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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."
The.Black.Hole.1979.dvdrip.xvid.torrent -> goatse.png
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Trolling is a art,
It's hidden in their header png.
Trolling is a art,
Obviously you have never visited 4chan.
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.
Summation 2
Here's an example. It's the OpenOffice.org 3.1.0 win32 torrent taken from the OO.o site.
I don't get why they can't just use the old trick of hiding a zip file in an image file.
Seems simpler, technology-wise, to me than encoding a torrent file as a PNG image, and all you would have to do to get the torrent file is change the extension on the file. Also seems safer. Unless this trick wouldn't be possible with .torrent files, that is?
Yes, someone should invent a method for posting images on the internet and associating text with them.
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.
I built a utility that can be used for the same purpose back in april. http://cosmodro.me/blog/2009/apr/11/smuggle-improved/
It's a small flash movie that can encode files into pngs and decode them back. It's not limited to torrents, so you can encode any file that's less than about 16MB.
------- Driver carries less than 64K of cache.
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.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
And if the xxAA gets the torrent from the image, they're illegally circumventing a technical protection measure!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I take it you've never actually tried to use slashdot's search function.
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