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Infinite-Storage-Glitch – Use YouTube as cloud storage for any files
- egorfine 4y agoI immediately remembered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
- selfmodruntime 4y agoI'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 4y agoI 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 http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
- meltyness 4y agoGmailFS was another early implementation.
- coffeeblack 4y agoNow 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>
- selfmodruntime 4y agoThis 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 4y agoLook into Squeak/Smalltalk. It is an operating system/desktop/IDE with self contained compiler.
- phh 4y ago> 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 4y agoThis 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- diceduckmonk 4y ago> 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 4y agoI 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.
- joaonmatos 4y agoElon Musk was the one claiming to do it
- mattkrause 4y agoMany 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.
- vlunkr 4y agoGenius.com hid the message “red-handed” in Morse code using alternating quote characters to prove that Google was displaying their lyrics.
- xen2xen1 4y agoCIA and similar have been doing that for something like 50 years. Made it into Tom Clancy novels in the 80s IIRC.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoIn completely unrelated Hacker News : "Ask HN: What are these strange random strings spamming my blog?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34865695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34865695
- nullc 4y agoPretty 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 4y agoIn 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.
- petercooper 4y agoHow about storing your files in other people's DNS caches? https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-storage-dnsfs https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-st...
- metadat 4y agoDiscussed 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134041 (36 comments)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adolph 4y ago> 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
- dtx1 4y ago> 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 https://imgur.com/fQvMh9S
- throwaway71271 4y agohaha this is so cool, i made something similar https://punkjazz.org/scrambled-eggs/ 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
- actionfromafar 4y agoOne could do side-channel sliding window hand shakes with audio, to improve download performance. :-)
- throwaway71271 4y agoi 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
- pveierland 4y agoNice! 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/ https://divan.dev/posts/fountaincodes/
- andrewstuart 4y agoHmmm 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 4y agoIf 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 4y agoOK I'm convinced. I like it!
- manmal 4y agoIt‘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 4y agoThe 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.
- sam_goody 4y agoThis 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 4y agoYes - 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459501 [1] https://github.com/sz3/libcimbar https://github.com/sz3/libcimbar [2] https://cimbar.org https://cimbar.org
- egberts1 4y agoOh boy, OpSec should pay attention to this.
- thombat 4y agoIt 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.
- sz3 4y agoAha! I was wondering where the github stars were coming from. :) I did get a kick out of this from the OP: > Binary: Born from YouTube compression being absolutely brutal. RGB mode is very sensitive to compression as a change in even one point of one of the colors of one of the pixels dooms the file to corruption. It's more than youtube compression -- video compression in general wreaks absolute havoc on our meticulously arranged (and sometimes colored) pixels. It's actually pretty fun/instructive to step through the transition between (what you want to be) two distinct frames when you're trying to (ab)use video for this sort of use case -- there are segments of the frames that get correlated and "flip" together first, resulting in in-between frames that are gibberish even with a modest amount of ECC in play.
- lousken 4y agoif only somebody wrote client for personal backblaze backup (which is also unlimited), can't easily store terabytes from my linux PCs
- FloatArtifact 4y agohttps://github.com/tom300z/backblaze-personal-wine https://github.com/tom300z/backblaze-personal-wine
- nivenkos 4y agoUntil Google bans your account completely across all services with no means for appeal.
- ranting-moth 4y agoI 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.
- ornornor 4y agoDon’t forget there is no appeal process (let alone the ability to talk to a human) What a brave new world.
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- flangola7 4y agoThis 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 4y agoPresumably even the BBC could use them...
- flatiron 4y ago$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).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoI 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 4y agoSeems 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 4y agoUsing full RGB clearly wouldn't work, but I do wonder if you could use the color channel for something, possibly redundancy information.
- einr 4y agoVery 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoSeems 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).
- albert_e 4y agoOff 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 ?
- bombcar 4y agoApparently? 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 4y agoThere 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.
