[HN Gopher] Infinite-Storage-Glitch - Use YouTube as cloud stora...
___________________________________________________________________
Infinite-Storage-Glitch - Use YouTube as cloud storage for any
files
Author : kinduff
Score : 273 points
Date : 2023-02-20 10:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| klntsky wrote:
| > Unfortunately no filesystem functionality as of right now
|
| I chuckled because of my own thought that seek (FS call) can be
| implemented via youtube video seeking
| lousken wrote:
| if only somebody wrote client for personal backblaze backup
| (which is also unlimited), can't easily store terabytes from my
| linux PCs
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| https://github.com/tom300z/backblaze-personal-wine
| nivenkos wrote:
| Until Google bans your account completely across all services
| with no means for appeal.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| This reminds me of a stupid idea I had: would it theoretically be
| possible to store data using the backbone of the Internet itself?
| You'd bounce packets (probably TCP) back and forth between two
| hosts with bytes that aren't actually written to a disk anywhere
| so they just exist as a stream until one end decides to copy a
| section for itself.
| cowsup wrote:
| You're effectively relying on two computers to be up and
| running 24/7. It'd be twice as better of an idea (which is
| still a very low number) to just store that data in RAM on a
| single device, rather than rely on two.
| josephg wrote:
| Suckerpunch did a video on "harder drives" where he implemented
| a block storage device by storing data in ping packets. It's
| one of my all time favourite technical talks - his style is
| amazing, and he's an incredible story teller.
|
| https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Am I correct in remembering a version of this video that
| existed before the COVID tests?
| tredre3 wrote:
| This isn't a new idea. It can be traced back to delay-line
| memory [1] and many thought experiments have been suggested to
| use a large network as such. Even some actual demos have been
| made [2][3].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
|
| 2. https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/
|
| 3. https://www.shysecurity.com/post/20120401-PingFS
| warent wrote:
| Thank you for making this! I had the exact same idea quite some
| time ago but had neither the skills nor the passion to actually
| create it.
|
| Seeing it come to life has just scratched a long forgotten itch
| and damn it feels great.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I like the novelty of this project, but if you value your Google
| account I wouldn't try this out.
|
| Google has been known to close accounts and "related" accounts
| for abuse (as defined by them). So even if you create another
| account, don't expect your main account to survive if there's any
| possible link between them.
|
| They are the judge, jury and executor, so eff around at your own
| peril.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The downside of using YouTube for backups is that the comments
| on your backups are so toxic.
| [deleted]
| ornornor wrote:
| Don't forget there is no appeal process (let alone the ability
| to talk to a human)
|
| What a brave new world.
| [deleted]
| flangola7 wrote:
| This is starting to change. India has a new law requiring
| social media companies to have a grievance officer and a
| formal grievance process that allows users to speak to an
| actual human. It lays out a set of valid reasons to suspend a
| user, and cannot suspend or penalize a user for reasons not
| on the list, and must do so in a fair manner as prescribed by
| law. If the grievance process fails it can be appealed to a
| government office and then courts.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Presumably even the BBC could use them...
| flatiron wrote:
| $20 a month gives you "unlimited" storage at google. they
| gladly take my encrypted files for years now and I'm up to
| 80TB. i think its more than reasonable to pay them for that
| type of service and be slightly above board (the account type i
| have says i need a minimum of 5 people but its just me).
| gekoxyz wrote:
| how do you manage the encryption/decryption?
| trvz wrote:
| https://rclone.org/crypt/
| baal80spam wrote:
| Love rclone!
| willmorrison wrote:
| One option is Cryptomator: https://cryptomator.org/
| coldblues wrote:
| That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. You have to pay for
| all the users to get the benefit of unlimited storage.
| flatiron wrote:
| I must be grand fathered in. I pay $20 flat per month.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Are you paying month to month or yearly? I don't know if
| you can rely on that storage being available. See below.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-happens-to-your-g-
| suite-u...
| deadfece wrote:
| $100/mo for absolutely unlimited is still an incredible
| bargain. $20/mo is in the neighborhood of almost free.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A hundred dollars a month is only an incredible bargain
| if you have huge amounts of data.
|
| The average person could buy a $100 external drive and
| replace it every five years, and that would be enough.
| salawat wrote:
| $20/mo x 12 months = $240 annually.
|
| $240 annual x 75 years = $18000
|
| Almost free huh?
|
| $12000 a year x 75 = $90000
|
| If I could pay that in and lock it in for the duration,
| maybe I'd consider that, but no one is going to let you
| do that.
|
| Y'all got some funny notions on "Free".
|
| Then there's the whole issue of "What if Google gets
| bored?"
