Auto-import of deny lists

[julian@activitypub.space]

NodeBB has a very simple allow/deny list capability at present. You paste in a bunch of newline-separated domains, and we block (or optionally, only allow) them all.

On the road to more fine-grained controls, I discovered that IFTAS publishes a Do Not Interact list in an importable CSV format.

As maintenance of these lists is important (adding new entries as well as handling removals), it looks to be increasingly important that I add into NodeBB the functionality to follow these lists automatically and update as necessary.

[thisismissem@activitypub.space]

The problem with the CSV format, is that it doesn't tell you what was removed, only the current state of the data, so you'd need to store previous CSV files to detect removals by diffing new versus old.

[thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange]

@julian you might want to check out what GoToSocial does on this front -- it seems very well thought out

[julian@activitypub.space]

This is not an issue if you are rebuilding the instance wide deny list every time it is updated.

In that case, whenever the list is rebuilt any removed entries will simply not appear in the new list.

[thisismissem@activitypub.space]

julian in which case you loose anything you manually needed to add. We've had so many conversations about this..

[julian@activitypub.space]

thisismissem not necessarily, I'm planning to build this out as a separate collection of CSV lists, in addition to a list you manually curate. 🙂

[thisismissem@activitypub.space]

Just spend the tiny bit of extra time and implement basic support for federation policies. Keep track of data snd where it comes from, such that you can react to changes over time