Hid.im Converts Torrents into PNG Images

Written by Ernesto on July 14, 2009 

Hid.im is a new web-based service that allows users to hide .torrent files inside PNG images. This means that users can easily upload hidden torrent files to their favorite image hosting service and forums, or use it as an avatar on social networking sites without being censored.

hid.imAre you one of those people who has always wanted to hide a torrent inside an image? Wait no longer, with Hid.im it takes just one click to convert a torrent into an image file, with the option to decode it later on.

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 TorrentFreak. “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.

Once the torrent is converted you can easily share it via image hosting services or social networking sites that don’t allow the uploading of .torrent files.

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.

The idea of converting torrents into images is not entirely new. Stegtorrent is an application that has been around for a few years already and does something similar. However, unlike Stegtorrent Hid.im is web-based and doesn’t require users to install any software.

Although we’re not really sure how useful Hid.im is for the average BitTorrent user, it does come in handy for those places where torrents are prohibited.

Decode the image and get the hidden torrent

hidim

Previously: Modified 3 Strikes Back on Agenda For New Zealand Pirates

Next: Internet Villain Mulls 3 Strikes For Australian Pirates

136 Responses

1 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:04 by winnner3000

I do like this

2 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:05 by meh

meh, invalid torrent errors for me.

3 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:07 by P

Great now their going to have to ban images from the Internet because of this.

4 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:10 by ressu

I can already see the headlines: MPAA to sue flickr!

5 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:15 by Pappy

Great idea! Now I can link my friends to torrents using Facebook Photo Albums!

6 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:17 by Ian

Big deal. Edonkey only needed a small string and they blasted them off forums faster than “FIRST!” posts.

7 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:20 by reacto

i dont get it:(

8 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:23 by xXx

Nice, pwned restrictions in one easy step.

Isnt it amazing how easily walls come down on the internet?

9 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:25 by ZeDestructor

Cool! Need to try it soon!

10 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:27 by xXx

Hmm tryin to figure out why some torrents are LARGER than 250 kb, im guessing because theres alot of .rar files and that you have to store alot of extra meta data?

11 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:27 by dumb

This is dumb when in one command you can attach a torrent file to a .png, and have been able to since .png image files existed. Plus by combining it with an image, you can choose an image that corresponds to the share itself.

12 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:32 by o

nice 1st Step…….

Now all we need is data transfers that look like web pages being transfered.

13 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:37 by Anonymous

Just don’t forget boys and girls, use tor to upload those images to anywhere, the guys downloading have reasonable doubt of their intentions but uploaders who can’t point to anywhere else have not.

Indexers can now claim ignorance about torrents and use images.

“No we didn’t know it was a torrent even if people called it: Terminator Salvation DVDrip 2009.jpg” LMAO

14 Jul 14, 2009 at 19:59 by mmmunf

I’m not sure I see the point of this. It seems to me its like a rather crude form of stenography and you would be able to achieve the same results by using regular images.

I guess that’d be kind of ironic though, using Creative Common images with a .torrent containing copyright infringed material inside.

15 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:00 by youngdand

Its good to see the public are always one step ahead of the system. long live open source projects.

16 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:14 by 4nd

Well, that’s kind of neat.

I don’t see it becoming the Next Big Thing, but it IS a cool development. Nice job, guys. :)

17 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:25 by Anonymous

“Great now their going to have to ban images from the Internet because of this.”

^ haha xD

18 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:26 by Anonymous

lol now bayimg will be the new pirate bay. fked up again (maffia)

19 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:31 by lold there

“Great now their going to have to ban images from the Internet because of this.”

HAHAHHAA

20 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:38 by Krvk

Whats the difference from renaming your .torrent to .png (or some other format)?

21 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:51 by Anonymous

19 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:38 by Krvk

Whats the difference from renaming your .torrent to .png (or some other format)?

Just renaming the file don’t stop filtering software from knowing what the file really is, but embedding it in another file bypass any filters and turn the automated solutions a bit complex if not very, very hard to analyze.

22 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:06 by ron

you stay classy hid.im

23 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:06 by Anonymous

Hmmm…not only images, steganography can be used to embed data in audio and video too here is an example the song from Aphex Twin have an image embeded that you can only see using a spectrometer(ex: baudline).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RxGQKcdkEw&feature=related

Then the MAFIAA would have to block all images, audio and video from the internet :)

24 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:08 by aristoadel_II

torrents are dead…sites that utilize rapidshare (and other similar services) are much faster,you do not need a bit torrent client,they are almost always available and not readily indexed, so one must scour the internet via google…

25 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:09 by Anonymous

This is open source stuff.
What stops the MPAA/RIAA from hiring software professionals to just study the source code and make an effective detector of these “torrent” files?

