6 ms·

I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few b

I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.

Zamicol 5y ago
As long as Google is willing to serve binaries, encryption solves this.
- rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
  Base64 would like to put in a word too. https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271
SavantIdiot 5y ago
There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Sure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).
  - bshipp 5y ago
    ...which is what floors me when Google made this statement. I thought the whole benefit of their Google drive system was deduplication of common files to minimize storage space costs. If they start tinkering with private files then people have no choice but to encrypt everything. This will cause their storage requirement to explode. However, if the goal is only to prevent public sharing of content in contravention of the user agreement then I'm surprised it took them this long to implement this.
    - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
      How many people have the wherewithal to encrypt their content? Even if some have the technical capability, how many are willing to take the reduced quality of life required for what is probably a low probability risk?
      - RachelF 5y ago
        You can use something like Syncdocs https://syncdocs.com https://syncdocs.com which supports encryption/decryption on the fly to Google Drive
  - jmclnx 5y ago
    Came here to say this. Only an idiot (should say people without knowledge) would upload any personal data to the "Cloud" without encrypting it first. That includes pictures. As for size, you can always tar/encrypt its dir and include dummy files to modify its size.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
They are way ahead of you, with stuff like neuralhash. Does it work? Mostly. Can it be tricked? Yes.
ksec 5y ago
To battle the Cloud storage paradigm with uniqueness is always going to be a cat and mouse game. I wish the future is a NAS that is simple, fault tolerant ( Bit-Flip protection, Error Correction, Drive Redundancy ) and extremely affordable. That is something the Apple Time Capsule should have been. Right now I cant even get a 2x 2.5" 2TB HDD and a NAS enclosure for under $200 RSP. I was hoping Kobol would be it someday. But chip shortage and many other things had them canceled the project.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  > Right now I cant even get a 2x 2.5" 2TB HDD and a NAS enclosure for under $200 RSP You can get comparatively much more for much less if you look carefully at the used market and spend some time building it for yourself. My 5 bays home NAS cost me just a bit over €130, excluding disks of course: €46 for a SUPERMICRO X7SPA-L mainboard and €88 for a Ultron RPS19-G3380 case, power supply included. All purchased from ebay sellers. I already had the memory modules plus an additional slow SATA controller I use for a non RAID disk, so had to buy only the disks locally. It runs XigmaNAS and has been rock solid with multiple 1 year+ uptimes interrupted only for maintenance or disk upgrades.
- beagle3 5y ago
  Synology isn’t the cheapest, but they’ve made it “just work”. Every few years - both for home, and for work, I consider getting a “more serious” storage system or building one; and every time I do a serious comparison and end up choosing Synology over building my own FreeNAS/TrueNAS/etc for home, and preferring Synology over NetApp for work. I do have a couple of NetApps for mission critical stuff; and one of my customers runs an Isilon which I have to support; for almost every workload that can tolerate a few minutes of planned downtime per month, the Synology wins bigly as long as you have knowledgeable IT staff. And no, you don’t want an Isilon or a NetApp if you don’t have knowledgeable IT staff around - you want a synology (or to get better IT)
- StreamBright 5y ago
  I think there are pretty good solutions out there with zfs.

Zamicol 5y ago

As long as Google is willing to serve binaries, encryption solves this.

rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
Base64 would like to put in a word too. https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271

SavantIdiot 5y ago

There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.

snarf21 5y ago
Sure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.
kurthr 5y ago
Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).
- bshipp 5y ago
  ...which is what floors me when Google made this statement. I thought the whole benefit of their Google drive system was deduplication of common files to minimize storage space costs. If they start tinkering with private files then people have no choice but to encrypt everything. This will cause their storage requirement to explode. However, if the goal is only to prevent public sharing of content in contravention of the user agreement then I'm surprised it took them this long to implement this.
  - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
    How many people have the wherewithal to encrypt their content? Even if some have the technical capability, how many are willing to take the reduced quality of life required for what is probably a low probability risk?
    - RachelF 5y ago
      You can use something like Syncdocs https://syncdocs.com https://syncdocs.com which supports encryption/decryption on the fly to Google Drive
- jmclnx 5y ago
  Came here to say this. Only an idiot (should say people without knowledge) would upload any personal data to the "Cloud" without encrypting it first. That includes pictures. As for size, you can always tar/encrypt its dir and include dummy files to modify its size.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

They are way ahead of you, with stuff like neuralhash. Does it work? Mostly. Can it be tricked? Yes.

ksec 5y ago

To battle the Cloud storage paradigm with uniqueness is always going to be a cat and mouse game. I wish the future is a NAS that is simple, fault tolerant ( Bit-Flip protection, Error Correction, Drive Redundancy ) and extremely affordable. That is something the Apple Time Capsule should have been. Right now I cant even get a 2x 2.5" 2TB HDD and a NAS enclosure for under $200 RSP. I was hoping Kobol would be it someday. But chip shortage and many other things had them canceled the project.

squarefoot 5y ago
> Right now I cant even get a 2x 2.5" 2TB HDD and a NAS enclosure for under $200 RSP You can get comparatively much more for much less if you look carefully at the used market and spend some time building it for yourself. My 5 bays home NAS cost me just a bit over €130, excluding disks of course: €46 for a SUPERMICRO X7SPA-L mainboard and €88 for a Ultron RPS19-G3380 case, power supply included. All purchased from ebay sellers. I already had the memory modules plus an additional slow SATA controller I use for a non RAID disk, so had to buy only the disks locally. It runs XigmaNAS and has been rock solid with multiple 1 year+ uptimes interrupted only for maintenance or disk upgrades.
beagle3 5y ago
Synology isn’t the cheapest, but they’ve made it “just work”. Every few years - both for home, and for work, I consider getting a “more serious” storage system or building one; and every time I do a serious comparison and end up choosing Synology over building my own FreeNAS/TrueNAS/etc for home, and preferring Synology over NetApp for work. I do have a couple of NetApps for mission critical stuff; and one of my customers runs an Isilon which I have to support; for almost every workload that can tolerate a few minutes of planned downtime per month, the Synology wins bigly as long as you have knowledgeable IT staff. And no, you don’t want an Isilon or a NetApp if you don’t have knowledgeable IT staff around - you want a synology (or to get better IT)
StreamBright 5y ago
I think there are pretty good solutions out there with zfs.