Everyone knows how hard it is to find a good cloud storage service. The 'quality' options count their gigabytes on the fingers of one hand, and those that promise infinite space end up changing their minds sooner or later. The only exception to the rule is YouTube... as long as we store video. So, how hard would it be to encode our data into a video file to back it up on YouTube? The Infinite Storage Glitch project has the answer.
Storing data on alternative media is nothing new, so to speak. Audio cassettes were an essential resource for home computer users in the '80s, but solutions like the Danmere Backer, which used VHS tapes (or any other similar format) and video signals to save files. These days, the combination of hard drives and solid state absorbed everything, and the possibility of "store data in video" became irrelevant... or maybe not?
The key here is YouTube, which offers infinite storage for our videos. So... how crazy does it sound to use YouTube as a cloud backup? The user DvorakDwarf on GitHub decided to find the answer with his project Infinite Storage Glitch.
Infinite Storage Glitch: YouTube as a Cloud Hard Drive
https://www.youtube.com/embed/8I4fd_Sap-gInfinite Storage Glitch is a program that allows us to embed/attach any type of file within a video that survives YouTube's compression. The technical explanation is relatively simple: The bytes of a file are interpreted as numbers from 0 to 255. And that number can in turn be represented with pixels using one of two modes, RGB or binary.
An RGB pixel contains three bytes at once, and would be a much faster and more efficient solution... but YouTube's compression is ruthless. The binary representation offers more resistance to compression corruption, though it's not perfect either. DvorakDwarf's trick was to increase the size of the pixels to 2x2 blocks. The video invites us to compile the program from source (there will be Windows-compatible binaries later) and extract the hidden files. The author promises it's not just a rickroll...
Now, the bad news: On one hand, ISG is very inefficient, and the final video size will be four times larger than the files we're trying to back up. And on the other hand, YouTube's terms of use could mark these videos as spam. I imagine someone will put it to the test...
Official site: Click here. Source: Hackaday.