26 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:09 by Anonymous

lol, torrents imageboards is a good idea.

27 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:10 by Nutman

Doesn’t sound very useful to me but still is pretty interesting, maybe a really good use will actually come out of this.

28 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:12 by Anonymous

@19 Jul 14, 2009 at 20:38 by Krvk:

Almost forgot the important part “plausible deniability”, depending on the circumstances it would be very hard to prove in a court of law that you willfully tried to infringe on copyright.

29 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:24 by Anonymous

And people could go one step further and use 2D barcodes to print the music on them and start protesting in the real world painting the codes on the walls so every single person with a cell phone can just snapshot it and here the song :)

Can you imagine the MAFIAA trying to mandate people paint their walls because of copyright infringement?

http://in.rediff.com/money/2009/mar/13now-dense-barcodes-to-store-video.htm

30 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:31 by lmao

lmao at following scenario:
someone creates a plugin for browsers that enables you to right click an image and get to choose: “Download torrent”.

Next someone starts to upload these new images:
“Very cool image from Terminator” and “Oops, the image is all fuzzy, well don’t have time to do anything about it now…”

31 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:32 by lmao

man, I got to put my projector out on the street…

32 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:41 by Anonymous

@ 19

that won’t show up as an image file, just as a corrupt file.

33 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:44 by .neo.styles|nvDX

I can already see the headlines: MPAA to sue flickr!

Wrong. Try “MPAA to shutdown hid.im for encouraging pirate to run from the law.” That’s all their doing. This is no different from the fugitives you see on cop shows who thinks he can hide from the cops by running into a random building or putting on someone’s clothes.

Also, since the extension is publically available, image hosters like flickr, might be able to reverse engineer it to detect hidden torrent files.

34 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:45 by Viper

Anyone else having trouble getting their converter working? Their form does nothing for me.

35 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:47 by Anonymous

Also, since the extension is publically available, image hosters like flickr, might be able to reverse engineer it to detect hidden torrent files.

Ya sure flickr would willfully expend thousand of dollars to protect other industry and then be bullied to implant filters that cost into the 100s of thousands of dollars LoL

36 Jul 14, 2009 at 21:53 by heh

@24 cost effectiveness I suppose. I agree it probably wouldn’t be very difficult to filter these, but unless they catch on to a much greater extent than I suspect they will it wouldn’t be very useful to filter them either.

37 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:00 by Skittles

.neo.styles trolling just hasn’t been the same as of late. It’s so bland and uninteresting, not like before where it was fresh, and uninteresting.

38 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:01 by Dxx

Automated filters are easy to defeat with the use of simple password

by the way it would be much much better idea to use valid files and encode torrents into them Steganographycaly.

in that case it would be possible to post Movie cover and same movie cover is also torrent file which can be used to download that movie.

to avoid automated detection some simple encryption can be used.
and CAPCHA encoded password can be displayed on that same image.

39 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:01 by Anonymous

Well it’s not just flickr, you have wikipedia, photobucket, google, blogs, facebook and all websites that allow an avatar would have to implement a filter system.

Somehow I don’t see it happening.

40 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:04 by Jasper

@.neo.styles|nvDX
it’s not running away from the law
the law is what THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY wants that it is.|(
they adapt laws to suit them because they can afford it!!motherfockers
WE are the world the law needs to control the world the entertainment industry may not control US!
we love content and we want to share that lovely content with everyone no matter what file no matter if there is a copyright for that file!
copyright was designed to protect the creative! to prevent that COMMERCIAL companies edited or sold there content! now they adapted the law so they can sue innocent civilians! that’s not where copyright was made for!
(if you don’t think that this story is true go to hell!)

BEST REGARDS Jasper
(yeah i’m nice unlike you!)

41 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:07 by Cracker Jack

Steganography FTW

42 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:18 by Anonymous

Steganography is the main ingredient on digital watermark how an automated solution will distinguish between a real watermark that protects copyright material from other uses?

43 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:22 by Hom3r

a lot easier to just encode a .rar containing a torrent in a .jpg (a lot of places don’t allow .png images due to their larger size)

44 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:28 by ATuin

This seems like an extension of the old deCSS mass posting years ago, embedded into images, encoded into songs etc. The main point of it all was to get the code scattered all over the internet to prevent its censorship. That worked and that’s probably how most of the free/shareware dvd rippers work. The only downside to this is that more software/addons are required for it to work, now if there was an addon for torrent clients so you could copy the image location and paste that in where you’d put a .torrent URI that’d certainly start the ball rolling with this “alternative media” style of distribution/indexing.

