Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonwoodson | Hacker News Reader

That’s 2,598 tweets to transmit a single megabyte.

So, if I wanted to tweet the movie Spaceballs, encoded at 4K UHD (20MB/s), I estimate that I will need to make 20,945,455 tweets.

Twitter limits the posts made by nobodys (like me) to 2,400 tweets per day… so, it is going to take me just under 24 years to complete my task.

I’d better get started.

View on HN

You can fit much more in a single tweet!

You can do that with base64 + gzip + (and that’s the important one) _wrapping the content in a url_.

Here’s pong (3.5kb) stored in a single tweet: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1316836397903474688?s=2...

Source: I was bored, curious if I could turn twitter into a CDN

If/when we get an edit button, I feel like twitter could be a CDN and a CMS. Could make a "severless" blog that is just hijacking Twitter's server. Comments and media hosting built in!

There's no need to edit or delete. Treat Twitter as a changes feed. Encode your editions and deletions as new tweets.

Git on Twitter then

A Twit-chain, if you will

Delete this comment now before you have a dozen offers from various VCs.

You can fit much more into a tweet if you consider image data, too.

Problem is that there's no guarantee that twitter won't apply lossy transformations to your data (in fact, it's guaranteed that it does). So either you would have to encode the data with lots of redundancy and/or error correction, or you have to encode in like, QR code or something similar, and rely on image recognition to extract it.

Inside the range of characters support by twitter, your data is "guaranteed" to not change

In 2018 people discovered that Twitter would recompress images but leave the embedded ICC profile, if present, intact, and used that to make a Twitter-surviving JPEG+ZIP polyglot[1], although that got patched out once someone used it as a C&C channel[2]. Apparently that still worked (and was utilized for the same purpose) on Steam user profiles in 2021[3].

[1] https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1057042085029822464

[2] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/18/l/cybercriminal...

[3] https://twitter.com/miltinh0c/status/1392944896760238080

This technique is still fully functional: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/tweetable-polyglot-png

Or the 1000 characters of the Alt tag. Since you can have multiple images per tweet, your limit just jumped without having to worry about images getting edited.

Or just transmit a url to the media on some site,ipfs,.onion,etc...

I don't know their use case but I was thinking more for malware command-and-control and red teaming.

One of the funniest encoding things I've ever seen is Shrek encoded to just under 8 MB (128x72, 8 FPS, with audio! Actually understandable to watch, if only just barely). With this that would look to be 21,655 tweets or, using the API to post base65536 tweets, 14,888 tweets.

At 2,400 tweets per day that's just over 9 days for base2048 or just under a week for base65536. Doable!

Well you don't have to use such a decadent encoding! If you aim to upload 10 seconds a day you could be done in a year and a half. 900KB can handle 10 seconds just fine, especially with a cutting-edge codec.

Ib4 some masochist makes a streaming platform that uses twitter as a backend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com