have access to. A multiplayer remote desktop site was popular for a while, loads of links to shared virtual machines and sometimes people would upload screen recordings of something that happened (usually social things like someone saying something edgy in a chat that runs alongside). Since it's a lab environment, the users enjoy letting loose all sorts of malware and they'd use my site to get it there, but they always already had access or you can't type in the URL and execute the file
There was one instance where someone did make a self-spreading piece of malware, custom for my site. It would try to occupy a lot of short links, so pretty much no matter what you guessed, you'd end up finding that Windows executable and, if you ran it, it would upload itself to create yet more valid download links. Didn't do anything malicious to infected machines, just a nuisance to the site until I banned IP addresses that continued to spam the site
Of course, that's just focusing on the malware. The vast majority of uploads are screenshots, legit software (matching sha2sum with a known good source), long links or commands someone would otherwise have to type over, stuff like that. On occasion there's waves where some community will decide to use it for something, like rich Koreans sharing chatroom links for about a year comes to mind. A few teachers use it for very short temporary links that they can write on the chalkboard/whiteboard for students to download coursework from. It was down for 2h last week due to a power outage and one of my old teachers opened a github ticket about it, that was nice to see :)
I didn't newly start this in 2026; I just haven't stopped the existing system :). Fifteen years ago there weren't all these issues though. Attempts at taking it down whenever anything bad was spotted started probably somewhere around 2019-2020, and user reports are picking up as well since about a year. People suddenly care a lot more that when they guessed a url and found malware (something no legitimate user would stumble upon), it gets removed promptly. So far the number of reports is very very manageable, but it's interesting to observe the collective consciousness change over time from "don't run executables that you don't know are safe" to "untrustworthy files shouldn't exist online in the first place"
The risk of pedophile images is way to high to let anyone upload files to your website. It's one thing probably even the evilest country would agree to jail you for, without investigation.
Maybe, let's see. I have the same amount of faith in humanity and the legal system as I did in the forum era. No CSAM reports so far. Very little porn in general, maybe one video per year or so? In my particular case it's also not very useful because the uploads are all self-destructing. After a few hours you'd have to upload it again, but from a new IP address because I'd block any (C)SAM uploaders and report all evidence I have to police in the appropriate country. Seems like a silly way to burn through a set of working proxies if someone wanted to try to keep abuse material available on that site
Theres no way you can say having an internet presence is over for the little guy and yet at the same time imply its ok if you have enough money/power. I think at that stage it ceases to be useful and we need an internet 2.0. maybe something hobbyists can run over radio or something.
This is why developing darknet and obfuscating P2P network tech that make it impossible to properly assign legal liability to a node is so important. States are by far the worst monsters humans have invented and they do the stupidest things imagineable.
A State might be composed of humans but it is a machine, a generally unthinking machine, which projects force on and breaks individuals.
/shrug - I have an end-to-end encrypted file delivery service. It's a dumb service. If the box got compromised, it doesn't even matter. The files can't be read or stolen because they would have to actually crack the algorithm... which if they did then it's just over, the internet is plaintext again if people are able to defeat what's been recommended as best practices for SSL/TLS these days.
The correct answer is probably the abuse contact shown in the WHOIS data. That's programmatically accessible and thus scales