Show HN: Use DNS TXT to share information

You can base64 encode an image, split to TXT records and send over Internet. Useful in certain circumstances. Like when one of the communicating parties is under severe censorship.

The order of records associated with a name is undefined, so if you spread your data across multiple records, you need to add ordering metadata.

The total size of the records must be less than 64 KiB - they have to fit within a DNS message, which has a limited size.

You can put all your 64K ish data into one TXT record, but it has to be split into strings of up to 255 bytes.

You can invent your own record type to contain raw binary data without the sequence-of-strings requirement.

You can use multiple names (eg, numbers) to get past the size limit and to be explicit about the correct order.

  % finger xabi
  Login: xabi              Name:
  Directory: /home/xabi                Shell: /usr/bin/zsh
  On since Mon Jul 17 11:20 (CEST) on pts/0 from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
   1 second idle
  No mail.
  Plan:
  Latest version of my code (base64 encoded):

  -------- 8