Hoardr: Flickr as a cloud backup service
After years of being relegated to nothing more than a container for whacky cat antics, it turns out the humble Gif is capable of more than meets the eye. Specifically, it is able to carry more than just image data – you can actually append whatever you want to a Gif and still have it function as normal. This has a fairly scary implication, since it means any Gif on the internet could theoretically be hiding malicious code or other files that you want nothing to do with. A slightly less nefarious and more interesting use case lies in the fact that we can get files into or past a system that may not usually accept that filetype. And that’s what Hoardr does – it packs whatever files you want into gifs and turns your Flickr account into a cloud backup service.
Hoardr uses zip archives in particular due to the nature of both filetypes. Simply changing the file extension of a combined file...