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Turns out any site that allows users to submit and retrieve data can be abused in the same way: - FacebookDrive: "Store files as base64 facebook posts" - Twit
by umvi 4y ago
Turns out any site that allows users to submit and retrieve data can be abused in the same way:
- FacebookDrive: "Store files as base64 facebook posts"
- TwitterDrive: "Store files as base64 tweets"
- SoundCloudDrive: "Store files as mp3 audio"
- WikipediaDrive: "Store files in wikipedia article histories"
- the_duke 4y agoGithub repos makes for a pretty good key-value store. It even has a full CRUD API, no need for using libgit.
- upupandup 4y agoWhat a great time to write botnets
- WaxProlix 4y agoI wrote one of these as a POC when at AWS to store data sharded across all the free namespaces (think Lambda names), with pointers to the next chunk of data. I like to think you could unify all of these into a FUSE filesystem and just mount your transparent multi-cloud remote FS as usual. It's inefficient, but free! So you can have as much space as you want. And it's potentially brittle, but free! So you can replicate/stripe the data across as many providers as you want.
- turtledove 4y agoI was an eng manager on Lambda for a time, and we definitely knew people were doing this, and had plans to cut it out if it ever became a problem. :D
- WaxProlix 4y agoYeah, you'd need to find some sort of auto-balancing to detect this kind of bitrot from over-aggressive engineering managers & their ilk and rebalance the data across other sources. I think the multiple-shuffle-shard approach has been done before, maybe we could steal some algo from a RAID driver, or DynamoDB.
- wging 4y agoSee also https://github.com/qntm/base2048 https://github.com/qntm/base2048. "Base2048 is a binary encoding optimised for transmitting data through Twitter."
- colinmhayes 4y agoStill need around 30,000 more unicode characters for this to work.
- theblazehen 4y ago> For transmitting data through Twitter, Base65536 is now considered obsolete; see Base2048. Source: https://github.com/qntm/base65536 https://github.com/qntm/base65536
- wging 4y agoSorry, I edited the post concurrently with your comment - it now points to Base2048, the link I meant to post, which actually should work - rather than https://github.com/qntm/base65536 https://github.com/qntm/base65536 (which I think you're commenting on).
- jasonlotito 4y agoMy friends and I had a joke called NSABox. It would send data around using words that would attract the attention of the NSA, and you could submit a FOIA request to recover the data. I always found it amusing.
- havblue 4y agoI've heard of the loic ion cannon dos tool described as a shortcut to getting sent to jail. This sounds similar.
- mechanical_bear 4y agoBig difference. LOIC actually impacts a target.
- mickeyp 4y agoThere's a feature in Emacs that does that (unsurprisingly.) It's called `M-x spook'. It inserts random gibberish that NSA and the Echelon project would've supposedly picked up back in the 90s.
- LukeShu 4y agospook.el was "introduced at or before Emacs version 18.52". And 18.52 was released in 1988. And spook.el in a comment says ;; Created: May 1987 So the things that the NSA and ECHELON would have picked up on back in the 1980s, not the 1990s :)
- itake 4y agoBack in the day when @gmail was famous for their massive free storage for email, ppl wrote scripts to chunk large files and store them as email attachments.
- ihaveajob 4y agoI know someone who published an academic paper on doing exactly this.
- IshKebab 4y agoDoesn't sound very noteworthy tbh. It's obviously possible and the implementation is straightforward.
- adzm 4y agoPeople did this on AOL in the 90s as well!
- jprd 4y agoDid you manage to get on the latest Mass Mail going out tonight?
- willcipriano 4y agoI made a tool that lets you store files anywhere you can store a URL: https://podje.li/ https://podje.li/
- metadat 4y agoIs there an import URLs button? Otherwise, how does one reassemble the original?
- willcipriano 4y agoClick them, it's really for things that fit into one or two urls like small text files. I've used it for config files that were getting formatted incorrectly over corporate email that ate it as a attachment.
- mike00632 4y agoI wonder if access permissions would be easier to maintain using Facebook...
- dheera 4y agoUntil one day your base64 ciphertext just so happens to contain a curse word and you get banned for violating "community standards"
- behnamoh 4y agoalso Telegram
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thrdbndndn 4y agoThis is pretty tame compared to some actual, practical ones such as https://github.com/apachecn/CDNDrive https://github.com/apachecn/CDNDrive For people who don't read Chinese: it encodes data into ~10M blocks in PNG and then uploads (together with a metadata/index file as an entry point) to various Chinese social media sites that don't re-compress your images. I knew people have used it to store* TBs after TBs data on them already. *Of course, it would be foolish to think your data is even remotely safe "storing" them this way. But it's a very good solution for sharing large files.
- decebalus1 4y agoor reddit: https://github.com/AncientEntity/PublicPyRedditStorage/ https://github.com/AncientEntity/PublicPyRedditStorage/
- 7373737373 4y agoI think I've seen similar blog posts about doing the same with the DNS and BGP networks
- fomine3 4y agoI found some pirates uploads video to Prezi so they get free S3 video hosting.
- Denatonium 4y agoAt one point there was a piece of software called deezcloud which exploited Deezer's user uploaded MP3 storage, allowing it to be used as free CDN cloud storage for up to 400GB of files. I don't think it works anymore, and I'm not sure if it ever worked well (I never tried it).
- quickthrower2 4y agoWe need an HNShowDeadDrive
- momofarm 4y agoI wonder if we could use this technique at place which gov will censored senstive data upload to streaming site like mainland china or North Korea(they do have streaming site right?) although for propganda use, shortwave / sat tv is a much much simpler way to distribute information to place like that, but I belive now its hard to get one SW radio for anyone.
- vfinn 4y agoReminds me of when I tried to Gmail myself a zip archive, and it was denied because of security reasons iirc. I then tried to base64 it, and it still didn't work, same with base32, until finally base16 did work.