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Where did the $12,000/year come in?
| salawat wrote:
| Fack. $1200 a year x 75 years should be $90000 lifetime..
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Why 75 years?
| ianburrell wrote:
| I think they messed up $240/yr * 5 people. Which is
| $1200/yr. Or $100/month * 12.
| www_harka_com wrote:
| Which service is that? Doesn't Workspace allow 1TB?
| renonce wrote:
| How long does it take for you to download 80TB? From what I
| can see Google allows you to download 10TB per day but who
| knows when they will change that limit.
| selectodude wrote:
| Even with a gigabit internet connection that would take a
| couple hundred hours.
| recuter wrote:
| https://diskprices.com
|
| Price per TB appears to have fallen below $8. So that's $640
| worth of storage. Basically, if you were to buy your own hard
| drives it works out to about $20/mo over two years..
| mulmen wrote:
| You're not accounting for redundancy, administration cost,
| electricity, heat management, or servers to hold the
| drives.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I'm betting Google Storage is a little more fault
| tolerant...
| recuter wrote:
| The other reply mentions backblaze. Whether you choose to
| use them or not their published driver statistics are
| quite useful:
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-
| for-202...
|
| A well chosen model has an AFR of well below 1%. To get
| about say, 100TB, you'd need a dozen drives or so with
| ZFS and a nice enclosure. It is unlikely even one of them
| will fail in a given year and you will not experience
| data loss.
|
| Here is a $100 case:
| https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005003125774264.html
|
| Here is some YouTuber shoving 100TB into it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boKmZKTKXHc
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Depends on the fault. Disk errors, fire, theft? Yes.
| Account suspension? Hmmm...
| manquer wrote:
| This particular account while loss making for them it is
| not by all that much.
|
| A comparable Cloud Storage account on GCP with Coldline
| storage would be $320/month ($0.004 GB/month) or just
| $96/month for archival ($.0012/month).
|
| The actual cost to Google is probably < $80/month for
| this 80TB ( most of the data is going to be in stored in
| a version of archival given the standard restrictions of
| 10TB on export.
|
| 80TB is also an heavy outlier, given the typical
| available bandwidth today and disk sizes commercially
| available for most users it will take a lot of dedicated
| investment of effort and time to upload this amount of
| data into the cloud.
|
| Also Google's personal storage pricing is not competitive
| for pure storage, Backblaze is only $7/month for example.
| The higher price and value is derived from able to
| integrate into other Google products and provide storage
| for those like Gmail, Photos etc.
| Oxxide wrote:
| 8 dollars for a TB of storage, man. It still makes me feel
| awestruck sometimes when I see stufff like a $23 3TB HDD.
| PYTHONDJANGO wrote:
| This information is wrong. Please give an URL to the service
| you are writing about to prove that it is right, thanks.
| nimbius wrote:
| Bold of you to assume hn hasn't fully convinced me to abandon
| everything but maps ;)
|
| The 4x size increase is my biggest concern...too bloaty.
| yootyootr wrote:
| Don't forget that YouTube compresses videos, so the extra
| filesize makes the videos resistant to that destructive
| process.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Video steganography might be a better approach and would be less
| likely to trigger account banning or claims of abuse by the
| hosters. The issue of avoiding data loss due to lossy compression
| algorithms seems to be an active area of research:
|
| https://jis-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...
|
| > "Moreover, most video-sharing channels transmit the
| steganographic video in a lossy way to reduce transmission
| bandwidth or storage space, such as YouTube and Twitter. . .
| Robust video steganography aims to send secret messages to the
| receiver through lossy channels without arousing any suspicions
| from the observer. Thus, the robustness against lossy channels,
| the security against steganalysis, and the embedding capacity are
| equally important."
|
| I suppose in this project, the blocks of pixels are large enough
| to avoid data loss due to compression?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Hmmm I'm not convinced.
|
| I had a good look into these sorts of technologies but the host
| almost always changes the file so it makes it impossible to
| retrieve the data hidden in the file.
|
| You need a file hosting platform that guarantees not to change
| the uploaded file.
|
| How does this avoid such problems ?
