Using YouTube For File Storage 193
First time accepted submitter anonymous writes "Ever thought it might be a good idea to store encrypted data in a QRCode video? Using this technique one could easily store 10GB of data to be available anywhere in the world, and completely free."
a bit too blatant (Score:5, Interesting)
If you start uploading videos to YouTube with nothing but frames of QR codes, you're pretty likely to have your account closed and the videos deleted.
It would be more robust if you made the video look like something that could plausibly be on YouTube as a "normal" video, even if it's something really boring. Probably especially if it's something really boring. Record one of your pets and use the low-order bits of the video and/or audio to steganographically include some data.
Re:Lolzers. (Score:5, Interesting)
No its an example of how naively relying on an uncontracted outside "cloud" service is a really dumb idea.
Now imagine you split your data up into a Set of messages, which can be recovered by any sufficiently large subset of more than N messages? This is what tahoe lafs does, typically using 10 messages, any 6 of which can recover the original.... of course its all encrypted too.
Then all you need is some process which periodically checks the messages and ensures that you always have some threshold (which should really be larger than N, by at least a few).
There is also no need for QR codes to be used, thats another example of naive use. It would actually be vastly more efficient to encode the data differently, but, encoding in such ways as to not be easily detected and removed by youtube could be tricky. However, if you could find a way to minimally disguise the data so it just looks like hours of terribly boring video (like, video of your pet fish)....
Shit you could probably just keep re-uploading the same fish video with differently encoded data and new names....nobody is going to examine hours of fish swimming to determine where the loop is or whether the two videos are of the same loop.
Re:Lolzers. (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on the decoding speed, this may be a good way to include tablet and phone apps with movie purchases. Just tack it on where the movie previews are. Not everybody has reliable broadband, especially those that don't stream their video.