RedditStorage • Hacker News Board

Re: RedditStorage

#71

Post by jedberg » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:21 PM UTC

aquilaFiera wrote: post #57

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.

I'd only do it to people I know after backing up the original. I wouldn't want someone to actually lose their files.

Re: RedditStorage

#72

Post by pstuart » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:21 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #5

I think this will break your ToS with reddit and result in a ban on the account. That said, I don't know. It's kinda cool though.

Only in the "hacking the system part". Otherwise it's an abuse of a service. There's plenty of cheap data hosting elsewhere on the net.

Re: RedditStorage

#73

Post by yellowapple » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:22 PM UTC

math0ne wrote: post #20

I've been preaching the similarities of reddit to newsgroups and IRC forever so this seems like a natural evolution to me. Probably fairly easy for reddit to shut down though unfortunately. Now if ISP's would start offering their own cached usable versions of reddit we would be getting somewhere :)

And that somewhere would be Usenet 2.0.

Re: RedditStorage

#74

Post by sam_bwut » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:25 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #62

cmdrfred wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see an api for sending and receiving any type of file or text, I think botnet/building a secret chat system on top of it.

Can we encode C&C commands into a blockchain?

yes - its been done several times.

Re: RedditStorage

#75

Post by gkop » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:25 PM UTC

If this idea appeals to you, you may also be interested in the 2009 paper Graffiti Networks: A Subversive, Internet-Scale File Sharing Model [0] by Andrew Pavlo.

tl;dr: the researchers discovered that MediaWiki instances were good soft targets.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/static/slides/graffiti-dc401-o...

Re: RedditStorage

#76

Post by zedadex » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:36 PM UTC

tacone wrote: post #68

empyrical wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal favourite: https://github.com/philipl/pifs

That just segfaulted my brain. Everything we may ever write in the future is already there, you just need the address.

> Copyright infringement? It's just a few digits of π! They were always there!

You really have to admire that creativity

Re: RedditStorage

#77

Post by antihero » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:39 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…)

Connect ethernet cables in a loop, keep sending data back and forth "around" the loop. Data is stored in cables.

I think this was from an old BOFH.

Re: RedditStorage

#78

Post by nissehulth » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:39 PM UTC

hippich wrote: post #34

dragontamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who would suspect reddit as a command server Everyone who used IRC as a command server from years past. It turns out that things useful for human communication tend to be useful for computer communication. Usenet, Email... hell... I'm sure BBS would have been used if modems were popular enough back in the day.

actually, i personally witnessed C&C based on BBS :)

Fidonet, in some obscure distributed echomail area? :)

Re: RedditStorage

#79

Post by zedadex » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:42 PM UTC

I remember once briefly thinking how fun it'd be to do something like this, before realizing with the spam filters the way they are it'd probably be the last thing I ever did on the site.

Neat proof-of-concept though

Re: RedditStorage

#80

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Jun 04, 2015, 11:42 PM UTC

A nice new example of what's called "parasitic storage." This kind should be easy enough to detect on Reddit's end: encrypted and binary data look very different from text. Further, if a site allows binary, it's different from crypto. The only type that's hard to filter is custom stego whose patterns look similar to normally accepted traffic. Extra true if it's a high volume site.