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| If you look at the example video, it doesn't depend on the
| video not being changed, but it does depend on a minimum level
| of quality. That is, as long as the video quality is high
| enough (720p in this case) to get back the original black and
| white pixels, you're fine. The data is not hidden, it's there
| in plain sight in the video.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| OK I'm convinced. I like it!
| manmal wrote:
| It's described in the README. The video has 2x2 pixel blocks
| that are either black or white, so each one signifies a bit. So
| a 1920x1080 frame encodes 518,400 bit = 64.8KB
|
| The assumption is that video compression won't mess up those
| blocks beyond recognition, so you should retain the information
| as long as the rendered resolution and bitrate don't drop too
| low.
|
| Maybe this could be improved by e.g. using 32 colors instead of
| 2, and bumping the block size to 3x3 (for safety) which should
| yield ca 144KB per frame.
| LocalH wrote:
| The block size should honestly be tuned for the codec in use,
| chiefly to determine the best block size to fit with the
| codec's macroblock size. That's usually either 8x8, or with
| newer codecs 16x16. I feel like something like maybe 8x2
| would be smart, and I like the idea of monochrome for
| resiliency, since chroma is downsampled. The fewer possible
| pixel combinations you have within a macroblock, the better
| the compression will probably end up being as well. And 8x2
| would somewhat evoke the look of the old video backup systems
| as well, for the fun of the nostalgia of that.
| [deleted]
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| You could do this with any service which accepts user content.
| You could have a tumblr blog focused on "paranormal phenomenon in
| white noise images" and fill it full of data embedded in images.
| If anyone ever asks you just explain that like many pattern
| illusions not everyone can see images contained within - try
| squinting, or covering the eye on the predominant side of your
| body, stand on your head, blah blah blah.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| > fill it full of data embedded in images
|
| This is even easier, because jpg's ignore additional data past
| the end of the file. Post a low-res ~200kb jpg that has an
| additional ~20mb of data appended. It'll still render perfectly
| fine.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| You could do the same thing with PNGs and different thunk
| types. Although in both cases you run a risk that some
| paranoid developer might filter out unexpected thunk types or
| additional data so in both cases it would be best to put the
| data in the image payload.
|
| The other consideration is that Tumblr was always very
| "creator" oriented and while they might produce thumbnails of
| various sizes the original image is still available and not
| mangled by resizing algorithms. Other free image hosts are
| going to crush that image down the maximum amount tolerable
| to the human eye. Google even does that for paid photo
| hosting.
| AkshatJ27 wrote:
| Most platforms compress uploaded images, which would result
| in the appended data being removed.
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| Nice work! I made a much worse variant of this years ago, with a
| "mosaic" mode[1]: whatever YouTube was doing for compression at
| the time handled multiple QRs tiled next to each other much
| better than it did a single large one.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/woodruffw-hackathons/where-tube
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I understand that the goal is to make the data survive video
| compression, but wouldn't it make sense to use at least some
| color information instead of entirely black and white pixels?
| trklausss wrote:
| Seems that you did not read the README:
|
| There are two encoding modes, RGB and B/W. It uses a pixel-to-
| data width of 2x2, but says YouTube's compression algorithm is
| brutal, and one corrupted pixel already renders the whole thing
| corrupted.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Using full RGB clearly wouldn't work, but I do wonder if you
| could use the color channel for _something_ , possibly
| redundancy information.
| einr wrote:
| Very likely you could get away with _at least_ 4 bits (16
| distinct colors) per pixel, which is 4x more efficient than
| pure black and white.
| LocalH wrote:
| I think the _size_ of the effective chroma metapixels is
| more important than the range of values. You need to make
| them larger in order to keep the decoder from blending
| them together when upscaling the 4:2:0 chroma.
|
| Now, if you're using a 4:4:4 format to do this, then you
| should be able to use smaller chroma metapixels (I still
| wouldn't use the full chroma resolution, though, unless
| you're using a high bitrate or a lossless codec).
| However, that risks data corruption if passed through a
| pipeline that downsamples the chroma.
