Long before there was dropbox, I used to claim my backup solution was to use steganography and place my data inside porn pictures that I would upload.<p>Then I could just use google to find my backups distributed all across the net.<p>You might be looking at my 2007 Quicken files even now!
Some numbers on this:<p>A standard-quality .avi is about 800MB. Base64 provides 6 bits of information per character, so that movie translates into ~8M tweets. Twitter seems to limit users to 1k messages per day,[0] so that movie would take about 22 years to upload.<p>[0] <a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364-about-twitter-limits-update-api-dm-and-following" rel="nofollow">https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364-about-twitter-lim...</a>
One interesting thing about this is the question of what is a file. Depending upon how Twitter stores a tweet, does a file actually exist at their location, or only a stream of information? Under current DMCA what would they be asked to remove X number of tweets in a row? If decoded and a copyright holder (provided there is one) notices, does he have to submit 155 claims/takedown notices? What if that information is broken up, chunked and some agreed upon pattern is used ie every 3rd tweet is garbage etc?
One of the more interesting chapters in the Steve Jobs book discusses the time when Jobs finally convinced the recording industry that piracy wasn't necessarily a problem because people want free stuff (though that is a portion of it) but that it was simply easier than the alternatives. (In the case of the music industry at the time, every label had their own solution and they were all a pain to use.)<p>This experiment (and other humorous examples like this: <a href="http://datenform.de/blog/dead-drops-preview" rel="nofollow">http://datenform.de/blog/dead-drops-preview</a>) displays the complexity of trying to prevent piracy by fighting it. If a critical mass of people want something and there isn't a convenient way to get it, alternatives will arise.<p>Life... er... pirates will always find a way.
Why limit yourself to Base64? Twitter supports Unicode quite well. The 140 character limit is actually counted using normalized Unicode code points[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/docs/counting-characters" rel="nofollow">https://dev.twitter.com/docs/counting-characters</a>
The question in the end is who is responsible for the 'file.' MegaUpload was shutdown because they are being targeted as the responsible party. Most sites like YouTube and others have convinced the necessary parties that they are not responsible.<p>Once a file is broken down into multiple parts and scattered throughout, can you be held responsible for hosting parts of files? how large does the 'part' have to be to be held responsible? what happens if a file is split into parts and posted on pastebin + github + blogs and a trackers are used to manage and build the files again?<p>The only thing taking down megaupload will do is create new means to allow sharing to occur.
Why not just tweet magnet links instead? Surely that's better than killing Twitter with base64 encoded files? Especially images where you already have twitpic and the like.<p>It's an interesting idea, but I don't see what you could do with it that you can't already do better with other services.
With some regular expression magic I extracted the data from Twitter, however, the data was in the wrong order. With this command in Linux, I reversed the order and decoded the data:<p>tac twitData.txt | base64 -d -i > image.jpg<p>I've uploaded the image here:<p><a href="http://iqsecur.blogspot.com/2012/01/sending-files-using-twitter.html" rel="nofollow">http://iqsecur.blogspot.com/2012/01/sending-files-using-twit...</a><p>However, it seems there is an error in the image, I'm not sure if it is the process itself or the image actually has an error. A reverse search resulted in 0 results, so I'm inclined to believe the former.
I really don't understand what the author is trying to prove here. Countless sites let people upload and share free-form information (a few that come to mind: Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook) in ways that would be much easier for pirates to use than Twitter, and none of them are going to get shut down any time soon.<p>Yes, shutting down Megaupload and its kin isn't going to stop piracy. But I don't think that was ever the goal. As long as it reduces piracy by some measurable amount, which I think it will, then the censors will have succeeded.
I can't find it but I remember something that sent messages like this over Facebook chat and then, on the other end, the software pieced it all together to show the image that was transferred. Anyone else remember this? It was a video so it might be on YouTube.
To this extent, why not just turn twitter into a torrent tracker? tweet out something like: <torrent id> + <seeder information>. You could then just perform a tweet search for that torrent id, and you'd get all the seeders in return.
Comment on publishing platform, not content: Instead of using pastebin.com, use <a href="http://pen.io" rel="nofollow">http://pen.io</a> (for example PAGENAME.pen.io -- no account required, and you can edit if you have the password to the page, however you can't format the text) or <a href="http://hackpad.com" rel="nofollow">http://hackpad.com</a> (account registration is quick and you can format your text).