There should be a contest: Who can find the most implausible data storage medium? (Rated according to various criteria such as ingenuity, reliability, max. data read/write rates, latency, storage size, costs…)
Convert data to binary. Use Amazon Mechanical Turk API to create tasks for people to remember the index of each bit (the value of the task would be $0.01 for binary 0 and $0.02 for binary 1). And, for reading memory, a new task to input the index they remembered and the value they were paid.
You'd have to factor in a ton of redundancy to account for the human bits who just got bored and wandered off.
Anyway, people would probably just start saving the bits on this computers after first job or two. Which would be an amusing result for being just a convoluted interface to a remote hard drive, but it's conceptually less interesting then actually using distributed human memory as a digital storage medium...
you could structure it such that the longer they sit there remembering the data, the more they get paid. When they want to leave, they enter what they remember and get paid.
To get reliable and free storage, photo hosting is usually the easiest way. Flickr offers 1TB, picasa/g+ offers unlimited storage with some hidden quoats. Everything that allows lossless photos lets you store arbitrary data. Depending on how careful you wanna be you can store hundreds of GBs per account.
Email attachments used to be a great way a while ago but nowadays using multiple gdrive/dropbox/onedrive accounts is much easier.
They are easy to create in large numbers (especially if your ISP has dynamic IPS) and as long as you're even a little bit careful, nearly impossible to ban. Add some redundancy across different services to that and a $2 VPS that gives you tons of upload bandwidth and you've got yourself as many TBs of free,fast and reliable online storage as you want.
I spent so much time as a teenager with no money and some python skills coding storage solutions like that. I'd say it was to store movies and tv shows for myself but in retrospect I mostly did it because it was so much fun to develop.
Video hosting (i.e. YouTube) is another potential repository for massive amounts of data.
Combine that with the fact that data which is encrypted looks practically like static, and you could potentially overlay it on top of an existing video of something mundane.
You'd need to use strong ECC to get past the lossy encoding, but as things like QR codes show, that is not so hard.
I thought it was only lossy if the originals you uploaded were >16MP. I tested uploading some <16MP images and redownloading them, and they didn't seem to have undergone any lossy conversion.
I've done similar with images for the fun of it. The simplest solution that I recall finding was to base64 the file/data, then turn to hex, then use those hex data to create pixels in RGB. I would line them up top-left to bottom-right.
Probably not the most efficient but easy and fast and the resulting images would look... interesting. For large files, the decoding would be difficult mostly just due to reading the image of so many pixels into memory. So, that's when I began fixing the image size to a smaller size and having multiple images that I would later convert to 60fps video. I could then use ffmpeg to convert images to frames and frames back to images.
I had no practical use for this but, was a fun project on a rainy afternoon.
Yeah, I wrote something that stores data to Flickr last summer: https://github.com/namwen/hoardr . I kind of had a reason but it was more for the enjoyment of getting it to work.
Until this gets so popular that Google or Flickr start to analyse photos, and come to the conclusion to either delete those photos and videos, or to convert them and destroying the data for you. Then, years later, you need your backup and ....
", he became convinced of something he came to call the Dust Theory, which holds that there is no difference, even in principle, between physics and mathematics, and that all mathematically possible structures exist, among them our physics and therefore our spacetime. These structures are being computed, in the manner of a program on a universal Turing machine, using something Durham refers to as "dust" which is a generic, vague term describing anything which can be interpreted to represent information; and therefore, that the only thing that matters is that a mathematical structure be self-consistent and, as such, computable. As long as a mathematical structure is possibly computable, then it is being computed on some dust, though it does not matter what dust actually is, only that there be a possible interpretation where such a computation is taking place somehow. The dust theory implies, as such, that all possible universes exist and are equally real, emerging spontaneously from their own mathematical self-consistency."
While I'm not sure every number is in pi (see my other comment to grandparent), there is a similar really weird feeling I get when I consider all digital data is really just numbers. That means there is a number, that when turned into a .avi (or format of your choice), shows anything you can imagine. Imagine yourself talking with Plato. There is a number that produces a 1080p video of you doing just that. Actually, there are a lot of numbers that do that, as every little difference in the setting would be a different number.
