They *may* have fixed the issue. The test run I created now no longer loads the deleted images. I will create a new test run with more current deletions and see if they disappear from the media server in a timely manner.
John aka cobeachbum
Disregard. I was running a old version (somewhere along the way, they had changed the url to the media server). The media still exists, even the one I deleted ~6 hours ago.
I will run the test occassionally to see if the latest one gets deleted, but I'm not holding my breath. The other issue I failed to mention before is you don't even have to be logged on to access the media server. Not real secure.
John aka cobeachbum
This is an unfortunate problem in the whole software industry - nobody bothers to actually delete things from the Internet, and it's not just TrueNudists, most big sites - if you grab the direct link to the jpg image and then try and delete the picture, that jpg link always always works, years or decades later. Facebook, Discord, Grindr even - I once went digging thru my rooted Android phone and found the URL to my Grindr profile pic, and it's been 10 years and the link to that is still there if you know the URL, after I had deleted/replaced it/deleted my whole account.
I work as a software engineer and have been at a bunch of different companies, and can give some insider knowledge that: nobody in those companies cares enough to scrub their CDN (content delivery network) servers to remove from hard disk the pictures that were uploaded. Why? It costs them $nothing to just hold onto them, storage is extremely cheap (like $0.0001 per download of a picture, and if you "deleted" the picture, nobody's even downloading it anymore) - it costs more money to pay your developers to write the code that goes out and scrubs the CDN servers.
As a software developer, I've also run a lot of my own little rinkydink websites and personal projects -- in my own cases, I would program my site to actually delete things, make sure that the URL to the image goes 404, but that's because I operated off an actual hard disk with limited space, I would run out of space if I wasn't deleting anything! But at the corporate level, disk space is basically infinite, especially with big cloud providers like Amazon, and when I've brought this up at the companies I work at (how it would be neighborly of us to actually delete things), I don't win those arguments because money - it's $free to just not even bother with doing so.
A website will usually remove the database entry to the picture (maybe except for Facebook, data hungry as they are); but the jpeg itself sits on the CDN. And at that point, if they wanted to really scrub the deleted pics, a developer would need to write a whole program to cross-check the whole CDN against the database to identify the orphaned pictures and remove them... if a company doesn't want to invest in properly deleting off the CDN to begin with, it's more expensive to write such a boutique script to detect orphaned photos (not linked in the database).
So the story isn't "website backups may have copies still" - eventually the oldest backups would expire, and if a pic were truly deleted, new backups wouldn't include it to begin with. It's laziness and capitalism mainly. This is the status quo for basically the whole entire Internet, unfortunately! The good part is, the direct URL to your pic is long and random and nobody's going to just guess it, so "deleting" it is effective enough. But, people could have (long ago), right-clicked and saved your picture and it's on somebody's computer and they could upload it to other sites, and the cat's out of the bag even if TN were to scrub it from their servers.
This is an unfortunate problem in the whole software industry - nobody bothers to actually delete things from the Internet, and it's not just TrueNudists, most big sites - if you grab the direct link to the jpg image and then try and delete the picture, that jpg link always always works, years or decades later. Facebook, Discord, Grindr even - I once went digging thru my rooted Android phone and found the URL to my Grindr profile pic, and it's been 10 years and the link to that is still there if you know the URL, after I had deleted/replaced it/deleted my whole account.I work as a software engineer and have been at a bunch of different companies, and can give some insider knowledge that: nobody in those companies cares enough to scrub their CDN (content delivery network) servers to remove from hard disk the pictures that were uploaded. Why? It costs them $nothing to just hold onto them, storage is extremely cheap (like $0.0001 per download of a picture, and if you "deleted" the picture, nobody's even downloading it anymore) - it costs more money to pay your developers to write the code that goes out and scrubs the CDN servers.As a software developer, I've also run a lot of my own little rinkydink websites and personal projects -- in my own cases, I would program my site to actually delete things, make sure that the URL to the image goes 404, but that's because I operated off an actual hard disk with limited space, I would run out of space if I wasn't deleting anything! But at the corporate level, disk space is basically infinite, especially with big cloud providers like Amazon, and when I've brought this up at the companies I work at (how it would be neighborly of us to actually delete things), I don't win those arguments because money - it's $free to just not even bother with doing so.A website will usually remove the database entry to the picture (maybe except for Facebook, data hungry as they are); but the jpeg itself sits on the CDN. And at that point, if they wanted to really scrub the deleted pics, a developer would need to write a whole program to cross-check the whole CDN against the database to identify the orphaned pictures and remove them... if a company doesn't want to invest in properly deleting off the CDN to begin with, it's more expensive to write such a boutique script to detect orphaned photos (not linked in the database).So the story isn't "website backups may have copies still" - eventually the oldest backups would expire, and if a pic were truly deleted, new backups wouldn't include it to begin with. It's laziness and capitalism mainly. This is the status quo for basically the whole entire Internet, unfortunately! The good part is, the direct URL to your pic is long and random and nobody's going to just guess it, so "deleting" it is effective enough. But, people could have (long ago), right-clicked and saved your picture and it's on somebody's computer and they could upload it to other sites, and the cat's out of the bag even if TN were to scrub it from their servers.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. You should work for the EU. They are working on the digital service act, in which they try to bring in humanism to social networks.
This is an unfortunate problem in the whole software industry - nobody bothers to actually delete things from the Internet,
As someone who runs a web site I agree you point about the reality. However with the GDPR in effect in Europe those sites risk huge fines if found to not have a mechanism for comple deletion of user data.
Nothing about this forum lets you delete anything! Messages, friends requests etc, you can delete them all but they simply come back. As a Scotch video advert once said in the 1980's, "re-record not fade away".
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