New Service Converts Torrents Into PNG Images

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."

Comments

4chan banned similiar images

[Pingh]

A while ago it was a common thread on 4chan to have torrents hidden within rar files appended to jpgs. This lead to massive amount of virus infected files being uploaded. 4chan banned images that it could detect rar headers within. I can imagine similar practices would be up and about on other image boards as well.

Re:Why not just use slashdot instead?

[elashish14]

Parent is wise. It would be easy for any image hosting site to detect something like this. They would just have to scan it as they receive it. Nobody wins when you just encode it using a simple straightforward and one-time algorithm.

What the authors need to do is provide some sort of key to decoding the torrent file. Instead of creating an entire image of it, they should instead take a standard image, and use some cypher method that would slightly distort the it (blur, stretch, etc.) in some way that would allow recovery of the torrent data. Then it wouldn't be obvious to the naked eye and you could just post the information necessary to decode the information from some other location. But is this worth the effort when torrents are still easy to find? Probably not yet, but in the future it may be.