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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 ;-)
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 ;-)
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 ;-)
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?
Depends how you encode it. A bunch QR codes, no problem. But encoding into the individual pixel, probably not so much.
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-email gateways that you could ping and would happily return lists of files and messages. And if you sent another mail would happily send you base64-encoded versions of those binaries that you could decode on your machine.
The free e-mail service became slow-motion file sharing. But that was OK because you'd set it up before you went to bed and it would run overnight.
Thank you, whomever came up with base64.
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 :)
In the same spirit, I made a few "just for fun" plugins for my (now abandoned) encrypted-arbitrary-storage Dropbox-like application Syncany: The Flickr plugin [1] stores data (deduped and encrypted before upload) as PNG images. This was great because Flickr gave you 1 TB of free image storage. This was actually super cool, because the overhead was really small. No base64. The SMTP/POP plugin [2] was even nastier. It…
I feel less hesitant about revealing this now, given how long ago it was and that more accessible "libraries" are now available.
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 ;-)
You'd be at the mercy of them potentially changing their encoding scheme unannounced and corrupting your files.
Build in a bit of redundancy, and I think it would work.