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Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64

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

#61

Post by DonHopkins »

marquis-chacha wrote: post #24
userbinator wrote: post #21

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.

Back in the day of email gateways between different networks, there used to be a terrible problems with all the tin-pot dictator IBM SYSADMINs at BITNET sites who maintained their own personal styles of ASCIIEBCDIC translation tables, so all the email that passed through their servers got corrupted.

EBCDIC based IBM mainframe SYSADMINs on BITNET were particularly notorious for being pig-headed and inconsiderate about communicating with the rest of the world, and thought they knew better about the characters their users wanted to use, and that the rest of the world should go fuck themselves, and scoffed at all the unruly kids using ASCII and lower case and new fangled punctuation, who were always trying to share line printer pornography and source code listings through their mainframes.

"HARRUMPH!!! IF I AND O ARE GOOD ENOUGH FOR DIGITS ON MY ELECTRIC TYPEWRITER, THEN THEY'RE GOOD ENOUGH FOR EMAIL! NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!!!" (shaking fist in air while yelling at cloud)

It was especially a problems for source code. That was one of the reasons for "trigraphs".

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234582/purpose-of-trigr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs

>Trigraphs were proposed for deprecation in C++0x, which was released as C++11. This was opposed by IBM, speaking on behalf of itself and other users of C++, and as a result trigraphs were retained in C++0x. Trigraphs were then proposed again for removal (not only deprecation) in C++17. This passed a committee vote, and trigraphs (but not the additional tokens) are removed from C++17 despite the opposition from IBM. Existing code that uses trigraphs can be supported by translating from the source files (parsing trigraphs) to the basic source character set that does not include trigraphs.

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

#63

Post by romanhn »

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…

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 email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)

I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.

EDIT: Just checked the Wayback Machine. Looks like www.doom.com was not affiliated with the game at the time, so I must have browsed to www.idsoftware.com instead.

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

#64

Post by mindfulhack »

justinjlynn wrote: post #57

Sounds like a great way to lose your Google account (and all your other linked Google services) for ToS violations to me.

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.

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

#65

Post by dogma1138 »

joebergeron wrote: post #11

Me and a friend came up with a similar idea of a sort of distributed file system implemented across a huge array of blog comment sections. Of course you’d need a bunch of replication and fault tolerance and the ability to automatically scrape for new blogs to post spammy-looking comments on, but I thought it was a pretty funny and neat idea when we came up with it.

So UseNet?

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

#67

Post by solotronics »

joebergeron wrote: post #11

Me and a friend came up with a similar idea of a sort of distributed file system implemented across a huge array of blog comment sections. Of course you’d need a bunch of replication and fault tolerance and the ability to automatically scrape for new blogs to post spammy-looking comments on, but I thought it was a pretty funny and neat idea when we came up with it.

Even scarier than that would be a Turing complete language where the code is stored and memory is written to comments sections. The actual execution could be done by reading, execution function, and writing comments to store working memory and results. I guess with cryptographic encryption you could even hide what your doing.

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

#68

Post by londons_explore »

sircastor wrote: post #46
wmichelin wrote: post #5

Someone is going to notice a few accounts with insanely high storage usage, and then comes the ban-hammer. Enjoy losing your Google account!

I think that depends on their tools and how they evaluate data usage. If the reporting states that the accounts are using very little storage because it's using the same measuring stick that the client does them it's invisible. The question comes up during an audit of the system when the disk usage doesn't match the report. Then again, if this is used by few people it may just look like a margin of error.

It'll more be that the Google docs "live editing" backends are expensive to use disk and memory wise. They store complete version history with each keystroke of a document.

There's a good chance a megabyte of "document" costs Google a gigabyte of internal storage...

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

#69

Post by MatthewRayfield »

I couldn't find it with a quick search, but I remember many years ago someone creating a similar scheme for storing files inside of TinyURLs.

You would run the uploader and get back a list of TinyURLs that could then be used to retrieve the files later with a downloader.

But you couldn't store too much in each URL so the resulting list could be pretty big.

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

#70

Post by jabl »

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…

First time I was able to access the WWW via a graphical browser I had a dial-in shell account at an ISP (or BBS or whatever they called themselves back then), then there was a program called "slirp" (which, amazingly enough, seems to have a wiki page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp ) which allowed one to run "SLIP" (IP-over-serial) over the terminal connection to get IP access from my computer. Amazingly I got it to work, considering I barely knew what I was doing back then.

One big reason why I became a Linux user was that the TCP/IP stack for Win 3.1, Trumpet Winsock, was amazingly unstable and would regularly crash the entire OS. Linux had, even back then, a stable TCP/IP stack. And fantastic advancements like preemptive multitasking running in protected mode so errant user-space applications didn't crash the OS.

Good times.

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