45 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:44 by blah blah

neo why do you come here you know you will get scene banned if you keep it up then this is the only place you will have left…

this is a crap idea you really really think once photo hosting sites realise what your doing they will stop it there is no doubt about it and that doesnt stop anyone from getting the torrent and seeing what tracker its being hosted at. there is no point in this

46 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:45 by @neotroll

I can already see the headlines: MPAA to sue flickr!

Wrong. Try “MPAA to shutdown hid.im for encouraging pirate to run from the law.” That’s all their doing. This is no different from the fugitives you see on cop shows who thinks he can hide from the cops by running into a random building or putting on someone’s clothes

Neotroll you must be an idiot who does no research before posting.. What about all the other reasons\services who do this exact same thing?

Also, since the extension is publically available, image hosters like flickr, might be able to reverse engineer it to detect hidden torrent files.

Ahhh.. Your an idiot .. Flickr wouldn’t care if people posted these.. It drives more traffic which means more money.. Theyll probably create a section just for it.. Good luck suing people who distribute images.. What a noob this guy is..

47 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:46 by 4nd

To everyone who questions its reliability because it is open-source:

Remember that the same source code that the MAFIAA can study is the same source code that the common man can study. If the MAFIAA finds a hole, it can be quickly patched. It’s the same premise as with GNU/Linux: Because it is open-source, its defenses are much stronger.

48 Jul 14, 2009 at 22:46 by kaeos

It wouldn’t be easier with a qcode?

49 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:03 by Anonymous

Does it work?

http://i25.tinypic.com/xbwvoz.jpg

50 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:09 by Stegano

Another good steganography tool: http://stegoshare.sf.net

51 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:10 by diarRIAA

neo.troll, once again you’ve managed to out-stupid yourself. Reverse engineering is not needed as the source code is already available. ;)

I suppose if these images became a way of life and headaches for web sites like facebook, bebo, live spaces, etc, etc they would eventually have no choice but to decrypt and filter out these files. This would be a monumental task requiring enormous man power, processing cycles, bandwidth and computer storage logs because in essence trillions of image files and I mean EVERY SINGLE image file would have to be scanned, and there’s a good chance of false positives. No one, not even the all of the mighty billionaires of the world combined have the money to take on such a task, and there aren’t enough computers in the world to handle the trillions of computer images the are being shared around the world in a one second time frame. Attempting to do so would bottleneck and eventually break the internet completely.

It couldn’t just stop there. Someone could use that source code to do the same thing to JPG’s, GIF’s, BMP’s, and so on. Though I’d place my money on animated GIF’s to store more meta/hash-data. ;)

52 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:28 by vyvyan

Countries like Spain and Netherlands can have indexers legally even if one objects to tracker. getting torrent files is not a big issue, the real thing is tracker.

In other words “No one will be poorer by loss of mininova but loosing tpb would hurt.”

but I like the imageboard idea. 2chan->4chan->btchan

all the trolls will get a license to fuck around :P

53 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:35 by mirrormagic

the + more = the merrier.

54 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:39 by anonymous

It does send a message to anti-piracy groups that aren’t so technically inclined that banning .torrent hosting is like saying you’re going to ban all zip files, because there are many formats a torrent could be converted with.

55 Jul 14, 2009 at 23:50 by truth

@50 good idea that, make it very CPU intensive to recover the torrent from the image file. Not much hassle for millions of clients decrypting one file at a time, but a real pain for a central server (or very large server farm) used by a MAFFIA tracking company.

56 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:05 by Anonymous

I suppose I am going start looking for websites that post screenshots and album art to find me torrents.

57 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:09 by Dxx

@53
far more secure way is to implement optional capcha system
we have valid image after all? so why not just put password in human readable form?

machines will be unable to detect anything suspicious but every human user will see
password: “sky”

and when your decoder plugin asks for password you just enter it.

I think this is quite secure against automated analysis.

only way to defeat this is to introduce some noise and recompenses all images.

and if we add decentralized DTH tracking option there is no way that even God himself could defeat that.

by the way, there is also MIME encoding available which allows to posts binary data as text.

so anyone who need that can just MIME encode torrent file and paste that text block in the forum.

