131–140 of 251 posts
Honestly this isn't ground breaking, we have been using BASE64 to convert binary to ASCII as a way of "sharing" files all the way to USENET days. While applications like these make it easy for the masses to participate in the idea, they don't bring anything new to the table. That all said, this is really cool from a design perspective and I poured over the code learned a lot.
I think in the long run, the user could risk the complete google-account if they begin rating the uploads a violation of TOS. I advise a totally seperate account when using this tool. But anyways, something inside me likes it. Nicely done. Good job :)
That being said, they currently allow the guys at /r/datahoarder to use gsuite accounts costing £1 for life with unlimited storage quotas. These are regularly filled to like 50TB and Google doesn't bat an eye.
Sounds like a great way to lose your Google account (and all your other linked Google services) for ToS violations to me.
Indeed. I love the "sorry @ the guys from google internal forums who are looking at this" line at the github. All tongue in cheek and aware of the situation. TBH this is not unlike reporting a security bug to a company as a white hat, but more like a grey hat here.
You can also just use GSuite with a few users to get unlimited Google Drive storage. https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en#6_storage
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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…
> I decided to move everything OUT of Google Have you been successful in it? Any guidelines / tips? How hard is it?
It really is a suite that can combat Google's suite — and you can truly own it. Other than that, DDG for search, and your own domain for email (so that you could transfer it between different hostings if necessary).
I do have a Google account, but I use it for precisely two purposes: Google Play (my phone wouldn't work without one) and YouTube subscriptions (I can use an RSS reader for this, but it's a bit inconvenient). You can create a Google account without creating a Gmail account.
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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!
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 ;-)
Base64 has the advantage of relative ubiquity (though Base85 is hardly rare, being used in PDF and Git binary patches). It also doesn't contain characters (quotes, angled brackets, ...) that might cause problems if naively sent via some text protocols and/or embedded in XML/HTML mark-up.
> YouTube ... you'd need to find a resilient way of encoding the data [due to lossy re-encoding]
That should be easy enough: encode as blocks or lines of pixels (blocks of 4x4 should be more than sufficient) in a low enough number of colour values (I expect you'd get away with at least 4bits/channel/block with large enough blocks so 4096 values per block) and you should easily be able to survive anything the re-encoding does by averaging each block and taking the closest value to that result.
Add some form of error detection+correction code just for paranoia's sake. You are going to want to include some redundancy in the uploads anyway so you can combine these needs in a manner similar to RAID5/6 or the Parchive format that was (is?) popular on binary carrying Usenet groups.
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Yep and the Shar command that created a bash wrapper round sections of uuencoded data, so you could email a file in segments and conveniently recompose and run it to get the file back, without needing Shar at the other end. Good times.
That brings back memories. Of using an email gateway to get an Amiga fred fish disk - delivered as shar pieces to my uni email account (only staff had telnet, ftp, etc. access). Then assembling the pieces in /tmp on the departmental unix server. Then switching to a PC to use Kermit to get the contents onto a PC floppy. Then using an Amiga utility to be able to read PC format disks to copy them to an Amiga floppy. I'v…
I do :)
It was the wonder of doing something for the first time. Of feeling like you were pioneering and learning and having fun all at the same time.
Truly, fun times :)