I don't mean literally that you're an asshole. I've always enjoyed your posts, and I get that you're not acting with malice, which is a cornerstone of being an asshole :) But this is one of the core tendencies that contribute to the perception that geeks and hackers are "socially inept".
Consider the following made-up scenario, even if it is contrived. Try to avoid the urge to pick it apart on a literal basis and focus on how this breeches basic social contracts. Then consider that normal people work at Flickr, and that those people are trying to do something good for users.
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Me: This is my library. It's for storing books. You're welcome to store some of your books here as well.
You: <Starts bringing in boxes of random stuff and placing them on shelves.>
Me: Hey, what are you doing?
You: You didn't say I couldn't store random stuff here, and you haven't implemented any counter measures to prevent me from storing random stuff, so I figured it was ok.
Me: You're kind of an asshole. Did you know that?
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I'm not saying the hack isn't cool. I'm not saying the hack shouldn't exist. I'm just saying that it's OK to point out that using it might be considered a dick move.
I guess 'noise' does not a photo make.
Of course I doubt they will implement that kind of filtering, but this 'invention' is not that original/difficult/interesting, I guess.
The fact that the original designers did not say anything about this does not mean they did not envision it, by the way. Simply that they may very much either do not care or have a recovery plan.
EDIT: this is obviously easily circumvented with a lot of traffic going on but it is just a simple idea.
Jacques,
Hackernews isn't for people who hack stuff that is against the law or something like that. Why would PG want to create a site for criminals? Hackernews is for the other new generation 'hackers' (like growth hackers, design hackers) etc. Not for stuff like this.
Imagine, I rent you my apartment and you 'hack it' into a miniature casino or a drug dealership. When I rented you the apartment, I rented it to you in good faith that you wouldn't do these things. But now, you broke my trust and next time when I rent out my apartment, I would go take some extra steps like installing security cameras inside every single room of the apartment because I have to protect my apartment from unethical usage scenarios. That's the same case with Flickr. So, clearly, this is something that is destructive to someone who gives you something with a good intent. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
His speech was about how you develop something and people start using it completely different from what you imagined or even wanted. His tip: learn and take use of it.
Probably people like to have 1TB of free storage.
edit: sorry I must be on the wrong message board. Thought this would interest people. Guess I'll take my idea elsewhere.
Maybe you could hack it together with owncloud or something? I'm sorta tempted to try doing something like this but I don't want to screw flickr over.
I wonder if there's a way for GD/ImageMagick to detect the image data and strip everything else. (And if EXIF data is needed for photographs, import all non-binary EXIF data into the system first.)
"According to a study by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), major social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr remove copyright information and other useful embedded data from pictures posted by their users"
It also compresses big files though so I'm not sure if it can do it without effecting the image data and format itself.
But it won't help. You could just make your data a real image.
They could even implement that in their TOS: "whenever you upload a photo you agree to a random byte being modified on one of the pixels on the border."
Oh well, obvious 'exploit'. Wondering how Y! will react. They must've forseen this, right?
Question though, how large of a file can you hide with steganography in a 300mb picture?
Would that be big enough to hide an MP3?
On a side note, can you upload files to Flickr that have data appended after the end of the image data? Like people were doing on 4chan until moot removed that capability.
This is akin to key schedulers used in various cryptography schemes, I suppose. The idea is that you REALLY don't want to just shove your data all at the beginning of the file in order, as it becomes really easy to tease out the data with some cursory frequency analysis/bruteforcing. "Oh the first 20 pixels encode the first X bytes of <insert well known file type here>, BALEETED!"
Then you simply have each user pick their own key, stored locally, and have the cycle generated on the fly when encoding and retrieving data.