58 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:12 by Dimagus

Open a command prompt, browse to your folder and do:

copy /b Image.jpg + Archive.rar HiddenFile.jpg

Usually we stick the torrent in the rar. Been around for years. Not original in the slightest

59 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:39 by truth

@55 I like the idea of “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, but it would make torrenting a bit harder for blind people. Maybe optionally add a distorted audio sample.

But I have always liked the addition of time to make things difficult to brute forced. A mate of mine 15 years made an electronic car opener, walk to a car park pushed a button and sent random noise until a cars alarm turned off and the doors open. Nowadays because of a 1 second delay between incorrect keys and correct ones his device is useless. A delay is a very powerful thing.

If capcha is used then they will probably just setup another sweat shop in a third world country to type in the keys.

60 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:50 by blah blah

@neo.troll your the stupid one you think that flickr or somewhere like that would turn around and make their own page just for those files types because it draws more traffic? how dumb are you the more and more attention a site recieves the more and more people are going to say why is that site suddenly getting all this traffic lets have a look. then they will see why then the mpaa riaa and all the others will turn around and say ok you know whats going on pay us millions or face court plain and simple your a douche who has no clue

61 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:50 by hurry

This is just one more layer away from downloading stuffs, hardly be any useful except sites can’t effectively filter them out. The main point is that if computer can’t find them, you can’t either. It has to have some kind of meta tags attached in order for people to search for it. And if you can search for it, so can RIAA or content creators.

62 Jul 15, 2009 at 00:53 by Jasper van Weerd

Now we can send images to friends and around to get the show going, then image top 10’s @ social network sites can exist out of popular torrents, I like the idea…! we only need a way to recongnise them and put them into meta engines like torrentz…. You would need a scrape service like the google engine to get it roling, maybe the service can be based on google, with some meta data to recognise the images… this can be a great solution!

63 Jul 15, 2009 at 01:05 by Zacqary Adam Green

Something similar but probably more useful in the long run is Monolith. It doesn’t hide the torrent, but it does “hide” anything copyrightable.

http://monolith.sourceforge.net

64 Jul 15, 2009 at 01:11 by Phrantik

LOL you know it’s a matter of time before someone claims to see a picture of jesus in his porn torrent.

65 Jul 15, 2009 at 01:48 by Em

It’s not that ideal… most sites reformat the image to JPEG, meaning that the lossless pixels of the PNG that would each hold 3 bytes of information would get dirty. Kinda like the image in the article, if you zoom and look at some squares, each one of them has more shades in it, making the information useless!

What we need is a better or wider implementation of Kademila.

66 Jul 15, 2009 at 01:56 by HAHA

totally pointless

but I love it :)

67 Jul 15, 2009 at 02:31 by pooshoot

Good stuff, though prefer the idea of using steganography to encode the data into a more useful image form.

68 Jul 15, 2009 at 02:33 by Mr Universe

You cant stop the signal.

69 Jul 15, 2009 at 02:52 by Anonymous

What we need is a better or wider implementation of Kademila.

More widespread than already is?

uTorrent, azureus, transmission, retroshare, osires serverless portal creator just to name a few already use it as their DHT.

70 Jul 15, 2009 at 02:53 by Anonymous

Kicking and screaming we will drag the industry to the 21 century LoL

71 Jul 15, 2009 at 03:27 by Anonymous

Who is going to be the first to sell T-Shirts with 2D barcodes that go to a torrent site?

72 Jul 15, 2009 at 03:59 by Tamphex

@Jul 14, 2009 at 23:03 by Anonymous

Does it work?

Yep.

73 Jul 15, 2009 at 04:00 by Anonymous

Torret files aren’t any more illegal than hyperlinks and most image hosting sites recopy the images anyway to avoid hidden files.

74 Jul 15, 2009 at 04:26 by .neo.styles|nvDX

The intent underlying this service is that pirates think that this will make them immune to reprisal from the entertainment industry. They think that, by blending in with the innocent, they will equate themselves with them. In doing so, they believe the movie industry will supposedly have no choice to take action against the everyone, the innocent bystanders included. Since taking action against an entire image hosting site and possibly many people who use it is too much, pirates think that this move makes them untouchable.

Wrong. The industry will simply go after the root cause : the service that enables them to try and blend in with the innocent.

75 Jul 15, 2009 at 04:29 by .neo.styles|nvDX

It does send a message to anti-piracy groups that aren’t so technically inclined that banning .torrent hosting is like saying you’re going to ban all zip files, because there are many formats a torrent could be converted with.

