The concern -- and I have no statistical idea how current or prevalent this is! -- is that your image hosting service can be used for something illegal if it can be adopted/co-opted automatically as the back end for some shady service.
(Any service that hosts binary files can in principle host anything, which is why you (for example) sometimes see people hosting pirated ebooks on music services. It's easy to do if the music service isn't carefully checking that you're really uploading music.)
So if there's a way to get a bot to create accounts and load and retrieve content to and from them on an image hosting service, your image hoster can turn into a warez site. And if it can, it probably will. Something like Flickr can deal with that, but it's "full time dedicated staff" levels of "deal". Dreamwidth logistically can't throw dedicated staff at the problem, so it has the three-step image hosting turing test to get an image into a dreamwidth post.
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Date: 2021-01-23 01:52 pm (UTC)The concern -- and I have no statistical idea how current or prevalent this is! -- is that your image hosting service can be used for something illegal if it can be adopted/co-opted automatically as the back end for some shady service.
(Any service that hosts binary files can in principle host anything, which is why you (for example) sometimes see people hosting pirated ebooks on music services. It's easy to do if the music service isn't carefully checking that you're really uploading music.)
So if there's a way to get a bot to create accounts and load and retrieve content to and from them on an image hosting service, your image hoster can turn into a warez site. And if it can, it probably will. Something like Flickr can deal with that, but it's "full time dedicated staff" levels of "deal". Dreamwidth logistically can't throw dedicated staff at the problem, so it has the three-step image hosting turing test to get an image into a dreamwidth post.