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I noticed a very interesting method one used recently where they stored video segments (2-5MB) on google with the extension ".text.png". Interestingly the files

I noticed a very interesting method one used recently where they stored video segments (2-5MB) on google with the extension ".text.png". Interestingly the files have valid PNG headers.

xnyan 7y ago
On google as in on one of the various google hosting services or something less intened-by-google like stuffing data in the "image" and somehow getting it cached by the crawler?
- chocolatkey 7y ago
  On google. And this is not using any of the proxies. Here is one such segment: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/d/12xIEN-mfboq4CSYJS8tKq4H9xmMIjDeL https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/d/12xIEN-mfboq4CSYJS8tKq4H... ... And guess what, I just googled that URL to check which service `/d/` is associated with, and lo and behlod, someone's already explained what I was going to: https://medium.com/@laurentmeyer/deep-dive-in-the-illegal-streaming-world-cd11fae63497 https://medium.com/@laurentmeyer/deep-dive-in-the-illegal-st...
  - scintill76 7y ago
    I would think the pirate site would be unable to parse the data it wants from the 4MB 1x1 PNG because of cross-origin restrictions. Anyone know how that works?
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      Same way any 3rd party content is hosted. The cors headers of the Google hosted content are set to allow all.
  - bspammer 7y ago
    I'm curious how the PNG header is removed for each chunk when streaming the video. Is HLS just resilient enough to ignore unexepected bytes?
  - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
    The dude ventures out to torrent a video, gets interested, and then in conclusion wants to tell Google engineers where he found it ??????????? That's great ass covering on the end bit there.
    - chocolatkey 7y ago
      These sites are used to takedowns, whether it be because the Google account got banned or abuse was detected. Pointing out a segment is not going to change anything, if I can find this a hundred Google engineers can
      - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
        Not you, the person in the article. It just seems comical that they'd intentionally go out of their way to torrent IP then turn it over to Google.
        chocolatkey 7y ago
        Ah sorry I misunderstood

I noticed a very interesting method one used recently where they stored video segments (2-5MB) on google with the extension ".text.png". Interestingly the files have valid PNG headers.

xnyan 7y ago

On google as in on one of the various google hosting services or something less intened-by-google like stuffing data in the "image" and somehow getting it cached by the crawler?

chocolatkey 7y ago
On google. And this is not using any of the proxies. Here is one such segment: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/d/12xIEN-mfboq4CSYJS8tKq4H9xmMIjDeL https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/d/12xIEN-mfboq4CSYJS8tKq4H... ... And guess what, I just googled that URL to check which service `/d/` is associated with, and lo and behlod, someone's already explained what I was going to: https://medium.com/@laurentmeyer/deep-dive-in-the-illegal-streaming-world-cd11fae63497 https://medium.com/@laurentmeyer/deep-dive-in-the-illegal-st...
- scintill76 7y ago
  I would think the pirate site would be unable to parse the data it wants from the 4MB 1x1 PNG because of cross-origin restrictions. Anyone know how that works?
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    Same way any 3rd party content is hosted. The cors headers of the Google hosted content are set to allow all.
- bspammer 7y ago
  I'm curious how the PNG header is removed for each chunk when streaming the video. Is HLS just resilient enough to ignore unexepected bytes?
- rwmurrayVT 7y ago
  The dude ventures out to torrent a video, gets interested, and then in conclusion wants to tell Google engineers where he found it ??????????? That's great ass covering on the end bit there.
  - chocolatkey 7y ago
    These sites are used to takedowns, whether it be because the Google account got banned or abuse was detected. Pointing out a segment is not going to change anything, if I can find this a hundred Google engineers can
    - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
      Not you, the person in the article. It just seems comical that they'd intentionally go out of their way to torrent IP then turn it over to Google.
      - chocolatkey 7y ago
        Ah sorry I misunderstood