Torrent site are alot more effective than manual exchange of torrent files, no matter what kind you convert them into. The movie industry will simply go after the sites that facilitate distribution and after that they will deal with the individual people who think they can get away with turning the .Torrent into a zip file.

76 Jul 15, 2009 at 05:09 by 4nd

@neostyles

The service is open-source. If this catches on, and the current service is taken down, someone else will make a new one out of the code.

It’s an endless game of cat-and-mouse that the entertainment industry cannot win.

77 Jul 15, 2009 at 05:47 by hurry

No one ables to answer how is this any useful when the key is relying on the search function. Anything that can be searched is removable, doesn’t matter if it’s a picture, sound or torrents. If we can’t search for it then we can’t look for that particular stuff that we want to download.

Manipulating the torrent file is no different than putting it inside a zip file.

78 Jul 15, 2009 at 06:03 by yawn

@33 neo troll

then why not sue the people who make bittorent clients because their clients are used to download content that can be copyrighted, they also can make torrents ZOMG hunt them down.

79 Jul 15, 2009 at 06:19 by Encephaloid Disturbance

.neo.styles|nvDX

The intent underlying this service is that pirates think that this will make them immune to reprisal from the entertainment industry.

No, it just makes your ill-conceived efforts at preventing the distribution of ‘unauthorised’ information on the Internet look as laughable as it is. Welcome to your very own impossible game of Whack-a-Mole. You are utterly owned and will remain so until the day you either accept reality, or die.

Have fun now. :)

80 Jul 15, 2009 at 06:33 by Anonymous

Back in the days when most software could fit on a floppy disk -often several times over- it was not uncommon to share software embedded on large images and hosted on free websites like GeoCities.

81 Jul 15, 2009 at 06:51 by Phoenix

omg
this is sooo much fun :)

82 Jul 15, 2009 at 09:18 by #YLS#

This needs to be worked on more, it’d go a long way in helping create bigger public torrent sites to make up for the fall of sites like TPB.

83 Jul 15, 2009 at 10:01 by fs

I’m frankly amazed that nobody has mentioned magnet URIs. Both Azureus and uTorrent, the two most popular torrent clients (last I checked), support magnet URIs. And you don’t even need an image to send them, just text and access to DHT.

84 Jul 15, 2009 at 10:09 by Anonymous

#71 The industry can’t go against a tool for converting .torrent files to PNG images.

85 Jul 15, 2009 at 10:46 by Fool

Notice its .PNG files not .JPG or anything else.
If you change the image in anyway it will probably be corrupt and hid.im will not be able to decode it.

Image has to be in original condition I think.

Keep them as .PNG

86 Jul 15, 2009 at 11:00 by h33t

AAA+++ GREAT DEVELOPMENT :-D

the MAFIAA has made an enemy of the world its mother and its sister!

Darwin said survival of the fittest is not about power and strength it is about the ability to adapt to the changing environment. the MPAA/RIAA dinosaur is dead

WELL DONE to all involved. you have won my heart and mind :-D

http://www.h33t.com is today VERY proud to be a filesharer

87 Jul 15, 2009 at 11:02 by Freeman

“Wrong. The industry will simply go after the root cause : the service that enables them to try and blend in with the innocent.”

*yawn*… just off to download some unauthorised content from the Pirate Bay. I’ll reply when I get back…

88 Jul 15, 2009 at 11:38 by Midarezaki

Check out Optar. The output can be scanned, photographed, photocopied and still decoded.
Torrents on T-shirts anyone?

89 Jul 15, 2009 at 11:58 by cosy

i just try to convert a torrent to png and i dont see where is the png

90 Jul 15, 2009 at 12:03 by Jasper

YOU GUYS ARE GREAT!!
WE ALL ARE THE BEST!!!
TO MAFIAA AND RIAA YOUR SCREWED!!

GO TO THE HELL!!!!!!!!!!

91 Jul 15, 2009 at 12:57 by NPI

Seriously?

Why would anyone support this? Indexing these “pictures” is suicide. Why would you want to camouflage your torrents? Because you know they are copyrighted. By indexing torrents you can always claim you index both legal and illegal content and that there’s no way for you to filter the content. Indexing sites set up to index illegal material would lose just about any kind of defence they had if they start “hiding” the torrents.

The image hosts are not suited for indexing no matter how you name the image and storing the torrents were never an issue -so infiltrating the image hosts yields no benefit.

As for using the images to upload torrents to forums no allowing torrents, well once again why would we want to do that? Chances are it’s only a few identifiable users on such forums that you want to join the swarm and pm’ing them would be much simpler and safer.

