Infinite-Storage-Glitch – Use YouTube as cloud storage for any files

Literally the modern equivalent of the old video-based backup systems. I remember they existed for both the PC and the Amiga. You would load a blank VHS tape into a VCR, connect the output of the computer to that VCR&#x27;s input, and then tell the program which data you&#x27;d like to backup to the tape. It would generate this flashing &quot;mess&quot; of black and white pixels that you&#x27;d record to the tape. To restore, you&#x27;d connect the VCR output to a little box that came with the product, it would convert the black and white data in the video signal to a data stream that the program would use to restore your data.<p>A portion of the signal would be used for timing, metadata and error correction, so the program could tell you if the data was sufficiently damaged upon restore.<p>LGR has a video on the PC version from Danmere: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;TUS0Zv2APjU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;TUS0Zv2APjU</a><p>Here&#x27;s a video example of the Amiga industry&#x27;s take on the idea: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;VcBY6PMH0Kg?t=573" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;VcBY6PMH0Kg?t=573</a><p>Sony even did this in 1980 to record CD-quality PCM audio onto VHS tape. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;bnZFLzBO3yc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;bnZFLzBO3yc</a>

This is why I really like HN...<p>(IMO there is not enough of these posts, and getting less over time.)<p>A refreshing &quot;actual hacker&quot; project that makes me look anew at the tools I always use...<p>So, my coffee maker is sending data to the net - maybe I can use that for backup, and have it replicated both in the fridge and in the living room lights...<p>But how would I retrieve that? Hmm. I assume that both Alexa and Google assistant are tracking everything that goes through my IoT devices. I&#x27;ll ask GPT how to hack my Nest device to pull back data on demand, that oughta work, surely?! :D

Previously on &#x27;Esoteric Filesystem Week&#x27;:<p>0. Linux&#x27;s SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34818040" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34818040</a> by rbanffy 3 days ago, 70 points, 73 comments<p>1. TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34847611" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34847611</a> by pps 1 day ago, 961 points, 185 comments<p>2. Vramfs – GPU VRAM based file system for Linux <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34855134" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34855134</a> by pabs3 1 day ago, 226 points, 71 comments

It isn&#x27;t exactly a &quot;glitch&quot;, just something Google doesn&#x27;t care about (but absolutely will care about if too many people start doing it).<p>I remember way back in the day someone came up with a clever way of using Gmail attachments to build a cloud storage drive mounted to your filesystem. Then Google themselves released Drive soon after.

Nice, until Google introduces a new compression algorithm that says: hey this looks like noise, let&#x27;s replace it by this other user&#x27;s noise so we can save on storage costs.

I like the novelty of this project, but if you value your Google account I wouldn&#x27;t try this out.<p>Google has been known to close accounts and &quot;related&quot; accounts for abuse (as defined by them). So even if you create another account, don&#x27;t expect your main account to survive if there&#x27;s any possible link between them.<p>They are the judge, jury and executor, so eff around at your own peril.

I wrote something just like this with Discord, and I even got it to host full videos which you can play back in browser. It&#x27;s a good backup service. [0]<p>I want to expand this in into a fully modular service that you write payloads and scripts for various services, so when you upload a file its spread out across many different providers. When you&#x27;re downloading, you just go down the list check what still exists, and verify the checksum. This should be stable for many years.<p>I plan to take a look into facebook and see what can&#x2F;cant be accessed there. I had this exact thought with youtube and thought about using a pixel reader to exact out data. Same idea for different image hosting services like imgur.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;5ut&#x2F;DiskCord">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;5ut&#x2F;DiskCord</a>

I&#x27;ve observed that with any piece technology where you&#x27;re permitted to write &#x2F; upload information and freely access it afterwards, someone will attempt to (ab)use it for file storage and write a blog article about it later :)<p>My favorite example of this was people storing files in &quot;secret&quot; subreddits by using posts and comments to store bytes. When they were later discovered by other users, the seemingly random strings sparked a huge conspiracy about their possible meaning.<p>However, you always have the problem that your unwilling host may remove your &quot;files&quot;. I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output format that can&#x27;t be distinguished from normal user interactions.