| Oxidation wrote:
| Seems like it could benefit from forward error correction to
| defend against bit errors (this is how QR codes survive big
| chunks being partially obscured or replaced by logos, and also
| how CDs survive being scratched within certain limits).
| naikrovek wrote:
| that error correction greatly inflates the final size of the
| QR code, too.
|
| there should be _some_ error correction in a system like
| this, though.
| Oxidation wrote:
| You can choose how much correction you get, in terms of how
| many bit errors you can correct per 'n' bits. And you need
| surprisingly few bits to get pretty great performance under
| "reasonable" bit-error rate channel (like under 10%
| overhead). You can wind up the strength of the error
| correction if you anticipate a noisier channel.
|
| QR codes have 4 levels of correction you can use depending
| on how robust you wish them to be. CDs and DVDs use two
| chained, fixed, levels to keep the decoders simple. CDs
| have 25% overhead, but their correction is very strong:
| they can correct 4000 bits in a row.
| LocalH wrote:
| Chroma is lossier than luma in most common video codecs. AVC is
| 4:2:0 on YouTube. 4:2:0, quite confusingly, means that chroma
| is halved in both dimensions compared to luma (so one chroma
| pixel is congruent with four luma pixels). As well, most
| decoders will apply filtering on the chroma to upsample it to
| match the luma, meaning that your color boundaries are going to
| be indistinct at best, and you might even lose the original
| chroma values entirely in the process. You'd have to use
| multiple chroma pixels as one metapixel in order to increase
| resilience, which would diminish the capacity. With modern
| codecs, a monochrome signal seems better to use for actual
| data, although I could see it being useful to use chroma for
| metadata.
| [deleted]
| Ralo wrote:
| I wrote something just like this with Discord, and I even got it
| to host full videos which you can play back in browser. It's a
| good backup service. [0]
|
| I want to expand this in into a fully modular service that you
| write payloads and scripts for various services, so when you
| upload a file its spread out across many different providers.
| When you're downloading, you just go down the list check what
| still exists, and verify the checksum. This should be stable for
| many years.
|
| I plan to take a look into facebook and see what can/cant be
| accessed there. I had this exact thought with youtube and thought
| about using a pixel reader to exact out data. Same idea for
| different image hosting services like imgur.
|
| [0] https://github.com/5ut/DiskCord
| danuker wrote:
| The author says another Discord project served as inspiration:
| https://github.com/pixelomer/discord-fs
|
| Maybe you could join forces.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| It'd be cool to add a FUSE wrapper around this. At one point I
| had a POC for a few of these sorts of things going (not as cool
| as this project, just data stored to X free cloud store/metadata)
| and creating a redundant transparent FUSE wrapper was probably
| the next step. With multiple sources, you could even treat mux
| data between slow/unreliable sources (content hosts in eg russia
| or asia) to 'stripe' the data. And then, you could make these
| modular so that new sources could be onboarded easily...
|
| Yeah, I really like this stuff. Awesome project.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| This was posted 2 days ago also (but received very little
| attention): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850643
| LocalH wrote:
| Literally the modern equivalent of the old video-based backup
| systems. I remember they existed for both the PC and the Amiga.
| You would load a blank VHS tape into a VCR, connect the output of
| the computer to that VCR's input, and then tell the program which
| data you'd like to backup to the tape. It would generate this
| flashing "mess" of black and white pixels that you'd record to
| the tape. To restore, you'd connect the VCR output to a little
| box that came with the product, it would convert the black and
| white data in the video signal to a data stream that the program
| would use to restore your data.
|
| A portion of the signal would be used for timing, metadata and
| error correction, so the program could tell you if the data was
| sufficiently damaged upon restore.
|
| LGR has a video on the PC version from Danmere:
| https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU
|
| Here's a video example of the Amiga industry's take on the idea:
| https://youtu.be/VcBY6PMH0Kg?t=573
|
| Sony even did this in 1980 to record CD-quality PCM audio onto
| VHS tape. https://youtu.be/bnZFLzBO3yc
| cortesoft wrote:
| I had one in the late 90s that used 8mm tapes and my video
| camera in the same way. Could store a ton of stuff.
|
| It was pretty finicky, though, and very slow.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I just had a flashback to the Nintendo e-Reader I had as a kid.
|
| Black and white dots in a strip on a card. Swipe the cards to
| load the games.