This sounds like one of those ideas that are fun on paper and exiting to work on, but ultimately have no purpose.

92 Jul 15, 2009 at 14:00 by Milu

87@ NPI

I just don’t agree, but too tired to explain..

93 Jul 15, 2009 at 14:06 by Anonymous

@87 Jul 15, 2009 at 12:57 by NPI:

In this particular case it seems useless but you miss something there, things do advance and this is just a baby step in other directions, steganography is so much more than this. You can put files inside other files, you can use steganography filesystems that already exist and there is better tools to hide things like stegoshare, PHP Stegger and a lot of other ones.

94 Jul 15, 2009 at 14:13 by Anonymous

The great thing about this is that it makes easy to anyone to use the technology, if it is useful or not is besides the point steganography is a very powerful and useful technology and can be used to put data inside TCP/IP streams.

It’s just great to see people thinkering with the subject and already releasing working tools, although not that useful yet it will become much more I’m sure.

95 Jul 15, 2009 at 14:31 by NPI

@94

Steganography has been used for years in the digital realm.

I suppose it’s always nice to see open source projects trying to apply techniques such as this, but this has to be one of the most useless applications of the art yet.

In fact I can’t think of any useful way to apply the science to the .torrent infrastructure, I’m afraid I don’t see much use for it in that aspect.

IMO we don’t need new ways to apply the science to certain textstrings or filetypes but rather ideas as to how to properly utilize the technique.

96 Jul 15, 2009 at 15:12 by Anonymous

95 Jul 15, 2009 at 14:31 by NPI

IMO we don’t need new ways to apply the science to certain textstrings or filetypes but rather ideas as to how to properly utilize the technique.

You are right steganography have been used for years but not in a noob way or mainstream thing kind of stuff, there is people out there who don’t care about computers and all those wonderful little insights that the tech savvy have and for them tools like Hi.Im are just fantastic you don’t have to hurt your brain about what to do all the decisions are taken for you and that explains why I do agree with you that what we need is new ways to apply the things that we already have. We need more tools like GUI’s that will transform all that crazy stuff and wonderful toys that the geeks have into something the general population can use without hurting their brains LoL

About ideas for bittorrent and steganography I think you can embed binary files into music or video files that would be more useful, because it put doubt into the mix it turns the certain into something obscure, how would you know that someone downloaded the file because of the illegal content? how successful would a campaign be against something that is not black and white?. Uncertainty is a powerful tool for fileshares and could have saved some mothers I think and it blurs the lines you no longer have to look for one type of file you have to look for a lot of files and take into consideration the context if it is a viral video with an embedded illegal music you can no longer keep tracking MP3 files you have to track all the media that could serve as a vector for distribution and that means you could even post this kind of stuff in the physical world and I’m particularly interested in the physical world because they say they can control the flow of information I would very much like to see them making people comply with that not on the internet but confiscating T-Shirts, suing people for copyright infringement because they have a painted 2D barcode on the wall what would be the implications when the internet spills into the real world?

97 Jul 15, 2009 at 15:18 by Anonymous

Here is a QR Code maker online put your favorite link in there and make thousands of copies and put it on stickers or anywhere, todays cellphones(or mobiles if you prefer) can ready those already lets put the internet on the real world and make it even more visible.

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

98 Jul 15, 2009 at 15:43 by Anonymous

Once the internet spills to the real world those who care about copyright will be forced to show how stupid and moronic copyright have become. Someone can imagine the police trying to arrest a boy for wearing a T-Shirt with a link to copyrighted material how would that be viewed?

99 Jul 15, 2009 at 17:15 by PrFirmin

Cool ! But why not using the good old file fusion ?

On Linux:
cat picture.jpg file.torrent > result.jpg

On Windows:
copy /b picture.jpg + file.torrent result.jpg

100 Jul 15, 2009 at 18:50 by Mike

When posting pics on Flickr, they could simply rewrite the jpeg by setting all least significant bits to zero – killing the torrent…

101 Jul 15, 2009 at 21:26 by Anonymous

i’ve already known how to do this without that website, but it’s very useful for the people that didn’t know this.

102 Jul 15, 2009 at 21:44 by anon

this is just childish and wont achieve anything, torrent files are not illegal so why bother, this just reinforces the misconception to many that they are illegal

103 Jul 15, 2009 at 22:28 by Link

Everyone will know in a week anyways and then they will be removed off all the large social sites

104 Jul 15, 2009 at 22:35 by Someone

Hiding the torrent in an image instead of just converting it into an image would be a lot nicer, though. Now it’s quite clear that there’s something in those pictures.

