Base85 would probably be a better choice for storing binary as text, since it has a ratio of 5:4 instead of 4:3. On the topic of "unusual and free large file hosting", YouTube would probably be the largest, although you'd need to find a resilient way of encoding the data since their re-encoding processes are lossy. I like the "Linux ISO" and "1337 Docs" references ;-)
Here is an implementation of arbitrary data storage using YouTube videos: https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive
Wouldn’t YouTube re-encode the video and mess up with the data?
Me and a friend came up with a similar idea of a sort of distributed file system implemented across a huge array of blog comment sections. Of course you’d need a bunch of replication and fault tolerance and the ability to automatically scrape for new blogs to post spammy-looking comments on, but I thought it was a pretty funny and neat idea when we came up with it.
I heard about a subreddit a while ago, where every post/comment was a random string. It was speculated at the time that something similar was going on.
The fact that this is even a remote possibility should worry everyone of the ugly monopoly that Google became. I found myself in a similar situation a couple months ago. An android App falsely charged me on the Play store. After trying to contact Google for multiple weeks I gave up and disputed the charge on my credit card. This resulted in Google coming after me for 8.99$ and threatening me to close all my Google ac…
Surely, Google has way too much power, but as the old adage goes: don't put all your eggs into one basket :)
It's unfortunate that they are the only basket in town!
In 1998, the EFF and John Gilmore published the book about "Deep Crack" called "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". But at the time, it would have been illegal to publish the code on a web site, or include a CDROM with the book publishing the "Deep Crack" DES cracker source code and VHDL in digital form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker https://www.foo.be/doc…
It seems like a cute and irrelevant distinction that electronic software would be published in a book. If researchers created a computer that processed information using proteins in plant cells instead of electrons, and such a computer could execute programs on this book directly instead of “scanning” it, would not the textbook be software? When laws say “electronic versions” I don’t think they literally mean to refe…
IANAL, but if the distinction clashes with the crypto export laws, does it not follow that crypto export laws clash with the first amendment? Which then makes them unconstitutional and the focus should be on whether that is wanted behavior and the constitution should be amended, or not.
I may be mistaken, but as far as I'm aware Google docs synced to your local machine are nothing more than links to documents in the Google Drive cloud. None of the data inside those docs is actually stored locally. I found this out the hard way when I decided to move away from GD and lost a lot of files. So buyer beware I guess.
Should you want to move from Google services, the best way of ensuring you keep your data is to use Takeout [1], which exports your documents as both doc and html files.
Couldn't you also embed data into images and upload them to Google photos, or is that discarded when they convert and compress the image in the backend?
Check the issues! Some people have tried quite hard to figure that one out.
Correction: unlimited as long as it takes Google to fix this oversight in quota calculation.
It isn't truly an oversight, it's an abuse of the fact that Docs/Sheets/Slides are not counted toward your quota. Their storage model is a little more complicated than a standard stream of bytes like an image or a text file.