| bri3d wrote:
| There was also DVStreamer for Windows and other tools for other
| platforms which would store data on MiniDV tapes. This is of
| course a bit less interesting than storage to VHS, since MiniDV
| was already storing a bitstream, but still a clever oddity. I
| think you could store ~13.5GB in SP mode or 20GB in LP mode
| (reduced error correction).
| adolph wrote:
| Or the audio based ones like this Commodore cassette as stage
| device. A guy in my neighborhood had one as part of Pac-Man
| contest winnings.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
| cronix wrote:
| We used to use regular audio cassette recorders to
| store/restore data on the TRS80 before hard/floppy drives. It's
| also how you backed up/restored midi data from early synths. It
| basically just sounded like an early dial up modem transmitting
| data when you played it back as audio.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nHrjqmt_wQ
| chiph wrote:
| My Apple ][+ had a tape interface. It mostly worked - if the
| tape stretched or if the tape speed changed for some reason
| (dirty capstan, power supply fluctuations, low volume, high
| volume, evil pixies) then you wouldn't be able to read it
| back.
|
| This site describes the format, which was basically a header
| tone, a sync tone, data bits, and then a checksum (not
| described there but other sites say it was just an XOR). When
| we got a Disk ][ (5-1/4" floppy drive) all those issues went
| away.
|
| http://www.applevault.com/hardware/apple/apple2/apple2casset.
| ..
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| > It basically just sounded like an early dial up modem
| transmitting data when you played it back as audio.
|
| Modern synths still do this. The Korg Volca has a library for
| converting audio into white noise that reprograms/adds more
| samples.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > It's also how you backed up/restored midi data from early
| synths.
|
| In a weird closing of the circle, I now store the internal
| sounds backup of my vintage Juno 60 synthesizer as a WAV file
| recorded from that tape backup output.
|
| So the digital info of the internal synthesizers gets
| converted to analog audio in the synth, then passed as audio
| to my modern computer's audio interface, which converts it to
| a digital representation of the analog audio.
|
| And vice versa to restore the backup into the synthesizer's
| memory.
|
| Incidentally those backups are more reliable now than when
| using analog tape decks, since one doesn't encounter physical
| tape degradation or a cassette deck "eating" the tape.
|
| I haven't done any testing with compressed audio formats, but
| I would expect even lossy formats to perform well, if one
| keeps the lossiness within certain bounds, so that the
| highest frequencies in the audio file are preserved.
| Ardakilic wrote:
| Reminds me of Gmail Drive from years ago, where you could use
| your Gmail space as a virtual file system.
| albert_e wrote:
| Off topic
|
| Does YouTube let you store unlimited video content (real video
| like screen recordings etc of our own work - no shady or sneaky
| stuff, nor any copyrighted stuff etc)
|
| With all videos marked private ...so they are just "storage" by
| account owner and no other users can access them and youtube
| cannot monetize it ?
| proxygeek wrote:
| Oh.... Verry Interesting!! Hoping someone has the answer here
| bombcar wrote:
| Apparently? We do a bunch of private videos for storage (many
| are also unlisted) and have no complaints.
|
| I wouldn't use it as my ONLY backup of course.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| There was a thread here a while back where someone lost years
| of corporate training content when YouTube deleted it.
|
| I'd it's anything vital, as in your paycheck depends on it,
| I'd have multiple backups.
| paxys wrote:
| It isn't exactly a "glitch", just something Google doesn't care
| about (but absolutely will care about if too many people start
| doing it).
|
| I remember way back in the day someone came up with a clever way
| of using Gmail attachments to build a cloud storage drive mounted
| to your filesystem. Then Google themselves released Drive soon
| after.
| rwalle wrote:
| I doubt "too many people start doing it" is ever going to
| happen.
|
| Obviously this is so difficult to use that most people would
| rather pay $10/month to get 1TB of storage that can be very
| easily accessed. Even if someone has 100TB of data and wants to
| back them up, I don't they would do conversion to and from
| YouTube videos.
|
| An interesting idea, but probably won't get much real world
| use.
| telotortium wrote:
| Pirates will take advantage of any suitably easy to use
| storage. I think YouTube is probably a poor target these
| days, though - Google's Denial of Service can probably detect
| something like this in pretty short order.