One of the things I’ve successfully used YouTube for was video storage of my security camera system. Unlimited video storage with a simple app to watch them in case I need to check something out!<p>And it’s simple: camera uploads automatically via FTP, inotifywait script uploads to google!

haha this is so cool, i made something similar <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;punkjazz.org&#x2F;scrambled-eggs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;punkjazz.org&#x2F;scrambled-eggs&#x2F;</a> few years ago to explore transferring files directly through the camera so nobody can &quot;see&quot; what you download, because no packets go through the internet, i managed to do 10kbps or so<p>the modern qr readers are so fast and easy to use, its unbelievable

Yeah, who would abuse a free service to store their personal files?<p>Data Block: c3828abe<p>c5cfe61f4e61c9eda05e39903df580566859708a52957754e06fd18feaceca5ec0cdcac4b24b0f9ac8d9f212301916ea9ebcb2e291e2e950e0118f150c8cde02 34e770773cb93d6f1b757098890475cb00bef5ca4275c51021118ac1f01b71db3604063fd945480afc6b6b5b8d125129f7a9813a4997bdea27bbe5f6c17abfeb f46309c93430f78d37d23c0ef646cf7796e6de2b072d771b35b832a5b5328d1c09c5d32eaf6309b3119e8468ed02f62cd4b25c6785792ec82edc72667da8e36e 3b7b0d22fd708f5a3ff4787bf9474f84dff52fe33a38f4b4fee6759498b38d2c3af01db8d3dc5b1bb1cf6d203f24a4f6016caf42ad5cac76d1b0a0bf01a435b0 54a288c7cf9859dde401af51685eef23661ff0102a94caab2df9bf298c07538885baec81576513b9a7591d429db24b221c071cf0d929308243b0af4535810052

Video steganography might be a better approach and would be less likely to trigger account banning or claims of abuse by the hosters. The issue of avoiding data loss due to lossy compression algorithms seems to be an active area of research:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jis-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.1186&#x2F;s13635-022-00130-z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jis-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.118...</a><p>&gt; &quot;Moreover, most video-sharing channels transmit the steganographic video in a lossy way to reduce transmission bandwidth or storage space, such as YouTube and Twitter. . . Robust video steganography aims to send secret messages to the receiver through lossy channels without arousing any suspicions from the observer. Thus, the robustness against lossy channels, the security against steganalysis, and the embedding capacity are equally important.&quot;<p>I suppose in this project, the blocks of pixels are large enough to avoid data loss due to compression?

You could do this with any service which accepts user content. You could have a tumblr blog focused on “paranormal phenomenon in white noise images” and fill it full of data embedded in images. If anyone ever asks you just explain that like many pattern illusions not everyone can see images contained within - try squinting, or covering the eye on the predominant side of your body, stand on your head, blah blah blah.

I understand that the goal is to make the data survive video compression, but wouldn&#x27;t it make sense to use at least some color information instead of entirely black and white pixels?

This reminds me of a stupid idea I had: would it theoretically be possible to store data using the backbone of the Internet itself? You&#x27;d bounce packets (probably TCP) back and forth between two hosts with bytes that aren&#x27;t actually written to a disk anywhere so they just exist as a stream until one end decides to copy a section for itself.

This was posted 2 days ago also (but received very little attention): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34850643" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34850643</a>

This is bound to get you banned. I would do it a little bit more clever (with lower bitrate&#x2F;throughput&#x2F;storage sizes)...<p>Encode the data inside audio, preferrably outside human audible range, and then use a nice video of singing birds, or whales talking, and use the &quot;hidden&quot; frequencies to hide the data.<p>I don&#x27;t know if Youtube has any filters that cut out frequencies, but this way they can&#x27;t ban you, since you&#x27;ve uploaded a really nice personal video of your singing birds, instead of the conspicuous looking QR-like codes as in the OP ;-)

Do this at you own risk, ive done this with lidar data (which didnt need to be as persice as binary, which is what im seeing in this post) which worked fine. 3 years later i revisited the project and it was broken because youtube compressed the files in such a way where it made the lidar just innaccurate enough to be unusable. I cant imagine storing data in binary where just one bit wrong screws everything

I have many old videos that have lost their &quot;HD&quot; encoding, and now look like potato vision. I no longer (silly that I did) trust YouTube for video storage.

Until Google bans your account completely across all services with no means for appeal.