There is a number that produces a high def photo of when you married your high school sweetheart, even if you never actually married her. There is one of you being awarded the Nobel prize. If there is a proof that P = NP, or that it doesn't, or even a proof that it can't be proven either way, then there is a number that would be the PDF version of that document.
Oh no! I sketched up a script to gzip the chunks, hashsum them, and then find out how many collisions there are before the real occurrence starting from an approximate address in the PI digits chain, so that I could have: ($address*1e12)$hash$collisioncount
The resulting string is 10% of size of the gzipped string, at the expense of CPU. But when I read you achieved 100% compression I just deleted the script and got out to get a beer. :-(((
Also, assuming that it is, if 'start as position X and read Y bits from pi' produced an illegal image (top secret document, abuse images, etc), what would be the legality of trading such information?
Combining steganography with Reddit could be interesting. Random (mildly interesting) photos pushed to imgur and posted to /r/pics by the same user every time.
A stenographed image embedded in a Word document, printed and faxed to a document archive that scans and digitizes it, embeds the scan in a PDF, and emails it back to you.
Erasure-coded comments distributed across the huge number of abandoned Wordpress blogs and phpBB forums that are out there. Plenty of storage, pretty readily accessible, low probability that even one fragment will get deleted, and even if one does that's what the erasure coding is for.
EDIT: also, Wikipedia never deletes anything. Even if your "edits" get reverted, you can still find them via the history page. Hmmm.
deleted pages are not visible to people with less than sysop rights (on enwp), and multiple methods are always available to deal with troublesome people, ranging from revision deletion to blocks and eventually ISP contact.
Usenet messages and mail systems are both good old ideas (I don't know of any actual implementation, but it's certainly been discussed at least back to the early 90's).
For Usenet you could depend on widespread resilien distribution + reasonably long retention periods for a lot of groups (but risked having messages killed by admins if too obvious spam).
For e-mail, anything reflecting your e-mail back can be used to juggle data: Send messages with attachment, refuse to accept the inbound reflected messages for a couple of days to let the other party store the data for you while they retry, then accept the message and instantly send it back out again.
Then there's the old Linus Torvalds quote:
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
Usenet is perfect for that since binary newsgroups for piracy have gotten really popular over the last few years. You can basically use it as a reasonably reliable key-value store that lets you store 300kb to 1mb blobs. Add some encryption and parity and you've got yourself nearly unlimited storage, even for free if you use trial accounts from certain providers.
Yeah, I remember reading about the e-mail reflection idea in the book "Silence on the wire", authored by "lcamtuf", the guy who's more recently known for writing afl-fuzz.
How about just a project that implements an S3-style directory system, with a "fill in the blank" for you to implement the storage backend?
That is, for a given storage medium, all you have to do is implement methods for "write key-value pair" and "read value at key", and you get to piggyback off that medium for your storage.
Interesting about DNS stores is they save a round trip, so it's not just a weird abuse of the protocol to store content, it's also potentially a performance optimisation.
I'd love to exploit ad networks user profiles for this. I.e., store some bits as "interests", by running a few appropriate google searches or hitting a few web sites, read the bits by seeing what ads you're served. This would probably require a bit of learning and a redundant encoding to make it work, but...
I had a few in mind when I was back in uni and hosting and cloud storage prices were still up.
I hadn't thought of reddit, as the abuse would be clearly visible, but I had used back then that Gmail Drive some guy had implemented using emails for storage, and it led me to think a lot of the Google Systems had non-obvious "unlimited" storage options.
For instance, I don't know if that's still the case, but Google Calendar surely seemed pretty fit for abuse: while calendar entries were limited in size, you could have as many as you wanted. And calendars can be private, so it's even better.
The problem with such systems will be the integrity of your data, when you start being forced to chunk things up. If they change one thing under your feet, you're a bit screwed. Also you have to detect all the undocumented pitfalls (e.g. forbidden characters in an edit field).