| josephg wrote:
| You also run the risk of YouTube deleting your videos /
| banning your account. I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate being
| used as a generic backup provider.
| okutanski wrote:
| This is hilarious
| naikrovek wrote:
| "hilarious" is a bit strong. "interesting" feels better to me.
| 2h wrote:
| please find better uses of your time. this is such an obvious
| abuse.
| amelius wrote:
| Nice, until Google introduces a new compression algorithm that
| says: hey this looks like noise, let's replace it by this other
| user's noise so we can save on storage costs.
| glasshug wrote:
| See, for example, film grain synthesis in AV1, which YouTube
| uses:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Filters
| https://norkin.org/pdf/DCC_2018_AV1_film_grain.pdf
| https://waveletbeam.com/index.php/news/48-netflix-film-grain...
| anonf0ld wrote:
| Using this can get your google account and related IP addresses
| banned? Isn't this sort of a Vandalism? But why attack Youtube
| out of all places? Do it to TikTok instead. They won't notice the
| difference(LOL). I would've said "delete this" normally but
| today's political climate demands more free space on the internet
| per individual definitely so...
| brthsim wrote:
| [dead]
| f_devd wrote:
| I wonder if you could get a better pixels/bit ratio when using
| DCT/2DFFT based encoding since you'd still encode lower frequency
| data but it would be in a format that compression algorithms
| would also try to maintain.
| yeahbutiguess wrote:
| People do this all the time with any web connected service that
| accepts data. People use open strings in AWS services, like
| lambda function names, to store arbitrary bits.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I feel like this is overcomplicating things. You should be able
| to download the original video you uploaded instead of
| downloading a compressed version. I'm sure the uncompressed
| version still exists.
| LocalH wrote:
| Ensuring that you can retrieve the data from the viewable video
| means that this is also be a way of file transfer, one that
| other people won't be able to download the original video for.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| This is bound to get you banned. I would do it a little bit more
| clever (with lower bitrate/throughput/storage sizes)...
|
| Encode the data inside audio, preferrably outside human audible
| range, and then use a nice video of singing birds, or whales
| talking, and use the "hidden" frequencies to hide the data.
|
| I don't know if Youtube has any filters that cut out frequencies,
| but this way they can't ban you, since you've uploaded a really
| nice personal video of your singing birds, instead of the
| conspicuous looking QR-like codes as in the OP ;-)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _preferrably outside human audible range_
|
| With any lossy audio compression algorithm, everything outside
| the human audible range is filtered away completely as a first
| step. That's compression 101.
|
| Also there's much less bandwidth in the audio channel than the
| video channel, and then far less again if you're trying to hide
| a signal in another signal.
| brudgers wrote:
| Using video formats to store other data has a long history.
|
| ADAT for example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT
| egberts1 wrote:
| THAT is 1337!
|
| A true hacker spirit worthy of Captain Crunch whistle and its
| application toward free payphone calls.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Dumb yet interesting idea, but if you care your data you should
| put it on google especially you are abusing their service, if you
| do not care why you even waste your time doing all this except
| for fun.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This would be really impressive with some stenography.
| wigster wrote:
| they're here...
|
| nice end of transmission simulator to boot!
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| One of the things I've successfully used YouTube for was video
| storage of my security camera system. Unlimited video storage
| with a simple app to watch them in case I need to check something
| out!
|
| And it's simple: camera uploads automatically via FTP,
| inotifywait script uploads to google!
| booi wrote:
| Shhhh.. don't you know what the first rule about YouTube
| storage for security systems is??
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Right this moment an engineer at Google is writing a personal
| OKR to block this and declare $$$ savings in order to get
| promoted next year.
| teawrecks wrote:
| All they'd have to do is limit the amount of private videos
| you're allowed to store. If your only option for storing
| unlimited security footage is to make it public, then
| people probably wouldn't do that.
|
| Alternatively, if they're allowed to use the footage to
| train some AI that will help them take over the world, then
| maybe they want all your random footage for free.
| skwheel wrote:
| after your finals, you should read about forward error
| correction.
| LastTrain wrote:
| " I still don't condone using this tool for anything
| serious/large. YouTube might understandably get mad."
|
| I do love these kinds of hacks, but I hate these kind of weaselly
| cop-out statements. You made the tool, own it!
| shultays wrote:
| Considering this might very well end up you losing your google
| account, it is a very necessary warning.
