Slashdot Mirror
Storing Very Large Files On Amazon's Unlimited Cloud Photo Storage
AmiMoJo writes: Last year Amazon started offering unlimited cloud storage for photos to customers who subscribed to its "Prime" service. Japanese user YDKK has developed a tool to store arbitrary data inside a .bmp file, which can then be uploaded to Amazon's service. A 1.44GB test image containing an executable file uploaded at over 250Mb/sec, far faster than typical cloud storage services that are rate limited and don't allow extremely large files.
First the article with the luser asking help desk question and now this with the link in Japaneses.
I think that with the new overlords Timothy has gone full honey badger on us.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Here is my research...
Steganography & Amazon Cloud Drive:
http://bsmuir.kinja.com/stegan...
Back in the day, when I worked as a dev at a social networking site, we would resample old photos that hadn't been accessed in over some threshold (let's say it was 1 year, for the sake of argument). Anything older than the threshold would get re-encoded in JPEG to a poorer representation in order to save storage space.
So what stops Amazon from doing the same thing? Do their TOS say they won't?
Non-image data under those circumstances become pretty much useless, even if packaged so that they appear to be an image of off-station TV reception. Once you include a lossy recompression, your data are no longer data, but noise for real.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
There are absolutely ways to stash file data in lossy compressed JPG files. You just have to have some knowledge of the file structure to know what bits are less significant and will mess up the file less. I personally wrote a steganography tool for JPEG-2000 files for a graduate school project - it just stored data in the least damaging sections of the file. The resultant files were still perfectly legal image files, lossy compressed, and minimally visually damaged.
Now if Amazon were to *transcode* every submission then you would be boned. But that would eat up a fair amount of overhead in processing time.
Yup, I have over 650 gigs (and growing) of 3d 1080p home videos. If my house catches fire or I'm robbed I won't lose them.
I don't get that kind if throughout though. Uploading 50 gigs of videos takes overnight and a lot of that time is a mysterious delay between the video uploads themselves. I'm guessing the glacier service can't save them fast enough and I have to wait for them to save entirely before I can move to the next video.
We, as humans dealing with other humans, assume that they will act with a modicum of sense. But there are a jillion leeches out there who don't, so it's no one's fault but ours for saying (you are) welcome to the food in my kitchen instead of the just-as-friendly you're welcome to a meal in my kitchen.
And businesses love screwing people over with fine print, so they deserve every bit of screwing over that they get from non-existent fine print.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Isn't it kind of a form of Net Neutrality for people to come up with ways to make sure that service providers can't sort and differentiate pricing for different sorts of content?
the camera that takes 1.44gb photos is something that I might actually be interested in.
Here it is.
I don't think this would be too hard to implement. If they compress the images before storing, they can just reject any "image" that fails to compress beyond some threshold. They wouldn't even necessarily need to do any screening: use a slightly lossy compression algorithm, images wouldn't look any different, but data would be useless.
If you read the full Cloud Drive Terms of Service, you'll find nothing in it that associates the word "unlimited" with "photos".
Everything they've put in writing makes it clear that you're permitted to use unlimited storage to store whatever files you like, so long as you don't resell access, use it as the backing store for another cloud service, etc. Personal use == A-OK.