Storage is expensive these days, whether you’re looking at the prices of spinning rust or magic little sticks of silicon. But what if there was some benevolent overlord that you could trick into giving you unlimited storage? That’s where Noisecloud comes in.
Created by [Lucas], Noisecloud is a tool that lets you use YouTube as a form of effectively-unlimited file storage. It works by taking whatever file data you have on hand, and turns it into frames of digital noise that can be stored and transported as an MP4 file and uploaded to YouTube. The encoding process involves first compressing the data with gzip, then packaging it into a high-constrast series of video frames that are then encoded with FFmpeg. Video containers can be produced in various resolutions, all the way down to 640×360 @ 30 fps. There’s also a special “TikTok mode” which is optimised to best preserve data on short form sites that use vertical orientation as default. More commentary from the creator is available via the supporting article on Github.
It’s probably not a practical way to store your files, given the fussy encoding and decoding required to actually use the data. However, it’s an interesting proof of concept that explores how data can be stashed in unexpected places via publicly-accessible services. We’ve explored similar work before, too.
Snowcrash!
Synchronicity…
Earlier today, when I was watching a video about grocers not needing to convert to modern refrigerants, I was reminded of the “Undisputed King of the Ozone Destroyers,” UKOD from Snowcrash.
Once AIs start reading these videos we can all look forward to some hacker implementing the virus from Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash.
A lot of youtubers already put some sort of watermarks on their videos, some of which look like old photoshop filters. Dunno if that’s to trip up AI, or force more generational loss on trying to copy the content, or some sort of proof of authenticity.
Either way, it makes the videos look like crap and Youtube is still full of Brian Cox or Richard Feynman lecturing absolute nonsense to people who are too dumb to realize that it’s generated slop.
Fairlight ilInstruments did something like this with animated barcodes on vhs tape 40 years ago to back up content and config data lol
Kyle Hill, on YouTube, just did a video castigating the producers of Feynman (and other scientists) slop videos. I had just stumbled on one of the “Feynman” videos, and it looked sort of OK, even though it was very obviously AI. Then I checked some of their other uploads. Total trash. It’s a shame there’s no practical way for the Feynman estate to do something about this, or the hundreds of other fake Feynman channels.
Even when it “looks ok”, it’s still just AI babble that is at best coincidentally correct or relevant. If it does look fine, it’s probably because you don’t know the topic well enough to spot that it’s bunk.
This problem doesn’t go away until Youtube’s monetization model changes to something that doesn’t reward slop and the simulacrum of content to farm clicks. In other words, it’s a byproduct of Google’s advertising business, and one of the best arguments why the whole ad-economy is a total disaster, practically and morally.
“Storage is expensive these days, whether you’re looking at the prices of spinning rust or magic little sticks of silicon. But what if there was some benevolent overlord that you could trick into giving you unlimited storage?”
Encode my files into DNA, and seed the planet. The ultimate P2P.
“The Chromosomal Code” by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
“Storage is expensive these days.” Storage has never been so cheap, and this a while it’s like this.
I have another truth: if an article here starts with a blunt assertion, the assertion is seldom accurate.
Storage prices have about doubled since October. So yes, at least in the short to medium term, storage IS expensive these days, in comparison to where it was last year. But storage is cheap compared to where it was a decade ago. Both are true, and neither are false.
Tell me again how hard drive prices haven’t doubled compared to one year ago.
Were you born last month ?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage
That data ended with 2023.
I guess you could say the same thing about comments that start with blunt assertions.
and if a hackaday post ENDS with a blunt assertion?
“Storage has never been so cheap”
The last few years the prices were lower. Prices have been set back to about 2022 level.
https://ronja.twibright.com/optar/
Maybe that makes it a bit more robust? It typically seems to encode for whole (A4?) pages, but with a bit^Wbyte of tuning for smaller “page” sizes, it may do the job.
OTOH … who still remembers Wuala? Wouldn’t be recreating something like that be nicer than needing an account with Big-Bad-G*?
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/4457/what-interface-did-video-backup-system-use
Been there, done that.
There was a similar system for PC’s in the mid to late 90’s, but I cannot recall its name. I only remember it wasn’t entirely self-sufficient, relying on you to forward or reverse the tape based on visible page numbers “embedded” into the video image and a separate file to page numner reference list. I never used it personally so cannot vouch for it or recall how it was meant to get data into the PC. It seemed impractical to say the least.
YouTube now does AI voice and video analysis. As soon as they get whiff of this, it will get deleted.
Unrelated rant time:
If 10 years ago you published a calm, fully educational video about history of some WW2 rifle (no memes, no screaming or horsing around) and there’s a scene where you load the magazine while shooting it on a range, it will now get demonetized and age-restricted instantly because according to the latest YouTube Guidelines that’s very much not ok and promotes gun violence. Try contesting the decision and your whole Google account will get permabanned for mysterious “abuse” or “suspicious activity”.
When during the late 00s the moderation was still likely done from California, you could post all sorts of content. I had lots of videos slandering the Pope John Paul II, but because my channel had a Star of David in its avatar and as a background picture, that was like IDDQD cheat. No amount of reports would get it deleted.
In 2010s they moved moderation to 3rd world countries because they needed resources to deal with amount of videos posted every day. From there things started getting shit, but stuff like Gachimuchi was still around.
