Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 251 posts

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#191

Post by epicide »

yreg wrote: post #143
mindfulhack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they might not care unless this can somehow endanger their infrastructure. (It's not really unlimited , is it?) If the few blokes using this scam their way into few hundred terabytes of free storage, so be it, it's not worth the hassle for Google, imo. edit: Apparently an account can create up to 250 docs a day https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/qu...

> If the few blokes using this scam their way into few hundred terabytes of free storage, so be it, it's not worth the hassle for Google, imo.

This. They probably thought of this exact scenario before adding unlimited docs. They probably even expected somebody to make a script for it. Hell, a few of them might even have a script.

As long as a lot of people don't start abusing it or make a file-sharing service based on it, then they probably won't care. Basically, not until it's a significant enough threat to their bottom line.

Ultimately, it's no different than the inevitable person that just has a script to generate garbage and upload it to Google Docs as fast as possible. That's what the 250 docs a day limit is there for.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#192

Post by epicide »

pault wrote: post #178
mxuribe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mostly off-topic, but related: this is one of the major reasons email needs to finally go away. It was never intended to be the backbone of peoples lives in the way it has become.

Access to my email account probably gives you more access to my life and identity than my SSN [0].

I long for the day that we [1] all get assigned a public/private keypair instead of SSNs. That won't fix everything, but it's a huge step above a shared secret that is limited to 9 digits [2].

[0]: Even without signing up for a bunch of services, it's basically impossible at this point (at least in the US) to not have an email address associated with your bank account, car loan, mortgage, credit card, or even just watching TV.

[1]: "We" meaning "US citizens" or anyone else with a similar system.

[2]: I realize you also need info about the person and not just their number, but also apply that to keypairs.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#193

Post by aflat »

yreg wrote: post #143
mindfulhack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they might not care unless this can somehow endanger their infrastructure. (It's not really unlimited , is it?) If the few blokes using this scam their way into few hundred terabytes of free storage, so be it, it's not worth the hassle for Google, imo. edit: Apparently an account can create up to 250 docs a day https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/qu...

I think you underestimate the amount of room most warez take up. And what these distributors will go through to get free space

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#194

Post by markstos »

whack wrote: post #173

For 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-quot…

Seems like a good way to earn yourself a Terms-of-Service ban.

If this considered an abuse-of-services now, the terms could be updated to clarify.

The finger print of big chunks of base-64 encoded blobs in Google Docs could be easy to spot.

If Google cares to notice this and take action, they can and will.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#195

Post by furyofantares »

Even URL shorteners offer unlimited storage if you jump through enough hoops.

To encode ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ first get a short url for http://example.com/ABC, then take the resulting url and append DEF and run it through the service again. Repeat until you run out of payload, presumably doing quite a few more than 3 bytes at a time.

The final short url is the your link to the data, which can be unpacked by stripping the payload bytes then following the links backwards until you get to your initial example.com node.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#196

Post by jfengel »

whack wrote: post #173

For 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-quot…

I wonder why they do that. It seems to me like it would be more effort to leave the Google Docs files out of their calculation, and with no real benefit. For conventional use of Google Docs it would be hard to use a significant amount of disk space, so it's not like users would be clamoring for additional space.

Perhaps it's just marketing, trying to prize people away from Microsoft Office with a thing that doesn't actually cost them all that much?

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#197

Post by magashna »

markstos wrote: post #194
whack wrote: post #173

For 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-quot…

Seems like a good way to earn yourself a Terms-of-Service ban. If this considered an abuse-of-services now, the terms could be updated to clarify. The finger print of big chunks of base-64 encoded blobs in Google Docs could be easy to spot. If Google cares to notice this and take action, they can and will.

Seems like more of a "can" rather than anyone actually using it. Always interesting to see how something can be broken or exploited, even though it may not be practical

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#198

Post by yreg »

aflat wrote: post #193
yreg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they might not care unless this can somehow endanger their infrastructure. (It's not really unlimited , is it?) If the few blokes using this scam their way into few hundred terabytes of free storage, so be it, it's not worth the hassle for Google, imo. edit: Apparently an account can create up to 250 docs a day https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/qu...

I think you underestimate the amount of room most warez take up. And what these distributors will go through to get free space

It seems you can only store ~177mb of data per account per day this way. Didn't test it myself.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#199

Post by brandmeyer »

sagebird wrote: post #97
DonHopkins wrote: post #76

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…

A bizarre intersection with this: I once had to prepare part of my employer's source code for registration with the US copyright office. They wanted "the first N pages" of the source code, for N of a dozen or so. After consulting with the lawyers making the filing, I ended up making a pdf that included main() and the first few functions that it called until I got up to N pages.

Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

#200

Post by groby_b »

reaperducer wrote: post #27

Base64 is such a wonderful gift. Back when the commercial internet was just getting its act together there were companies that would give you free online access on Windows 3.1 machines in exchange for displaying ads in the e-mail client. (I think one was called Juno.) The hitch was that you could only use e-mail. No web surfing. No downloading files. No fun stuff. But that's OK, since there were usenet- and FTP-to-em…

Mary Ann Horton[1] is probably one of the people you want to thank. She's responsible for uuencode.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Horton

Post reply on HN