RedditStorage • Hacker News Board

Re: RedditStorage

#51

Post by hhm » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:06 PM UTC

joefreeman wrote: post #36

If you had a language model (say, trained on existing comments from Reddit), you could encode the data in the comments in English, and make the abuse a little more subtle.

See my other comment on this post for an example of this (encoding data using Markov chains)

Re: RedditStorage

#52

Post by alfg » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:06 PM UTC

rndn wrote: post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

Something not too far off that I made a couple of years ago for fun. Stores small snippets of data in the URL.

https://github.com/alfg/jot with demo.

Re: RedditStorage

#53

Post by r-w » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:07 PM UTC

mtw wrote: post #31

Vexs wrote: post #2

Well there's some pretty amusing abuse. I recall there was a botnet a while back that got it's commands from a subreddit as well. Quite brilliant actually- who would suspect reddit as a command server?

"its"

ye's

Re: RedditStorage

#54

Post by mayli » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:07 PM UTC

fatratchet wrote: post #24

rndn wrote: post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

To get reliable and free storage, photo hosting is usually the easiest way. Flickr offers 1TB, picasa/g+ offers unlimited storage with some hidden quoats. Everything that allows lossless photos lets you store arbitrary data. Depending on how careful you wanna be you can store hundreds of GBs per account. Email attachments used to be a great way a while ago but nowadays using multiple gdrive/dropbox/onedrive accounts…

I did the same thing for google photos, but just for test purpose. https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOjZrywipm-SSH9jVNsKVF5...

Re: RedditStorage

#55

Post by jedberg » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:09 PM UTC

Wouldn't it be funny if reddit just randomly edited the comments to break the encoding...

Re: RedditStorage

#56

Post by notacoward » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:09 PM UTC

rndn wrote: post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

Erasure-coded comments distributed across the huge number of abandoned Wordpress blogs and phpBB forums that are out there. Plenty of storage, pretty readily accessible, low probability that even one fragment will get deleted, and even if one does that's what the erasure coding is for.

EDIT: also, Wikipedia never deletes anything. Even if your "edits" get reverted, you can still find them via the history page. Hmmm.

Re: RedditStorage

#57

Post by aquilaFiera » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:10 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #55

Wouldn't it be funny if reddit just randomly edited the comments to break the encoding...

This sounds like a /u/jedberg type of thing to do.

Re: RedditStorage

#58

Post by rcthompson » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:11 PM UTC

alfg wrote: post #52

rndn wrote: post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

Something not too far off that I made a couple of years ago for fun. Stores small snippets of data in the URL. https://github.com/alfg/jot with demo.

So, with this plus a URL-shortener as a frontend, you're essentially using the URL shortening service as the data storage.

Re: RedditStorage

#59

Post by chrissnell » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:11 PM UTC

hhm wrote: post #50

rndn wrote: post #4

There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)

Steganography is always interesting for data storage. It is pretty easy to hide data into pretty much any medium. See http://jthuraisamy.github.io/markovTextStego.js/ and https://github.com/hmoraldo/markovTextStego

Combining steganography with Reddit could be interesting. Random (mildly interesting) photos pushed to imgur and posted to /r/pics by the same user every time.

Re: RedditStorage

#60

Post by stephengillie » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:12 PM UTC

Interesting idea... Since image formats already store a huge BLOB, how much more would it take to make ImgurStorage?

(Ideally, it would be slightly more elegant than just renaming a zip file.)