TinyDisk, A File System on Someone Else's Web App

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:04AM from the all-your-byte-are-belong-to-us dept.

Psy writes "I attended Phreaknic this weekend where Acidus released TinyDisk, a shared file system that runs on top of TinyURL or his own implementation NanoURL. TinyDisk compresses a file, encrypts it, and dices it into clusters. Each cluster is submitted to TinyURL as if it were a url. This clusters can be read back out of the database, making TinyDisk a global file system anyone can use. There are safeguards in the default config to prevent people from dumping gigs of MP3s into TinyURL. While file-system-on-web-applications are nothing new (GMail file system anyone?) this hack shows how easy it is to accidentally design a web application insecurely despite the default PHP protections. See his presentation for more info"

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Furthur Compression by hoshino · 2005-10-25 00:30 · Score: 5, Interesting

I noticed that the whole of Alice in Wonderland is compressed to just 20 clusters and each cluster is represented by the five-letter keys used by TinyURL. So is it not possible, using the same method, to reduce the entire metafile (which is merely a textfile of less than 1kB) into a single-line URL? Then you can have the program retrieve the metafile from the URL and the actual file from the metafile. So instead of sending people a metafile, you can just copy and paste them one line of URL.