[whack]

For anyone else who's as confused as I initially was: Google Drive allows unlimited storage for anything stored as "google docs". Ie, their version of Word. This hack works by converting your binary files into base64 encoded text, and then storing the text in collection of google-doc files.

Ie, it's actually increasing the amount of storage space needed to store the same binary, but it's getting around the drive-quota by storing it in a format that has no quota.

[markstos]

Seems like a good way to earn yourself a Terms-of-Service ban.

If this considered an abuse-of-services now, the terms could be updated to clarify.

The finger print of big chunks of base-64 encoded blobs in Google Docs could be easy to spot.

If Google cares to notice this and take action, they can and will.

[jerf]

It's an arms race situation. Once you give me an information channel like a "word document", I've got an endless variety of ways to encode other things into it. I can encode bits as English sentences or other things that will be arbitrarily hard to pick up by scanning.

If I were Google, I wouldn't try to pick up on the content, I'd be looking for characteristic access patterns. It's harder to catch uploads, since "new account uploads lots of potentially large documents" isn't something you can immediately block, but "oh, look, here's several large files that are always accessed in consecutive order very quickly" would be harder to hide. It's still an arms race after that (e.g., "but what if I access them really slowly?"), but while Google would find a hard time conclusively winning this race in the technical sense, they can win enough that this isn't fun or a cost-effectively technique anymore (e.g. "then you're getting your files really slowly, so where's the fun in that?"), which is close enough to victory for them.

So, I'd say, enjoy it while you can. If it gets big enough to annoy, it'll get eliminated.

[imtringued]

They can just throttle access to Google documents to something like 4 GB per hour and then block obvious abuses. If people start encoding bits as English sentences they are reducing the amount of useful data they can download within an hour which is exactly what you want.

[jerf]

"They can just throttle access to Google documents to something like 4 GB per hour"

No, that's not likely to work. I'm sure there's far more legitimate users using 4GB of documents per hour than abusers right now. You have to remember things like bulk downloading, bulk scanning, bulk backing-up, shared automated accounts doing all sorts of legit things, etc. are all legitimate use cases. You can't just throw out all "big uses" or your enterprise customers are going to pitch a fit, and that's a bigger problem than people abusing your storage for a while.

(Those things will still have different access patterns than abusers, but thinking about how that will manifest and could be detected is an good exercise for the reader.)

[Someone]

I would guess those enterprise users pay for Google docs, and could be exempted from throttling on that basis.

If they don’t, Google wouldn’t lose much by throttling them, would they?

[dymk]

> So, I'd say, enjoy it while you can.

I'd say most certainly do not try this. Do you want to loose access to your gmail, maps, contacts, whatever else you rely on Google for, because you were found abusing google drive?

[beatgammit]

Why not just start counting Google Doc sizes as part of the quota? That would solve the whole problem, right?

[magashna]

Seems like more of a "can" rather than anyone actually using it. Always interesting to see how something can be broken or exploited, even though it may not be practical

[0xDEFC0DE]

I doubt it's actually unlimited behind-the-scenes and you'll hit a hidden quota for your account type or get throttled down to dozens of KB/s.

[jfengel]

I wonder why they do that. It seems to me like it would be more effort to leave the Google Docs files out of their calculation, and with no real benefit. For conventional use of Google Docs it would be hard to use a significant amount of disk space, so it's not like users would be clamoring for additional space.

Perhaps it's just marketing, trying to prize people away from Microsoft Office with a thing that doesn't actually cost them all that much?

[whack]

> Perhaps it's just marketing, trying to prize people away from Microsoft Office with a thing that doesn't actually cost them all that much?

Exactly. Never underestimate how much people love something being "free", even if only costs a fraction of a cent.