Nowdays when the AI moderation is in full force they’re turning the site into family friendly e-crack full of adverts, baby shark cartoons and brainrot minecraft videos for children to watch 24/7. Might as well leave the shopping channel or Cartoon Network on instead of YouTube. They’re pretty much the same these days.
The curse of exponential increase in computing power.
“it will now get demonetized and age-restricted instantly because according to the latest YouTube Guidelines that’s very much not ok and promotes gun violence”
finally, although i would not like to hold my breath to see if this is true, but i always thought it a little odd that you could talk about and show how you could kill somebody, but how to make them was taboo. but then again, yt rules are from the usa, the most hypocrite country in the world. showing guns on tv is ok, but dont try to say the word boob or dick ( even a normal name here in the netherlands)
we dont have “beep of decency” here on tv. never. ever.
Not if it gets them clicks and ad views. Youtube exists to show you ads, to have an excuse to take money from corporations, who in turn take the money from you. That’s the entire business – they serve people an excuse of content to have a reason to take your money, and if that means brainrot or even plain static noise, so be it.
They only care if the ads are displaying next to something that might scare off the corporations.
“Engagement (marketing), meaningful interaction between a consumer and a brand”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_marketing
Been there before Google, but it feels so much worse now. It’s the absence of humans in the pipeline, the automation and tastelessness. Watching something tragic, have it interrupted by cheerful burger commercial. It’s been messing with heads in the last 20 years.
But AI will fix that, right?
That’s what youtube ads are. Not engagement marketing – that is about trying to form some sort of consumer cults around brands by engaging people with fake interactivity.
One thing you have to remember about marketing is that the goal is not convincing the consumers who buy products, but the companies who buy marketing. That’s where the money is. That’s why marketing is full of bullshit, because it’s about marketing the marketing.
It doesn’t matter that the actual result is just “white noise” that communicates nothing, as long as the CEO believes they’re meaningfully engaging the audiences to boost sales or bring some other imaginary benefit. Most companies are willing to pay marketing consultants and campaigns but never measure or check whether the campaigns are actually doing anything – because that too costs money and the effect is difficult to observe from the noise. That’s how companies like Google can charge them money for serving ads with pretend-content and even pretend-viewers on Youtube.
There’s not much stopping you using full colour and 30fps, if you compensate for encoding.
That’s potentially a lot of data compression, at the expense of some decoding speed.
yt-dlp, then split the video in to one image per frame.
Probably…what happens to your backup restore operation though if your video gets reencoded by YouTube or on-the-fly by a carrier because of your data plan or roaming location?
It’s a really cool thought and exercise but there could be a lot of variables that could challenge practical use, whether YouTube detects and removes it or not.
I wager data exfiltration using video steganography faces similar challenges for attackers.
Better bit rate than blinking the keyboard LEDs or doing bad dialup through the PC speaker.
Most of the stuff i need storage for….are videos.
Made me laugh!!!!! 😆
In this case, that’s called using YouTube for 1:1 backups without the optional “compression” step enabled, right? ;-)
You can download ZX Spectrum games from YouTube video.
Perhaps the first meaningfully fun quip. Very serious unhappiness ami got the digital priesthood fo readers here today.
Also SSTV is also floating around on YouTube.
ZX Spectrum tapes on YouTube has saved me a bit of effort a few times, fixing originals that have sat too close to equipment and been erased.
Reminds me of pictures and videos saved as text so you could send them over Usenet. It works if it’s your only option but it’s highly inconvenient.
“ probably not a practical way to store your files,”
Nonsense. Try not to think of this as the be-all end to end user experience. This is just a storage backend.
If you want user experience, another project is needed that mates this to FUSE.
FUSETube would be awesome. Yes.
Add some color to save space:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Capacity_Color_Barcode
I’m getting heavy zx spectrum vibes here 😻
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTUvJtIfWFE
Not sure if this is a ‘turbo’ load or the later Spectrums had different tape routines in ROM?
Lucas, creator of NoiseCloud here…
I saw some comments talking about AI review after the video upload (just to clarify, the verification happens once when you upload the file and then only through reports, since the video is private, it won’t happen). I submitted a report to Google about this issue, since it makes it easier to use YouTube as a C2 server. As of now, Google hasn’t fixed the issue, saying that the malware would not be executed within the platform, but only after being downloaded, which is insane, LOL.
Another point: when you upload a video, it goes through internal compression on YouTube. Initially, I used the Reed-Solomon algorithm for recovery, now I’m using a proprietary algorithm from a private project. NO OTHER SIMILAR PROJECT, PUBLICLY, HAS MANAGED TO REACH THIS LEVEL.
1 – 100% encode of any file
2 – Reduced overhead, the lowest publicly, using Weaver version 1.0
3 – Processing time for decoding
4 – 100% decode
PS: About what I mentioned earlier regarding AI, it’s not speculation, it’s Google’s response after the report, especially since this project started from a bug bounty (CVE-2026-3084).
Spies used to get orders from shortwave numbers stations, now they can get them from YouTube videos.
People have been encoding data in video for decades. Back in the 1980’s PCM adapters were used to store digital audio as analog video on VHS tape.
A ripoff of danmere backer
How many MB (or KB!) per second does this do? I want to see how long a video would be for a file size, but the Readme doesn’t say
It is described in the article: https://unlucas-br.github.io/noisecloud/
Nah, you gotta store your data by juggling chainsaws