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New Service Converts Torrents Into PNG Images

Posted by Soulskill on from the pretty-useful-pictures dept.

jamie points out that a new web service, hid.im, will encode a torrent into a PNG image file, allowing it to be shared easily through forums or image hosting sites. Quoting TorrentFreak: "We have to admit that the usefulness of the service escaped us when we first discovered the project. So, we contacted Michael Nutt, one of the people running the project to find out what it's all about. 'It is an attempt to make torrents more resilient,' Michael told [us]. 'The difference is that you no longer need an indexing site to host your torrent file. Many forums will allow uploading images but not other types of files.' Hiding a torrent file inside an image is easy enough. Just select a torrent file stored on your local hard drive and Hid.im will take care the rest. The only limit to the service is that the size of the torrent file cannot exceed 250KB. ... People on the receiving end can decode the images and get the original .torrent file through a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers."

7 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. The race is on... by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    The.Black.Hole.1979.dvdrip.xvid.torrent -> goatse.png
    ... you know you want to.

    .

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    Trolling is a art,
  2. Re:What? by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    It's hidden in their header png.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  3. Re:Still limited by lxs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obviously you have never visited 4chan.

  4. PNGs?! by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Funny

    OMG, who uses PNG files?! The compression routine is rubbish! I'm going to use this technology, but I'm going to convert the files to JPEG before I upload them. When people see how much smaller the file is that they have to download, they'll quickly move over to my way of thinking.

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    Summation 2
  5. Re:Still limited by tooyoung · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hosting a bunch of images doesn't do any good unless you have a text (or at least searchable) description of what you're downloading. Without context, warehoused information is useless.

    Yes, someone should invent a method for posting images on the internet and associating text with them.

  6. Re:Why bother to hide it at all? by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 5, Funny

    And if the xxAA gets the torrent from the image, they're illegally circumventing a technical protection measure!

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    Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
  7. Re:Why not just use slashdot instead? by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anyone can then use slashdot's search feature

    I take it you've never actually tried to use slashdot's search function.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)