|
| If anything, the author should be more clear about what happens
| if youtube gets mad: you might lose your google account along
| with access to mail, drive, photos etc
| j-krieger wrote:
| I've observed that with any piece technology where you're
| permitted to write / upload information and freely access it
| afterwards, someone will attempt to (ab)use it for file storage
| and write a blog article about it later :)
|
| My favorite example of this was people storing files in "secret"
| subreddits by using posts and comments to store bytes. When they
| were later discovered by other users, the seemingly random
| strings sparked a huge conspiracy about their possible meaning.
|
| However, you always have the problem that your unwilling host may
| remove your "files". I sometimes wonder about file storage using
| a textual output format that can't be distinguished from normal
| user interactions.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I remember when GMail was by invite only, and at the time they
| were offering quite a larger amount of storage for Mail than
| anyone else so people started using their GMail drafts to store
| files.
|
| That was the first time I can across such a thing.
|
| Someone even made an extension for Windows XP that allowed you
| to mount GMail as a storage volume.
|
| > GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a
| virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing
| you to use Gmail as a storage medium.
|
| http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
| meltyness wrote:
| GmailFS was another early implementation.
| drkstr wrote:
| Writing the GmailFS HOWTO, and fixing a bug in the process,
| was my first exposure to the power of OSS. Looking back,
| I'm pretty sure this is what led me to persue software
| engineering as a career!
| petercooper wrote:
| How about storing your files in other people's DNS caches?
|
| https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-st...
| metadat wrote:
| Discussed 5 years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134041 (36 comments)
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Now I want to write a blog post about storing files inside of
| blog posts about storing files inside of blog posts ...<error:
| recursion limit reached>
| j-krieger wrote:
| This makes me think of Turing machines which store their own
| code inside them selves, which you can use for all kinds of
| interesting proofs. I wish I could find more about this.
| t344344 wrote:
| Look into Squeak/Smalltalk. It is an operating
| system/desktop/IDE with self contained compiler.
| [deleted]
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| In completely unrelated Hacker News :
|
| "Ask HN: What are these strange random strings spamming my
| blog?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34865695
| nullc wrote:
| Pretty easy to do that, use a fixed point implementation of
| GPT(N) of whatever size you like and range code your data into
| the model probabilities. This also will achieve a close to rate
| optimal embedding-- allowing you to embed about as much data as
| the language model thinks the text has...
|
| If you encrypt the data and include a checksum or other
| identifying bytes in the ciphertext you can even have unwitting
| human participants in the discussions and if their posts are
| context your embedded data will be credible replies. You just
| have to be sure that threading behavior doesn't make it
| impossible to give the decoder identical context.
| INTPenis wrote:
| In this modern cloud-giant world it's abused for file storage
| yes. But I come from the more traditional web hosting world of
| the early 2000s and back then the general rule was that
| anything that could store information online would sooner or
| later be used to store porn.
| adolph wrote:
| > When they were later discovered by other users, the seemingly
| random strings sparked a huge conspiracy about their possible
| meaning.
|
| Makes me wonder if numbers stations are actually just the
| worlds slowest modems
| [deleted]
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| > I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output
| format that can't be distinguished from normal user
| interactions.
|
| I guess it depends on what noise-to-signal density you're
| after.
|
| With a a long enough ChatGPT generated output, no one would
| question a few out of place characters or even an emoji. With
| 3000+ different emojis to choose from that encodes an entire
| byte of data.
|
| Another idea is using "they're", "their", "there" as bits.
| sgerenser wrote:
| I vaguely recall some secretive company (perhaps Apple) using
| adjustment of spacing, capitalization, etc. to encode a
| unique serial number in messages sent by the CEO, which could
| then be used to trace leaks.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Genius.com hid the message "red-handed" in Morse code using
| alternating quote characters to prove that Google was
| displaying their lyrics.
| joaonmatos wrote:
| Elon Musk was the one claiming to do it
| mattkrause wrote:
| Many people claim to do it.
|
| It's a plot point in a _Patriot Games_ , a 1987 Tom
| Clancy novel that introduced the term "canary trap" for
| this trick. He says he invented the term, but not the
| technique, which was already in use.
