Submitted by 7666 on

It is with great sadness that I must announce a temporary but indefinite shutdown of Pomf, both uploads and downloads, starting with new uploads on February 14th and ending with full shutdown on March 14th.

This is the last thing I ever wanted to do, but multiple major threats to the existence of Pomf are all coalescing rapidly at a time in which I do not have the personal bandwidth to fight all at once: 

I simply cannot handle all of this in a manner that I find acceptable in a timeline that I find acceptable while the service remains online. These events have all struck or intensified at nearly the same time, and while I can focus my efforts on one or maybe two situations (and I have been), I just can't deal with them all in parallel. I have already spent tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds upon hundreds of hours working on my services, and now I must think about myself and my livelihood and all of my other projects and endeavors first, and I must keep in mind the people and animals that depend on me. I have a home datacenter to keep building. I have a company acquisition to finish. I have multiple complex financial situations I need to deal with. I have a farm to keep running. I have a job that I like that my performance has suffered somewhat at due to all of this. The risk of running afoul of the law (justified or not) continues to grow. And the state of Lain.la's infrastructure (outside of the network, that's doing great) is dire. This is the simple reality of the situation. Despite my best efforts, I have been unable to keep up with the demands of running Pomf in a satisfactory manner, and I do not see any other way forward than to put the service on hiatus until these issues can be mitigated.

======(You can probably skip this part as it's paranoid rambling)
Most importantly though, is the heightened potential for a corrupt justice system or a single braindead federal agent to see Pomf and get the wrong impression, and then proceeding to slander me and ruin my life over it, which is apparently now kosher to do. As you may be aware, Pomf gets attacked by pedophiles daily who upload vast archives of CSAM. I have worked tirelessly to actively intercept and destroy these archives way beyond what is required of me by law, and I have put in preventative measures to stop its upload like blocking Tor or specific HTTP referrers or doing informant/foreign LEO outreach or using the NCMEC hash database in-line to the upload.php script for Pomf. Of course, no security system is perfect and attackers evolve over time, so regrettably some material does make it through. Now, Pomf pushes about 600-800TB of traffic a month in general, but most of it is perfectly benign. Imagine cherry picking "CSAM" and "Massive bandwidth" from the above statements, getting a judge to sign a warrant, and the false and misleading headline "Owner of massive CSAM distribution ring arrested" suddenly seems plausible. Now imagine how hard it would be to repair that reputational damage over time even with all charges cleared. Imagine how much it would cost to even accomplish that. Nobody is coming to defend me. I'm not even newsworthy. It is honestly a miracle it hasn't happened yet, although in the back of my mind I do wonder if someone is already building that case. Even worse, everyone in the current US administration who wasn't forced out by layoffs or principles is jockeying for power and recognition from the toddler in charge, manufacturing outright lies in the perpetuation of a false meritocracy, and I would be a juicy target for someone's promotion. In reality, there was always a potential for this to happen, but I counted the occurrence of it happening as remote and therefore did not include federal or state agencies in my operational threat model, as the previous administration was largely inept, not actively malicious. These days, you'd be a fool not to at least wargame out how you would handle a potential federal or state intervention or character assassination and make preparations to counter it, even if you don't think you are vulnerable or special. You can read more in this post I made here (https://comp.lain.la/notice/B2YXE9NvZ3zNAvfNgm, you may need to click "Show Content") that discusses the current US political environment factors that pushed this portion of my risk analysis over the edge, and that was posted even before the most recent events occurred. If a federal agent reading this would like to make themselves known and assure me that this won't happen (yeah right), you can always reach out to me at my personal email. I'm sure you know it. It's a shame too, because I considered myself on the forefront of interdicting CSAM through novel measures like forcing uploaders into encrypted 7z files to evade my defenses, and then subsequently smashing those to bits through custom hashcat scripts and massive password lists that I collected from multiple sources. I even worked with the Norwegian police! I had so many great ideas to fight this plague, like starting to inject stealer log malware into successfully cracked 7z files so I could score a few pedophile arrests, or open sourcing PhotoDNA because Microsoft won't. It's not like criminals have any recourse, and it sure would be better than whatever the hell Zuckerberg is doing flooding the NCMEC tip line with 20 million largely unactionable reports a year (which is for some reason required by federal law even though it does NOTHING. Malicious compliance?). Too bad. I want nothing to do with the feds now (especially considering most of THEM are pedophiles), because as the saying goes, the fish rots from the head down. Maybe in 2029!
======(Paranoid rambling ends)

