I had an (evil; don't do this) idea a while back to create a Dropbox-like program that stores all your data as binary chunks attached to draft emails spread across an arbitrary number of free email accounts.
This existed just after gmail launched. Can't recall the name of the program, but I played around with it to store a few hundred MB in a test account.
Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
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Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#172Reminds me of the old programs that would turn your Gmail storage into a network drive by splitting everything into 25MB chunks. Utterly miserable experience with terrible latency and reliability.
GMail Drive I believe.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#173For anyone else who's as confused as I initially was: Google Drive allows unlimited storage for anything stored as "google docs". Ie, their version of Word. This hack works by converting your binary files into base64 encoded text, and then storing the text in collection of google-doc files.
Ie, it's actually increasing the amount of storage space needed to store the same binary, but it's getting around the drive-quota by storing it in a format that has no quota.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#174I've wondered if someone could do the same thing with videos and jpgs. Amazon prime, as one example, allows you to store an unlimited number of image files for "free". What if there was a program that would take a video file and split it up into its individual frames as jpgs and stored them on Amazon prime. When you wanted to watch the video the program would rebuild the video file from the individual jpgs on AWS.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#175In 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…
The checksums in the left column of the listings innocuously looked to the casual observer kind of like line numbers, which may have contributed to their true subversive purpose flying under the radar. Are you implying there's something more interesting there than just the DES source code and related data that the book already very clearly claims to contain?
I don't think so, I think the OP's just trying to be dramatic?
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#176In 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…
The checksum is really interesting and would be useful even today.
I have looked for the scripts but the links are all gone [1], unfortunately.
EDIT: I have found it[2], finally. It's pretty sad that so much of the internet is getting forgotten, though.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19980630210313/http://www.pgpi.c...
[2]: https://the.earth.li/pub/pgp/pgpi/5.5/books/ocr-tools.zip
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#177I've wondered if someone could do the same thing with videos and jpgs. Amazon prime, as one example, allows you to store an unlimited number of image files for "free". What if there was a program that would take a video file and split it up into its individual frames as jpgs and stored them on Amazon prime. When you wanted to watch the video the program would rebuild the video file from the individual jpgs on AWS.
My guess would be that the latency of this approach would be far too high to be practical. But you could probably abuse the JPEG format to stuff bits of the video into image files. I think you'd probably still need to spend a fair amount of time buffering before you could start watching without lag.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sooner you start, the better. I've moved most of my email/contacts/calendar away [0], and the longer you give yourself to catch the things you've signed up for but forgotten, the better. Youtube was also a pain, but I transitioned my subscriptions manually to a different account. Maps seems like it'd be the trickiest if you're invested. I wasn't a heavy user, and maps still works pretty good when you're logged ou…
> you have to guard the domain very closely I'm intrigued by this, would you kindly share more on this!?!
It means if you slip up and lose your domain, nobody can send you email (including 2FA, reset password, add a new email to your account, etc). You can imagine how inconvenient that would be. I use fastmail with a custom domain and that scenario gives me nightmares.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#179Anyone remember Gdrive? I can’t find it now, but I think it was probably early or mid 2000s. It let you store files as a local disk (FUSE) via Gmail attachments.
I remember using it back in 2005 iirc, and it was amazing. The files had a label called gmailfs.gDisk which is how it could keep the "file system" separate from the rest. Now Google generously offers Drive with 15Gigs of space.
15 gigs would've been generous in 2005, now it's not.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#180Too bad there is no similar trick for atmospheric carbon.