105 Jul 15, 2009 at 23:24 by skerit

If only they would start accepting nzbs, too ;)

106 Jul 16, 2009 at 03:48 by Jigsy

@99

Prolly make more sense to .rar the .torrent first.

107 Jul 16, 2009 at 05:32 by dave

this is a great idea. i love how trolls are on here trying to squash our p2p dreams. HOW MANY TIMES WE GOTTA TELL YA MIND UR OWN BUSINESS WE AINT PAYING FOR THIS SHIT AND WE NEVER WILL. YA ALL IS EVIL

108 Jul 16, 2009 at 07:32 by Zoness

Magnet URIs aren’t practical in a lot of places because you need DHT which is obviously forbidden on private trackers. I think this is a neat development. Not a lot of people will need it but I’m sure those people on the most nazi-policed networks in the world appreciate it. :)

109 Jul 16, 2009 at 08:22 by .neo.styles|nvDX

No, it just makes your ill-conceived efforts at preventing the distribution of ‘unauthorised’ information on the Internet look as laughable as it is. Welcome to your very own impossible game of Whack-a-Mole. You are utterly owned and will remain so until the day you either accept reality, or die.
Newsflash : These aren’t my efforts. Making this personal seems to have an appealing side to you, for god knows what reason.

These efforts are the result of international legal cooeperation.

Newsflash 2: They aren’t ill-concieved. Judging by the fact that it has resulted in several high profile trackers shutting down, I’de say these efforts have been met with a large degree of success, wouldn’t you?

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111 Jul 16, 2009 at 10:20 by NPI

@109

Meanwhile the files are still getting distributed and the pirate community is growing.

If you could show me a decrease in the illegal filesharing traffic or interest for filesharing, then I’d be inclined to agree with you.
Heck if you could even show a decrease in the growth of the filesharing community I’d be impressed.

But unfortunately for the industry their methods have proven unsuccessful and they’ve been unable to contain the “threat”. Hence why they’ve been pushing for 3 strike laws to be implemented all around the globe.

Sure we’ve seen some large trackers and index sites shut down in the last year. But considering how there’s more and larger fish in the pond than ever before it doesn’t surprise me that the catch has improved.

Last I checked the copyright industry was claiming that illegal filesharing was a growing threat to their existence, not diminishing or under control.

112 Jul 16, 2009 at 11:42 by Anon

Hey moron, you forgot one thing…a torrent STILL needs a TRACKER to RELAY THE CLIENT IPs!
It’s not about the .torrent file, it’s about the coordination of the peers / relay of the peer IP pools.
What good is fifty gazillion hidden torrents on pichosts, if the TRACKER they refer to is DEAD?

Idiots. Idiots. Idiots.

113 Jul 16, 2009 at 12:42 by 113

totally useless -_-

114 Jul 16, 2009 at 13:15 by nobody

its alot simpler and alot easier on the image to just embed an magnetlink, and what ever u guys say an magnetlink CAN include a tracker.
ex: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:WN3E4CTXEYQVZYIFDCAYGFFJHKBGTV34&tr=http://tracker.seeding.it:6969/announce

that way u can make both dht or tracker based magnetlinks

but torrents and indexing isnt really the big issue getting an good stable p2p tracker solution is, dht isnt optimal.

115 Jul 16, 2009 at 14:28 by jebus

ok nevermind. i got it to work…pirate bay puts “.TPB” at the end and isohunt puts “.SN”. just take that away then upload it. that’s why it was giving me problems

116 Jul 16, 2009 at 16:04 by Anonymous

Good in concept for hiding torrent files, but that’s not the problem.

The RIAA/MPAA etc. often go after trackers, not necessarily torrent files themselves.

Then AGAIN they would have to figure out that images house the torrents and how to convert them before they’d get onto the trackers to snipe IPs, but once they figure it out, I’ll assume there will be large sites collecting these images torrents or using it for main distribution (which I still think would be a good idea, since the site can probably feign ignorance like “we didn’t know it was a torrent image lol”) but the tracker that’s connecting users is still fair game, where the copyright jerks will still sting people like they sting any other tracker.

tl;dr – Although there might be initial additional security, in the long run this isn’t going to do much at all.

imo

117 Jul 16, 2009 at 19:28 by blurry eyes

Won’t Flikr and Google just blur all the PNGs by a 0.1pixel radius before storing them on their systems to avoid the liability?

