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In May, Google made international headlines when it announced that it was going to offer free, unlimited storage for photos and videos. If you read Google's press release, you'll see that the free storage plan limits images to 16 megapixels and videos to 1080p resolution. But if digital images are simply collections of binary data and if all other files on your computer also just collections of binary data then isn't unlimited photo storage simply unlimited storage?
If only something existed that made this easy to do; you know, something that could bitmap all the things....
[ Ed's Comment: This link points to the author's own personal software solution, but I'm sure that others will come up with alternative ideas.]
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A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything,
should conceal it as well as she can.
-- Jane Austen
(Score: 5, Informative) by tripstah on Sunday June 28 2015, @04:19AM
Is this a great idea for backing up important files? No, of course not. I mean you could, but Google's storage is $120/yr and has a working API. Amazon's is even less.
Is this the next great file sharing tool? No, I think not either. I accidentally wrote one of those about 10 years ago (it was still open and called Azureus when I created it), but I don't see that happening again here as this is easily controllable by Google.
Will Google shut this down? Who knows, but they're aware of it and the fix is simple: stop allowing BMP files or transcode them (which they do for other formats or images of 16 megapixels).
As for the technical details, for anyone interested in the "hack," all this does is loop the files through rar to split them, place a 54 bit BMP header before the 64,000,000 byte chunks (i.e. 16 megapixels in RGBA BMP format) which makes it a valid BMP file. The client has a lot of extra features, but that's the general gist. It's explained here [linkedin.com] if anyone is interested (kudos to the 0s / 1s comments -- exactly on point).
Lastly, haters gotta hate I guess; anyone else BBSes / 2600 some days? Oh well, cheers to Soylent for keeping it real and to the insightful and interesting comments.
Best,
trip (i.e. Tyler Pitchford)
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @04:51AM
Do you enjoy seeing your jizz all over the front page of Soylent, you attention-whoring asshole? Oh look at you, now the whole fucking world knows you have friends at Google. How very nice for you! Do your friends have anal privileges? Do you just love it when a dude reams your asshole until his manly cum squirts inside your bowels?
Haters gonna hate, you're right about that. But consider why we fucking hate you.
1) Your project literally enables the Tragedy of the Commons.
2) Your project has no practical value to anyone.
3) You love attention so very very very much.
Next time you feel like you deserve to have the world acknowledge your pitiful existence, go fucking tweet something, you worthless twit.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 29 2015, @08:10AM
Are there any alternative services that you could use? If so, then you could store the file over multiple sites, using an error-correcting code, such that if one of the sites were to go down, the data would still be available. This is what the internet and the cloud was invented for!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by tripstah on Monday June 29 2015, @11:59AM
Amazon also allows bitmaps on their cloud service. The image portion is free for "prime" members and they supposedly they accept files up to 2GBs. That would work out to a 16,000 x 16,000 x RGBA bitmap.
As for error correction, RAR includes parity information (it's one of the reasons I looped through it versus just splitting). By default B.A.T.T. encodes 10% parity information, but that's user configurable. If you want extra assurance, there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAR2 [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by McD on Tuesday June 30 2015, @03:54PM
No kidding?
Well then let me take this off-topic opportunity to say thank you - I used Azureus a bit, right up until it turned south.
Can't buy you a beer, but I can make a donation to SN's upkeep in your honor. Cheers!
(Score: 1) by tripstah on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:30PM
No kidding, and ++ to you sir!
Best,
Tyler