Using video formats to store other data has a long history.<p>ADAT for example.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ADAT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ADAT</a>

Nice work! I made a much worse variant of this years ago, with a “mosaic” mode[1]: whatever YouTube was doing for compression at the time handled multiple QRs tiled next to each other much better than it did a single large one.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;woodruffw-hackathons&#x2F;where-tube">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;woodruffw-hackathons&#x2F;where-tube</a>

Off topic<p>Does YouTube let you store unlimited video content (real video like screen recordings etc of our own work - no shady or sneaky stuff, nor any copyrighted stuff etc)<p>With all videos marked private ...so they are just &quot;storage&quot; by account owner and no other users can access them and youtube cannot monetize it ?

Hmmm I’m not convinced.<p>I had a good look into these sorts of technologies but the host almost always changes the file so it makes it impossible to retrieve the data hidden in the file.<p>You need a file hosting platform that guarantees not to change the uploaded file.<p>How does this avoid such problems ?

Thank you for making this! I had the exact same idea quite some time ago but had neither the skills nor the passion to actually create it.<p>Seeing it come to life has just scratched a long forgotten itch and damn it feels great.

It&#x27;d be cool to add a FUSE wrapper around this. At one point I had a POC for a few of these sorts of things going (not as cool as this project, just data stored to X free cloud store&#x2F;metadata) and creating a redundant transparent FUSE wrapper was probably the next step. With multiple sources, you could even treat mux data between slow&#x2F;unreliable sources (content hosts in eg russia or asia) to &#x27;stripe&#x27; the data. And then, you could make these modular so that new sources could be onboarded easily...<p>Yeah, I really like this stuff. Awesome project.

This has been done many times in the past, one popular tool: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dzhang314&#x2F;YouTubeDrive">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dzhang314&#x2F;YouTubeDrive</a>

People do this all the time with any web connected service that accepts data. People use open strings in AWS services, like lambda function names, to store arbitrary bits.

&gt; Unfortunately no filesystem functionality as of right now<p>I chuckled because of my own thought that seek (FS call) can be implemented via youtube video seeking

Using this can get your google account and related IP addresses banned? Isn&#x27;t this sort of a Vandalism? But why attack Youtube out of all places? Do it to TikTok instead. They won&#x27;t notice the difference(LOL). I would&#x27;ve said &quot;delete this&quot; normally but today&#x27;s political climate demands more free space on the internet per individual definitely so...

Reminds me of Gmail Drive from years ago, where you could use your Gmail space as a virtual file system.

This looks like a fun project to tinker around with. I have one small request. The pack file in the repo is 146MB. Is there a way to make that smaller on github?<p><pre><code> pack-5d55e1f4809a8dae84591bc04b019b2ae8137f77.pack 146M</code></pre>

Interesting to note that how black and white pixels get compressed less and thus make for easier restoration. It would be interesting to generate a 512x512 QR code that changes every 3 frames to see how well that would work for recovering data.

I wonder if you could get a better pixels&#x2F;bit ratio when using DCT&#x2F;2DFFT based encoding since you&#x27;d still encode lower frequency data but it would be in a format that compression algorithms would also try to maintain.

&quot; I still don&#x27;t condone using this tool for anything serious&#x2F;large. YouTube might understandably get mad.&quot;<p>I do love these kinds of hacks, but I hate these kind of weaselly cop-out statements. You made the tool, own it!

I feel like this is overcomplicating things. You should be able to download the original video you uploaded instead of downloading a compressed version. I&#x27;m sure the uncompressed version still exists.

Dumb yet interesting idea, but if you care your data you should put it on google especially you are abusing their service, if you do not care why you even waste your time doing all this except for fun.

I immediately remembered <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ArVid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ArVid</a>

Or I could get the bytes data then create a really big hash table, boom have discovered a glitch in the simulation

This is hilarious

The real trick would be to monetize the resulting videos so you get paid every time you access your storage.

It could probably be hidden in a normal-looking video using steganography. Lower effective bitrate of course.

THAT is 1337!<p>A true hacker spirit worthy of Captain Crunch whistle and its application toward free payphone calls.

i would&#x27;ve save this &quot;improvement&quot; for my own project, but consider using colours instead of just black and white squares for higher data density! i am unsure how much compression can affect its effectiveness.

&gt; written entirely in Rust my beloved<p>jesus christ enough with the jerking

This would be really impressive with some stenography.

if only somebody wrote client for personal backblaze backup (which is also unlimited), can&#x27;t easily store terabytes from my linux PCs

&quot;You want to try some snowcrash?&quot;

after your finals, you should read about forward error correction.

they&#x27;re here...<p>nice end of transmission simulator to boot!

please find better uses of your time. this is such an obvious abuse.