201–210 of 251 posts
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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.
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.
If I were Google, I wouldn't try to pick up on the content, I'd be looking for characteristic access patterns. It's harder to catch uploads, since "new account uploads lots of potentially large documents" isn't something you can immediately block, but "oh, look, here's several large files that are always accessed in consecutive order very quickly" would be harder to hide. It's still an arms race after that (e.g., "but what if I access them really slowly?"), but while Google would find a hard time conclusively winning this race in the technical sense, they can win enough that this isn't fun or a cost-effectively technique anymore (e.g. "then you're getting your files really slowly, so where's the fun in that?"), which is close enough to victory for them.
So, I'd say, enjoy it while you can. If it gets big enough to annoy, it'll get eliminated.
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 str…
Maybe it isn't a bad first project, but on no account should you put it up on the "real" internet and tell anyone it exists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's an arms race situation. Once you give me an information channel like a "word document", I've got an endless variety of ways to encode other things into it. I can encode bits as English sentences or other things that will be arbitrarily hard to pick up by scanning. If I were Google, I wouldn't try to pick up on the content, I'd be looking for characteristic access patterns. It's harder to catch uploads, since "ne…
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…
That reminds me of the first time I accessed World Wide Web. Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service. Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.doom.com, which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's…
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Are they? Email, calendar, online office, cloud storage etc. are all available from various other companies(even beside the big few corporations). The only two areas where you'd really have to sacrifice features would be Android apps, and YouTube if you're running a channel.
tell me which provider has an integrated single signon service for all of those above? Which provider has apps for their service for all major OS'es (including mobile), and is mostly free (or low cost)?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be at the mercy of them potentially changing their encoding scheme unannounced and corrupting your files.
that would be tough if youtube doesn't save the originals
Sure you can get around this by adding ECC, but that isn't implemented here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an arms race situation. Once you give me an information channel like a "word document", I've got an endless variety of ways to encode other things into it. I can encode bits as English sentences or other things that will be arbitrarily hard to pick up by scanning. If I were Google, I wouldn't try to pick up on the content, I'd be looking for characteristic access patterns. It's harder to catch uploads, since "ne…
They can just throttle access to Google documents to something like 4 GB per hour and then block obvious abuses. If people start encoding bits as English sentences they are reducing the amount of useful data they can download within an hour which is exactly what you want.
No, that's not likely to work. I'm sure there's far more legitimate users using 4GB of documents per hour than abusers right now. You have to remember things like bulk downloading, bulk scanning, bulk backing-up, shared automated accounts doing all sorts of legit things, etc. are all legitimate use cases. You can't just throw out all "big uses" or your enterprise customers are going to pitch a fit, and that's a bigger problem than people abusing your storage for a while.
(Those things will still have different access patterns than abusers, but thinking about how that will manifest and could be detected is an good exercise for the reader.)