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Comment by selfmodruntime | Hacker News Reader

I've observed that with any piece technology where you're permitted to write / upload information and freely access it afterwards, someone will attempt to (ab)use it for file storage and write a blog article about it later :)

My favorite example of this was people storing files in "secret" subreddits by using posts and comments to store bytes. When they were later discovered by other users, the seemingly random strings sparked a huge conspiracy about their possible meaning.

However, you always have the problem that your unwilling host may remove your "files". I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output format that can't be distinguished from normal user interactions.

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I remember when GMail was by invite only, and at the time they were offering quite a larger amount of storage for Mail than anyone else so people started using their GMail drafts to store files.

That was the first time I can across such a thing.

Someone even made an extension for Windows XP that allowed you to mount GMail as a storage volume.

> GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

GmailFS was another early implementation.

Writing the GmailFS HOWTO, and fixing a bug in the process, was my first exposure to the power of OSS. Looking back, I'm pretty sure this is what led me to persue software engineering as a career!

If you get a job at Google you might even recoup the costs of GmailFS ;)

> I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output format that can't be distinguished from normal user interactions.

You could use a reproducible LM (for instance using Bellard's NNCP as basis), and encode one bit in one word by taking the {first, second} most probable next word.

This is fascinating! And the file transfer can be then fully disguised as a conversation, with a ChatGPT-like client and all. An unsuspecting user will see a chat bot; a specialized client app would be able to receive files by talking to it.

In this modern cloud-giant world it's abused for file storage yes. But I come from the more traditional web hosting world of the early 2000s and back then the general rule was that anything that could store information online would sooner or later be used to store porn.

How about storing your files in other people's DNS caches?

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-st...

Discussed 5 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134041 (36 comments)

In completely unrelated Hacker News :

"Ask HN: What are these strange random strings spamming my blog?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34865695

Now I want to write a blog post about storing files inside of blog posts about storing files inside of blog posts …<error: recursion limit reached>

This makes me think of Turing machines which store their own code inside them selves, which you can use for all kinds of interesting proofs. I wish I could find more about this.

Look into Squeak/Smalltalk. It is an operating system/desktop/IDE with self contained compiler.

> I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output format that can't be distinguished from normal user interactions.

I guess it depends on what noise-to-signal density you’re after.

With a a long enough ChatGPT generated output, no one would question a few out of place characters or even an emoji. With 3000+ different emojis to choose from that encodes an entire byte of data.

Another idea is using “they’re”, “their”, “there” as bits.

I vaguely recall some secretive company (perhaps Apple) using adjustment of spacing, capitalization, etc. to encode a unique serial number in messages sent by the CEO, which could then be used to trace leaks.

Elon Musk was the one claiming to do it

Many people claim to do it.

It's a plot point in a Patriot Games, a 1987 Tom Clancy novel that introduced the term "canary trap" for this trick. He says he invented the term, but not the technique, which was already in use.

In a spat over the plot of Star Trek III (so, early 1980s), Harve Bennett distributed slightly different versions of the script, allowing him to track a leak back to Gene Roddenberry.

The book SpyCatcher says it was in routine use at MI-5, and you can find variations of it in lots of fiction too.

Genius.com hid the message “red-handed” in Morse code using alternating quote characters to prove that Google was displaying their lyrics.

CIA and similar have been doing that for something like 50 years. Made it into Tom Clancy novels in the 80s IIRC.

> When they were later discovered by other users, the seemingly random strings sparked a huge conspiracy about their possible meaning.

Makes me wonder if numbers stations are actually just the worlds slowest modems

Pretty easy to do that, use a fixed point implementation of GPT(N) of whatever size you like and range code your data into the model probabilities. This also will achieve a close to rate optimal embedding-- allowing you to embed about as much data as the language model thinks the text has...

If you encrypt the data and include a checksum or other identifying bytes in the ciphertext you can even have unwitting human participants in the discussions and if their posts are context your embedded data will be credible replies. You just have to be sure that threading behavior doesn't make it impossible to give the decoder identical context.

> However, you always have the problem that your unwilling host may remove your "files". I sometimes wonder about file storage using a textual output format that can't be distinguished from normal user interactions.

Well, with Chat GPT that's almost trival. POC https://imgur.com/fQvMh9S

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