|
| In a spat over the plot of _Star Trek III_ (so, early
| 1980s), Harve Bennett distributed slightly different
| versions of the script, allowing him to track a leak back
| to Gene Roddenberry.
|
| The book _SpyCatcher_ says it was in routine use at MI-5,
| and you can find variations of it in lots of fiction too.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| CIA and similar have been doing that for something like 50
| years. Made it into Tom Clancy novels in the 80s IIRC.
| dtx1 wrote:
| > However, you always have the problem that your unwilling host
| may remove your "files". I sometimes wonder about file storage
| using a textual output format that can't be distinguished from
| normal user interactions.
|
| Well, with Chat GPT that's almost trival. POC
| https://imgur.com/fQvMh9S
| phh wrote:
| > I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output
| format that can't be distinguished from normal user
| interactions.
|
| You could use a reproducible LM (for instance using Bellard's
| NNCP as basis), and encode one bit in one word by taking the
| {first, second} most probable next word.
| animuchan wrote:
| This is fascinating! And the file transfer can be then fully
| disguised as a conversation, with a ChatGPT-like client and
| all. An unsuspecting user will see a chat bot; a specialized
| client app would be able to receive files by talking to it.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Previously on 'Esoteric Filesystem Week':
|
| 0. Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34818040 by rbanffy 3 days
| ago, 70 points, 73 comments
|
| 1. TabFS - a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a
| filesystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611 by pps 1
| day ago, 961 points, 185 comments
|
| 2. Vramfs - GPU VRAM based file system for Linux
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34855134 by pabs3 1 day ago,
| 226 points, 71 comments
| Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote:
| Maybe it doesn't have a post of its own, but I found these
| esoteric storage methods greatly entertaining as well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Tom7 is a national treasure.
| loeg wrote:
| Indeed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859300 :-)
| imhoguy wrote:
| Now we need ytFS FUSE driver to random read these pattern
| videos. Anyone? ;)
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| haha this is so cool, i made something similar
| https://punkjazz.org/scrambled-eggs/ few years ago to explore
| transferring files directly through the camera so nobody can
| "see" what you download, because no packets go through the
| internet, i managed to do 10kbps or so
|
| the modern qr readers are so fast and easy to use, its
| unbelievable
| pveierland wrote:
| Nice! It's such a neat way to transfer information :)
|
| This guy extended the idea using fountain codes, which allows
| you to miss arbitrary frames and still recover the full message
| without waiting for the missed frames to re-appear:
|
| https://divan.dev/posts/fountaincodes/
| actionfromafar wrote:
| One could do side-channel sliding window hand shakes with
| audio, to improve download performance. :-)
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| i was actually thinking about that, could be even more cool
| now with modern text to speech and whisper and some funky
| word based encoding with huge dictionary like:
|
| teacher: 0b00010010101001, school: ...
|
| and then the website can encode the data as a sentence and
| just text to speech it and the receiver can use whisper to
| speech to text and decode
|
| will be the most creepy thing because it can be very
| steganographic and sound like a real sentence
| sam_goody wrote:
| This is why I really like HN...
|
| (IMO there is not enough of these posts, and getting less over
| time.)
|
| A refreshing "actual hacker" project that makes me look anew at
| the tools I always use...
|
| So, my coffee maker is sending data to the net - maybe I can use
| that for backup, and have it replicated both in the fridge and in
| the living room lights...
|
| But how would I retrieve that? Hmm. I assume that both Alexa and
| Google assistant are tracking everything that goes through my IoT
| devices. I'll ask GPT how to hack my Nest device to pull back
| data on demand, that oughta work, surely?! :D
| ggerganov wrote:
| Yes - more of this please :)
|
| Tangentially related and discussed in the past on HN: File
| transfer via color barcodes and a phone camera
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459501
|
| [1] https://github.com/sz3/libcimbar
|
| [2] https://cimbar.org
| egberts1 wrote:
| Oh boy, OpSec should pay attention to this.
| thombat wrote:
| It starts with "no monitors facing windows" and "all
| visitors hand over phones and any other devices with
| photographic possibilities" and moves up the
| paranoia/professional caution scale from there.
| luma wrote:
| Agreed! Here's a fun video by suckerpinch trying out some truly
| insane data storage ideas https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
| layer8 wrote:
| It could probably be hidden in a normal-looking video using
| steganography. Lower effective bitrate of course.
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