The timeline of Pomf's shutdown is designed to be clear and staged in a deliberate manner with plenty of time (21-45 days depending on file age) for users to migrate to another service such as Catbox or Quax and/or to retrieve their files prior to shutdown. It's the least I can do. The full breakdown is below:

  • February 14th, 2026 - New Pomf uploads will be indefinitely paused. Security improvement efforts will pause. Abuse reports will still be honored. Donation pages and links will be terminated.
  • February 21st, 2026 - Storage1 (Files from September 15th, 2020 - April 30th, 2023) will be dismounted indefinitely. (Users who miss a storage dismount deadline and wish to have their file or files reactivated may email 7666@lain.la to request a reactivation, where the file in question will be migrated to Storage11 and made available up until the sunset of Storage11 itself. No authentication will be required for reactivation requests, I just need the URL.)
  • February 28th, 2026 - Storage2 (April 30th, 2023 - September 24th, 2023), Storage3 (September 24th, 2023 - March 25th, 2024), and Storage4 (March 25th, 2024 - July 15th, 2024) will be dismounted indefinitely.
  • March 7th, 2026 - Storage5 (July 15th, 2024 - October 5th, 2024), Storage6 (October 5th, 2024 - December 6th, 2024), Storage7 (December 6th, 2024 - March 16th, 2025), and Storage8 (March 16th, 2025 - July 5th, 2025) will be dismounted indefinitely. 
  • March 14th, 2026 - Storage9 (July 5th, 2025 - October 17th, 2025), Storage10 (October 17th, 2025 - December 19th, 2025), and Storage11 (December 19th, 2025 - Present) will be dismounted indefinitely. Reactivation requests will no longer be honored. All remaining Pomf assets will be taken down and replaced with a notification of indefinite suspension of the Pomf service. All Pomf infrastructure, cron jobs, scan jobs, security systems, databases, etc. will be disabled. The NCMEC hash database integration will be suspended. Abuse reports for Pomf will no longer be honored.

I will gather my strength and resources in the meantime and try to find ways around these issues that allow me to run Pomf in a manner that does not risk bringing me personal harm. Work will begin to convert Pomf virtual disks into a Proxmox compatible format for a restart of Pomf in the future on my new infrastructure. At the completion of this conversion work (assuming the risk level remains unsatisfactorily mitigated), Pomf will be placed into cold storage. Any running copies of Pomf will be deleted, and two distinct encrypted archives will remain - one on-site and one off-site, to ensure the durability of the entire Pomf repository. No exact timeline can be provided for this work as it is intensive and variable, and demands incredible care and diligence to ensure no loss of user data. The cold storage archive will NOT be accessible to anyone for any reason, however, until Pomf is back online.

I do have a plan above and beyond the Proxmox migration:

  • My first task will be to achieve a stable financial situation to fund all of my endeavors, which I expect should be completed by Summer of this year, if everything works out. I have multiple CPAs working for me now on this.
  • Next, I will acquire an army of lawyers to finally incorporate Lain.la into an entity separate from myself (as it has been pretty much from the start, just unofficially, d/b/a Iwakura Systems), as a way to compartmentalize the damage should something occur, and also to prime said army of lawyers on the risks I face so they can determine an effective legal strategy should the worst come to pass. They will likely be on a permanent retainer from that point forward due to the high risk nature of Pomf.
  • I will work on completing all other outstanding infrastructure projects (storage, backups, redundancy, compute, orchestration, patching, etc.) to rebuild the core of Lain.la into something resilient and 100% open source, and I will strive to share my work with others, as I expect a lot of cool custom things to come out of the migration.

This is by far not a comprehensive list. A lot of foundational work will have to occur to ensure that when Pomf comes back up, it will never go down again, come hell or high water or malicious governments. But I promise you, it will come back. For now, I am setting a return date of September 15th, 2026, or six months after the shutdown, to have Pomf fully operational and all risk mitigation and upgrade goals met. This is not a commitment, however. It will take as long as it needs to, to ensure the primary goal of protecting myself is met. Work will start immediately after shutdown.

I must apologize again for this. I understand that these services are a dying breed and one of the last bastions of a simple and free internet, and I have been proud to be this one's sole steward for over half a decade, and I hope I can continue to do so into the far, far future once this is all resolved. If you want someone to blame, blame me 50% for being an unprepared pussy who is years behind on infrastructure updates and legal mitigations, and 50% the current US administration for weaponizing the American legal system and federal law enforcement against their own citizens to the point where no one is safe, and encouraging the erosion and undermining of rights that allow for freedom of speech and a free internet while protecting pedophiles in their ranks.

All other Lain.la services will remain operational during this time.

With hope for the future,
-7666
Lain.la