h a l f b a k e r yMy hatstand runneth over
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Amazon offers unlimited storage now for photos
and 5 Gigs for everything else for $12.00/year.
With that in mind, my new favorite file extension
just became jpg. There has to be a way of taking
advantage. Perhaps mybackup001.zip.jpg? Or
maybe every single program could be an ordered
assemblage
of jpg files, like theoretically
programming in Minecraft...
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Annotation:
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I'm pretty sure -- at least with Windows -- that you can
change the filename extension to whatever you want. The OS
will caution you that the file will become unusable, but so
what? Just change it back when you're ready to use it again.
bun [+] |
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But did you read the fine print? Better make sure that
Amazon doesn't reserve the right to perform additional
lossy image compression on your files if your total exceeds
some threshold. |
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They could also easily detect abuse by checking to make
sure it is a valid format. Of course one could encode data
into an image stored in .jpg format. |
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better yet, use steganogrophy to actually encrypt your data
into images in a way that they can't complain about |
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Better still, print out the binary representation of your zip
file, and then scan it in as a series of JPGs which can be
stored on Amazon. Simply retrieve the data by OCRIng the
images to get back the 1s and 0s which form the binary
representation of the zip file. |
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Yes Ian, you win the award for obvious statement of the
day. That's why there's a double extension for renaming
purposes. |
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The steganographic proposal is worth exploring... |
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I'd be curious as to if the server simply reads file name
extensionsor if it verifies types. |
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//But did you read the fine print? Better make sure that
Amazon doesn't reserve the right to perform additional
lossy image compression on your files if your total exceeds
some threshold.// |
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If they do that, the solution is obvious : encode data as
solid greyscale 8x8 pixel blocks, and all (but the first) DCT
coefficients set to zero.
Now they could try to reduce that with a lossy jpeg
reencoding, but to succeed they'd need settings which
totally fry everybody's pictures. |
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// If they do that, the solution is obvious //
But what if they resize the images too? Better build some redundancy in. |
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Actually, if they really do allow unlimited images, you needn't store any data in them. How long can the filename be? Simply rename all of your images to, say, a base-64 encoded 32 byte chunk followed by .jpg , and you can read the data back just from the file list. |
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The Amazon offer is a bit suspect. But if anyone's
interested, I'm prepared to store all your cash free of
charge. |
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