I have to agree with the others, this is a brilliant idea, but it’s the wrong implementation. The hidden content should be stegano-attached (ie, a watermark)

Not only would the mark be undetectable, it would be very hard to remove or disrupt. But automated decoding would also be equally hard. Basically you want to encode the info such that most people can decode it trivially, but the determined few cannot do it easily.

118 Jul 16, 2009 at 19:48 by Joe Blow

Man – I see someone pissing and moaning about pirates above.

That fries my ass – Like nobody in the world can imagine legitimate uses for P2P.

What are you people doing on torrentfreak.com anyway if you’re here trying to bust pirates chops?

Dumb.

119 Jul 16, 2009 at 21:02 by horsemeat

What they should do next is hide a torrent within a video file say 1 frame and upload it to youtube.

That would make me laugh, terminator salvation trailer (with a torrent in it) :D.

120 Jul 17, 2009 at 05:02 by nikkibabes

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121 Jul 17, 2009 at 05:04 by Q91

Can’t believe someone’s not mentionedthis before, but there’s actually an Windows tool for this. Haven’t used it much lately, but I’ve known of it for atleast 5 years now.

It’s called Camouflage and it’s a freeware
http://camouflage.unfiction.com/

122 Jul 17, 2009 at 14:38 by albinoblackrabbit

genuis idea…

123 Jul 17, 2009 at 15:33 by jojo

As said, why not use QR Code ?
Existing standard, already implemented in many places…

124 Jul 17, 2009 at 19:05 by JTK

Forum systems and image hosters will add systems to block these images from being uploaded.

125 Jul 17, 2009 at 22:55 by Ninja

“No we didn’t know it was a torrent even if people called it: Terminator Salvation DVDrip 2009.jpg” <– ROFL

It’s been said, RIAA and merry friends actions will end up pushing everything to anonymity. Maybe at that point they’ll give up suing people and start actually working to adapt.

Bookmarked.

126 Jul 17, 2009 at 23:00 by Ninja

Oh, @ “racker that’s connecting users is still fair game, where the copyright jerks will still sting people like they sting any other tracker.”

Open BT. They can’t sue you if you don’t know what is going through your network (it’s like suing ISPs for encrypted data that might be illegal flowing through its cables lol… come on, out of 100 file sharers I know, 120 use encryption). Unless we come to a point where it’s assumed all content that is hashed in a tracker is illegal.. lmao.

127 Jul 18, 2009 at 12:34 by Jacob

Superb!!!

128 Jul 18, 2009 at 17:10 by Shithead

Just put the fucking torrents and tracker on TOR FFS.

129 Jul 18, 2009 at 18:55 by Gargamel

Love it how so many noobs yell “troll” at this neo.divx character and then proceed to post angry words after yelling that…

Like the definition of a “troll” is a post that is put there to attract angry replies from total noobs, LOL.

Your playing right into his trolls and even stating exactly what he’s doing by yelling troll…. id!ots

130 Jul 19, 2009 at 02:45 by Anonymous

4chan: torrent imageboard of the future

131 Jul 19, 2009 at 07:20 by Akkula

nice 1st Step…….

Now all we need is data transfers that look like web pages being transfered.

http://englishrussia.org/

132 Jul 20, 2009 at 12:18 by dude

someone should do the same for ed2k links

133 Jul 22, 2009 at 12:17 by Kuld33p

This is fcuking amazing… I really like the idea..

134 Jul 24, 2009 at 03:40 by Anonymous

114 is right. Someone makes a torrent file, and let’s say adds 3 trackers to the magnet url. Imagine how fast can a URL spread over the internet. Forums, blogs, pastebay-like sites, diggs, twitters, and all can be found on google ALL IN ALL TY 114 FOR GIVING ME THE RIGHT DIRECTION. I DON’T KNOW WHY IS IT SO BAD THAT TPB IS SOLD? ISN’T THIS THE BEST IDEA EVER?(magnet url)

135 Jul 26, 2009 at 01:01 by ejonesss

125 it is kind of obvious that steganography is being used to hide something and the anti p2p folks may actually download the file (if posted in a forum) and decode it just to find out what it is.

136 Jul 27, 2009 at 02:05 by Anonymouse

I don’t see lossy jpeg as an unsolvable problem, assuming that if you take an original image and apply jpeg algorithm to it you get the same “lossy” result each time.

This would simply need to be accounted for in the generation of the original image – you would encode data knowing what your end-result would come out looking like.

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