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RedditStorage

github.com

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Re: RedditStorage

#151
post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

To get reliable and free storage, photo hosting is usually the easiest way. Flickr offers 1TB, picasa/g+ offers unlimited storage with some hidden quoats. Everything that allows lossless photos lets you store arbitrary data. Depending on how careful you wanna be you can store hundreds of GBs per account. Email attachments used to be a great way a while ago but nowadays using multiple gdrive/dropbox/onedrive accounts…

The front-end is already there : https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs. Backends are currently being developed (https://github.com/mk-fg/tahoe-lafs-public-clouds), and there will even be a public offering from the very same guys (https://leastauthority.com/)

Re: RedditStorage

#154
post #153

What happens when someone uses this to pollute popular subreddits? People will get pissed off...

I guess they will simply block the username and delete the comments.

Re: RedditStorage

#155
post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

I had a few in mind when I was back in uni and hosting and cloud storage prices were still up.

I hadn't thought of reddit, as the abuse would be clearly visible, but I had used back then that Gmail Drive some guy had implemented using emails for storage, and it led me to think a lot of the Google Systems had non-obvious "unlimited" storage options.

For instance, I don't know if that's still the case, but Google Calendar surely seemed pretty fit for abuse: while calendar entries were limited in size, you could have as many as you wanted. And calendars can be private, so it's even better.

The problem with such systems will be the integrity of your data, when you start being forced to chunk things up. If they change one thing under your feet, you're a bit screwed. Also you have to detect all the undocumented pitfalls (e.g. forbidden characters in an edit field).

Re: RedditStorage

#156
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get reliable and free storage, photo hosting is usually the easiest way. Flickr offers 1TB, picasa/g+ offers unlimited storage with some hidden quoats. Everything that allows lossless photos lets you store arbitrary data. Depending on how careful you wanna be you can store hundreds of GBs per account. Email attachments used to be a great way a while ago but nowadays using multiple gdrive/dropbox/onedrive accounts…

Yeah, I wrote something that stores data to Flickr last summer: https://github.com/namwen/hoardr . I kind of had a reason but it was more for the enjoyment of getting it to work.

Until this gets so popular that Google or Flickr start to analyse photos, and come to the conclusion to either delete those photos and videos, or to convert them and destroying the data for you. Then, years later, you need your backup and ....

Re: RedditStorage

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not "Article Adjective Adjective Noun Adverb Verb Article Adjective Adjective Noun"? If you're making full sentences anyway, the grammar of the sentence doesn't need to change much. The vast majority of the entropy is already in the words themselves. Example sentence (generated by me, not a RNG): "the tiny hairy fish quickly paints a big scary monster". EDIT: With 10 words, each from the 252 most common words...…

Well, one, I'd love a more general solution where I could just say "generate a sentence with n bits of entropy" and my algorithm would spin out a sentence of the correct (arbitrary) length. (Hmm... Markov chains?) Or maybe add other mnemonic modifications, like rhymes. And two, I still need an algorithm to conjugate verbs and whatnot, though I suppose that part could just be left to the user. (You get n diceware word…

I think Markov chains would be a bad idea for the use case of passwords because some words always follow certain words.

Re: RedditStorage

#159
post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

[deleted]

Re: RedditStorage

#160
Can anyone do a rough cryptoanalysis of the code? It uses AES block cipher in CBC mode with a random iv. Which attacks is this open to?

First, I suspect it's lacking a secure integrity check (MAC), so is weak against chosen ciphertext attacks.

    def encrypt(self, plaintext):
        plaintext = self.pad(plaintext)
        iv = Random.new().read(AES.block_size)
        cipher = AES.new(self.key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv)
        return iv + cipher.encrypt(plaintext)
I'm also not sure about his padding of zeros to attain the AES block size - was there a more secure padding?

    def pad(self, s):
        return s + b"\0" * (AES.block_size - len(s) % AES.block_size)
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