New Service Converts Torrents Into PNG Images 297
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the pretty-useful-pictures dept.
from the pretty-useful-pictures dept.
jamie points out that a new web service, hid.im, will encode a torrent into a PNG image file, allowing it to be shared easily through forums or image hosting sites. Quoting TorrentFreak:
"We have to admit that the usefulness of the service escaped us when we first discovered the project. So, we contacted Michael Nutt, one of the people running the project to find out what it's all about. 'It is an attempt to make torrents more resilient,' Michael told [us]. 'The difference is that you no longer need an indexing site to host your torrent file. Many forums will allow uploading images but not other types of files.' Hiding a torrent file inside an image is easy enough. Just select a torrent file stored on your local hard drive and Hid.im will take care the rest. The only limit to the service is that the size of the torrent file cannot exceed 250KB. ... People on the receiving end can decode the images and get the original .torrent file through a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers."
If I were a congressman, what would I do? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why browser plugins? (Score:4, Interesting)
"The code is entirely open source and Michael Nutt told us that they are hoping for people to contribute to it by creating additional decoders supported by other browsers."
Ok, ok, I do understand that a browser plugin adds some convenience, but how about a stand-alone version (native executable, or maybe something like a Java, Python, Perl, or Lisp program [which would be cross-platform]), which I can just run either as a GUI, or even a command line. . .
png2torrent in.png out.torrent
(heck, the original torrent filename might be stored in the png, so you might only need to specify the input file, and optionally an output path/filename if you want to change the name or extract to a different directory).
Maybe a drag-and-drop icon on the desktop - drag the png to the icon, and it automatically creates the torrent on the desktop.
Bad metadata (Score:1, Interesting)
Alternatively (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why not rob a bank instead? (Score:3, Interesting)
4chan banned similiar images (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar to Spore (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why not just use slashdot instead? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent is wise. It would be easy for any image hosting site to detect something like this. They would just have to scan it as they receive it. Nobody wins when you just encode it using a simple straightforward and one-time algorithm.
What the authors need to do is provide some sort of key to decoding the torrent file. Instead of creating an entire image of it, they should instead take a standard image, and use some cypher method that would slightly distort the it (blur, stretch, etc.) in some way that would allow recovery of the torrent data. Then it wouldn't be obvious to the naked eye and you could just post the information necessary to decode the information from some other location. But is this worth the effort when torrents are still easy to find? Probably not yet, but in the future it may be.
Re:4chan banned similiar images (Score:4, Interesting)
Nonsense. You just run it through the exact same torrent-data-extractor process that the end-user would use.