- 4mitkumar 4y agoOh.... Verry Interesting!! Hoping someone has the answer here
- okutanski 4y agoThis is hilarious
- naikrovek 4y ago"hilarious" is a bit strong. "interesting" feels better to me.
- brthsim 4y ago[dead]
- charcircuit 4y agoI 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 4y agoEnsuring 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.
- brudgers 4y agoUsing video formats to store other data has a long history. ADAT for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT
- Ardakilic 4y agoReminds me of Gmail Drive from years ago, where you could use your Gmail space as a virtual file system.
- f_devd 4y agoI 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.
- NKosmatos 4y agoThis 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 4y ago> 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.
- fathyb 4y agoEven without compression, most audio (including YouTube's) is sampled at 44.1kHz which filters anything >22kHz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_rate
- OscarCunningham 4y agoPreviously on 'Esoteric Filesystem Week': 0. Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34818040 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34855134 by pabs3 1 day ago, 226 points, 71 comments
- imhoguy 4y agoNow we need ytFS FUSE driver to random read these pattern videos. Anyone? ;)
- Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 4y agoMaybe 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
- OscarCunningham 4y agoTom7 is a national treasure.
- loeg 4y agoIndeed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859300 :-)
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoYou 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 4y ago> 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.
- AkshatJ27 4y agoMost platforms compress uploaded images, which would result in the appended data being removed.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoYou 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.
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- LocalH 4y agoLiterally 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 https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU Here's a video example of the Amiga industry's take on the idea: https://youtu.be/VcBY6PMH0Kg?t=573 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 https://youtu.be/bnZFLzBO3yc
- doubled112 4y agoI 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.
- adolph 4y agoOr 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
- themadturk 4y agoHad one of these with my C64. When my floppy drive broke down, I actually ended up ordering a copy of "Silent Service" on cassette from someone in Great Britain. It kept me sane while I saved for the floppy repair.
- cronix 4y agoWe 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nHrjqmt_wQ
- anonf0ld 4y agoUsing 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...
- photochemsyn 4y agoVideo 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/10.1186/s13635-022-00130-z 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?
- 2h 4y agoplease find better uses of your time. this is such an obvious abuse.
- skwheel 4y agoafter your finals, you should read about forward error correction.
- warent 4y agoThank 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.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoThis was posted 2 days ago also (but received very little attention): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850643
- alephxyz 4y agoSomeone also posted a similar project here a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495049
- wigster 4y agothey're here... nice end of transmission simulator to boot!
- woodruffw 4y agoNice 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 https://github.com/woodruffw-hackathons/where-tube
- WaxProlix 4y agoIt'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.
- amelius 4y agoNice, 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 4y agoSee, for example, film grain synthesis in AV1, which YouTube uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Filters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Filters https://norkin.org/pdf/DCC_2018_AV1_film_grain.pdf https://norkin.org/pdf/DCC_2018_AV1_film_grain.pdf https://waveletbeam.com/index.php/news/48-netflix-film-grain-synthesis https://waveletbeam.com/index.php/news/48-netflix-film-grain...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yeahbutiguess 4y agoPeople 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.
- Ralo 4y agoI 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 https://github.com/5ut/DiskCord
- danuker 4y agoThe author says another Discord project served as inspiration: https://github.com/pixelomer/discord-fs https://github.com/pixelomer/discord-fs Maybe you could join forces.
- up2isomorphism 4y agoDumb 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.
- layer8 4y agoIt could probably be hidden in a normal-looking video using steganography. Lower effective bitrate of course.
- LastTrain 4y ago" 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 4y agoConsidering 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
- LastTrain 4y agoThe warning is fine, the warning while playing Pollyanna is annoying and disingenuous. To put it in a more constructive way - the author should be proud of the hack and all the fun and turmoil it could cause.
- eternityforest 4y agoThat would be black hattery. They could get people banned. I'd prefer nobody being proud of that kind of thing.
