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Storing Very Large Files On Amazon's Unlimited Cloud Photo Storage

Posted by timothy on from the computers-don't-feel-cognitive-dissonance dept.

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.

6 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Timothy's Revenge by Nethead · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. I wrote about this possibility last year by bsmuir · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here is my research...

    Steganography & Amazon Cloud Drive:

    http://bsmuir.kinja.com/stegan...

  3. same data 1 year later? by pz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:This is why by ImprovOmega · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re: This is why by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the camera that takes 1.44gb photos is something that I might actually be interested in.

    Here it is.

  6. Re: This is why by tburkhol · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.