31–40 of 52 posts
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mogrify -strip imagename.jpg But it won't help. You could just make your data a real image.
You might as well change a single byte. A tiny modification and BANG! nobody notices and the service is pretty useless as a general back-up solution. They could even implement that in their TOS: "whenever you upload a photo you agree to a random byte being modified on one of the pixels on the border."
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a.) flickr is a photo sharing site, no? the UI certainly seems to be optimized for mediocre or even pretty photos, not random noise. If I started pasting huge blocks of mime64 in HN comments to store encrypted personal stuff, or unencrypted cat pictures, would that be in the spirit of hacking, too? Or rather in the spirit of laming? (also notice the fact that I know better than to actually DO this even just ONCE, jus…
Arguably, you could use HN as a storage mechanism because it just marks comments as dead, it doesn't actually delete them. Hell, you could even write a utility to spuriously create HN accounts, stuff them full of comments that will be deaded but still accessible, and use that as a data store. Whilst there is some "hacker spirit" to it, it is absolutely, totally a dick move. And yes, it is like shitting in the urinals…
This is kind of a dick move to use IMHO. Clearly they are not giving you the space to store arbitrary stuff. It's a neat hack and props to the author but if enough people use this it will not only cause Yahoo! to have to build countermeasures but will also set an ugly precedent for Yahoo! product managers to consider before doing nice things like they did today.
This is hacker news isn't it? Re-purposing things in ways that the original designers did not envision is one of the cornerstones of hacking.
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This is hacker news isn't it? Re-purposing things in ways that the original designers did not envision is one of the cornerstones of hacking.
Please don't try to imply that the rest of us here agree with you in any way just because we're on this site. Hanging out on a site called HackerNews and having a basic sense of right and wrong are things that plenty of us can do simultaneously.
What surprises me is that a service like this isn't hardened from day one against the most obvious of flaws.
Of course it's wrong, but it is only really wrong when a billion or so people adopt it, and chances are that this will never see widespread adoption, it's just a guy saying 'see what I could do', not an army of people overrunning Flickr.
The cognitive dissonance of seeing a single person perform a neat little trick versus an army of people performing that same trick bringing down a service sits well in my head, I don't feel this is in any way destroying Flickr, nor do I think that it potentially will destroy Flickr.
It didn't happen with Gmail or any of the other services that were 'exploited' in this fashion before. In fact, those are now trying to get me to put as many files on their storage devices as possible (which I really don't want to, the cost of storage is so low I don't need an external service to host my files for me).
Lighten up.
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a.) flickr is a photo sharing site, no? the UI certainly seems to be optimized for mediocre or even pretty photos, not random noise. If I started pasting huge blocks of mime64 in HN comments to store encrypted personal stuff, or unencrypted cat pictures, would that be in the spirit of hacking, too? Or rather in the spirit of laming? (also notice the fact that I know better than to actually DO this even just ONCE, jus…
Arguably, you could use HN as a storage mechanism because it just marks comments as dead, it doesn't actually delete them. Hell, you could even write a utility to spuriously create HN accounts, stuff them full of comments that will be deaded but still accessible, and use that as a data store. Whilst there is some "hacker spirit" to it, it is absolutely, totally a dick move. And yes, it is like shitting in the urinals…
If you advertise a forum then people will do what they can with that forum, some will troll, some will try to advertise (even if they have to spend a lot of time to groom their audience) and some will do that much more outright (spam).
If you launch any service on the internet these days you have to start by analyzing it from the angles of possible abuse first. This is frustrating in a way but it is also inevitable, just like in life there are no niches that contain harvest-able energy without some life-form that takes advantage of that by adapting to it.
Storage, CPU, bandwidth are the currencies of the modern age, giving out any one of those currencies is asking for it, especially when it's done in large denominations.
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Please don't try to imply that the rest of us here agree with you in any way just because we're on this site. Hanging out on a site called HackerNews and having a basic sense of right and wrong are things that plenty of us can do simultaneously.
There hasn't been a storage facility labeled get 'x' bytes,Kilobytes,Megabytes,Gigabytes or even Terabytes free that did not result in people wondering about if they could use it for general purpose storage. What surprises me is that a service like this isn't hardened from day one against the most obvious of flaws. Of course it's wrong, but it is only really wrong when a billion or so people adopt it, and chances are…
> This is kind of a dick move to use IMHO.
Didn't say anything about creating the script, just about using it. Possibly, using it at scale was even implied.
Creating this is a hacker move. Using it to store your server backups is a dick move (and also potentially a poor backup policy).
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There hasn't been a storage facility labeled get 'x' bytes,Kilobytes,Megabytes,Gigabytes or even Terabytes free that did not result in people wondering about if they could use it for general purpose storage. What surprises me is that a service like this isn't hardened from day one against the most obvious of flaws. Of course it's wrong, but it is only really wrong when a billion or so people adopt it, and chances are…
Worth noting that the original comment said: > This is kind of a dick move to use IMHO. Didn't say anything about creating the script, just about using it. Possibly, using it at scale was even implied. Creating this is a hacker move. Using it to store your server backups is a dick move (and also potentially a poor backup policy).
I also think in this case the hack is a little useless. But I've seen examples where they use it to transfer a lot of 3D data for use in WebGL. And the author of this script is also linking to a nice usecase where is is used for game data: http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/05/compression-using-canvas-an...
Doesn't this already exist? Multiple times? Oh well, obvious 'exploit'. Wondering how Y! will react. They must've forseen this, right?
Probably poorly. Question though, how large of a file can you hide with steganography in a 300mb picture? Would that be big enough to hide an MP3? On a side note, can you upload files to Flickr that have data appended after the end of the image data? Like people were doing on 4chan until moot removed that capability.
This is akin to key schedulers used in various cryptography schemes, I suppose. The idea is that you REALLY don't want to just shove your data all at the beginning of the file in order, as it becomes really easy to tease out the data with some cursory frequency analysis/bruteforcing. "Oh the first 20 pixels encode the first X bytes of , BALEETED!"
Then you simply have each user pick their own key, stored locally, and have the cycle generated on the fly when encoding and retrieving data.
This is kind of a dick move to use IMHO. Clearly they are not giving you the space to store arbitrary stuff. It's a neat hack and props to the author but if enough people use this it will not only cause Yahoo! to have to build countermeasures but will also set an ugly precedent for Yahoo! product managers to consider before doing nice things like they did today.
His speech was about how you develop something and people start using it completely different from what you imagined or even wanted. His tip: learn and take use of it.
Probably people like to have 1TB of free storage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't try to imply that the rest of us here agree with you in any way just because we're on this site. Hanging out on a site called HackerNews and having a basic sense of right and wrong are things that plenty of us can do simultaneously.
There hasn't been a storage facility labeled get 'x' bytes,Kilobytes,Megabytes,Gigabytes or even Terabytes free that did not result in people wondering about if they could use it for general purpose storage. What surprises me is that a service like this isn't hardened from day one against the most obvious of flaws. Of course it's wrong, but it is only really wrong when a billion or so people adopt it, and chances are…