- klntsky 4y ago> 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
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoOne 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 4y agoShhhh.. don’t you know what the first rule about YouTube storage for security systems is??
- vinay_ys 4y agoRight 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 4y agoAll 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.
- userbinator 4y agoSecurity cameras are usually low-framerate and compress highly anyway, due to not much happening between each frame, so I doubt it's going to be a significant cost in comparison to all the other, far more massive content which is also constantly being uploaded.
- paxys 4y agoIt 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoPirates 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 4y agoYou 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.
- egberts1 4y agoTHAT is 1337! A true hacker spirit worthy of Captain Crunch whistle and its application toward free payphone calls.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThis would be really impressive with some stenography.
- c7DJTLrn 4y agoThis 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 4y agoYou’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 4y agoSuckerpunch 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 https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
- devnullbrain 4y agoAm I correct in remembering a version of this video that existed before the COVID tests?
- tredre3 4y agoThis 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory 2. https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/ https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/ 3. https://www.shysecurity.com/post/20120401-PingFS https://www.shysecurity.com/post/20120401-PingFS
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 4y agoInteresting to note that how black and white pixels get compressed less and thus make for easier restoration. It would be interesting to generate a 512x512 QR code that changes every 3 frames to see how well that would work for recovering data.
- nomel 4y agoI have many old videos that have lost their "HD" encoding, and now look like potato vision. I no longer (silly that I did) trust YouTube for video storage.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago"You want to try some snowcrash?"
- Thaxll 4y agoThis has been done many times in the past, one popular tool: https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive
- forgotpwd16 4y agoThis was what reminded me. It was posted here on HN few months ago.
- ReflectedImage 4y agoYeah, who would abuse a free service to store their personal files? Data Block: c3828abe c5cfe61f4e61c9eda05e39903df580566859708a52957754e06fd18feaceca5ec0cdcac4b24b0f9ac8d9f212301916ea9ebcb2e291e2e950e0118f150c8cde02 34e770773cb93d6f1b757098890475cb00bef5ca4275c51021118ac1f01b71db3604063fd945480afc6b6b5b8d125129f7a9813a4997bdea27bbe5f6c17abfeb f46309c93430f78d37d23c0ef646cf7796e6de2b072d771b35b832a5b5328d1c09c5d32eaf6309b3119e8468ed02f62cd4b25c6785792ec82edc72667da8e36e 3b7b0d22fd708f5a3ff4787bf9474f84dff52fe33a38f4b4fee6759498b38d2c3af01db8d3dc5b1bb1cf6d203f24a4f6016caf42ad5cac76d1b0a0bf01a435b0 54a288c7cf9859dde401af51685eef23661ff0102a94caab2df9bf298c07538885baec81576513b9a7591d429db24b221c071cf0d929308243b0af4535810052
- lionkor 4y ago> written entirely in Rust my beloved jesus christ enough with the jerking
- seanhunter 4y agoThe real trick would be to monetize the resulting videos so you get paid every time you access your storage.
- rldjbpin 4y agoi would've save this "improvement" for my own project, but consider using colours instead of just black and white squares for higher data density! i am unsure how much compression can affect its effectiveness.
- LinuxBender 4y agoThis looks like a fun project to tinker around with. I have one small request. The pack file in the repo is 146MB. Is there a way to make that smaller on github? pack-5d55e1f4809a8dae84591bc04b019b2ae8137f77.pack 146M
- liamtuohyff 4y agoDo this at you own risk, ive done this with lidar data (which didnt need to be as persice as binary, which is what im seeing in this post) which worked fine. 3 years later i revisited the project and it was broken because youtube compressed the files in such a way where it made the lidar just innaccurate enough to be unusable. I cant imagine storing data in binary where just one bit wrong screws everything
- Patrickmi 4y agoOr I could get the bytes data then create a really big hash table, boom have discovered a glitch in the simulation