

Store files in your Flickr account - ricardobeat
https://github.com/ricardobeat/filr

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kmfrk
As someone stated in the other HN thread, this is a bit of a dick move.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5741905>

~~~
logn
I read the flickr TOS. I don't think this violates it.

How is this a dick move? Get over yourself. They're valuing the company at
$1.1 Billion. If you can actually drain any significant amount of their
resources then sure it's a dick move, but crazy impressive.

Besides, you really think Yahoo! would be so upset that hackers are using
their site for a public CDN? Sure they might make a big fuss, but they
probably would think it's cool too. Afterall, flickr started as an online
game. Who's to say they won't pivot again?

Further, as much as anyone wants to complain about the downfall of hacker news
quality, this has made me more cynical than anyone's nit or snark or trolling.

~~~
greggman
You can't use Flickr as a public CDN AFAIK. Their terms require if you use
flickr to host an image displayed in another page that page must provide a
link to the photo's page on flickr.

Flickr also only allows photos, illustrations and screenshots. (and video).
Nothing else.

These terms are not spelled out in the ToS but in their community guidelines
and faq

There are plenty of examples of people having their accounts closed for not
following these rules.

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cllns
I definitely thought this was going to be storing data as the image.

I'd be interesting in the (computational) detection for that. Of course, if
you just encode/decode it, Yahoo could do the same.

If you encrypt the data, they could just check to see how high the entropy is.
If it's higher than what's plausible for a real photograph, they'd delete it.
(using ent [1])

Else, you could use good ole stenography. In researching this response I came
across the term Steganalysis[2]. Pretty interesting!

[1] <http://www.fourmilab.ch/random>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganalysis>

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simonwistow
Already done 7 years ago :)

<http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-FS-Flickr/>

Stores versioned files by encoding them in the lower order bits of PNGs in a
Flickr set.

Example stored file:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonwistow/sets/72057594097765...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonwistow/sets/72057594097765821/)

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ma2rten
This starts to get my imagination going. What if you would use all kinds of
websites, which allow user-submitted data, and encrypt and distribute the
content. You could create an underground internet hosted unknowingly by other
people. You could even encode your data so it looks like real image or natural
language data.

~~~
pfortuny
Well, yes. The fact is you would be at the mercy of minor changes in that data
which would make your 'data' worthless. As simple as, for example:

'Next month we are going to transform all our utf-8 fields into utf-32 and we
are going to add some padding to your data, for analytics'.

You would have to cope with that.

Which, honestly, would be a lot of a mess. Distributed mess, also. Something
like the proverbial fan & sh*t thing.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Not really. As long as you build in redundancy. Ie, automatically distribute
multiple copies of the same files or blocks over multiple different sites.
Yes, all of the sites could make breaking changes at the same time, but then
all of the disks in your raid array could die at the same time too... Hence
backups.

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Tloewald
What I would like is a program for uploading RAW files to Flickr, but clearly
Flickr is opposed to this.

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DigitalSea
It was only a matter of time before someone did this, wasn't expecting
something so fast though. I bet Yahoo! aren't anticipating people using that
whole 1TB, but with something like this I could easily fill 1TB in
music/videos very quickly.

Now if someone takes it one step further and creates a Site44 for Flickr:
<http://www.site44.com/> — we'll truly have it all.

~~~
belorn
Isn't videos is perfectly allowed so long its self-produced?

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Aardwolf
If you're unable to use zTXt, you could store the bytes in the RGBA pixel
values. Those are compressed, and you get some interesting images as a bonus
:)

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macspoofing
It was only a matter of time until someone came up with something like this.
Use at your own risk, and make sure you don't have anything you wouldn't mind
losing on the Flickr service since Yahoo can just arbitrarily close your
account at any time.

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vxNsr
Well that didn't take long.

I figured this would happen eventually, obviously yahoo will spend a
considerable amount of time trying to detect this and remove it...

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darxius
I knew something like this was going to pop up. Now we just have to wait and
see how long people can get away with it.

