Stealing Storage from Telegram

By popular demand.
Discord: / discord
Github for code: github.com/devdetour/Telegram...
Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/devdetour
Chapters:
00:00 Last Time
00:40 Shameless plug
0:42 Why I Didn't Do That
1:58 What/Why Telegram
2:32 Not Banned Yet
2:43 Teldrive
3:20 FUSE programs
4:36 Implementing It
6:18 Fixing It
6:34 Writing is Hard
9:48 Reading is Also Hard
10:52 Performance
11:29 TY, CYA

[@shayhan6227]

This guy is the reason free services eventually start to cost money.

[@R_Samnan]

Yea specially if its out in the public then alot of people will do the same, just because something is free doesnt mean it has no expenses behind it

[@rayanfernandes2631]

2 years ago I wanted build the exact same fuse mount thingy with telegram, but gave up since it was very very very much ambitious for my knowledge in systems file i/o operations. Really informative content, Keep em coming. Enjoyed every bit! ❤

[@Yuki-HoYo]

I was kinda surprise when I found your channel. You’re underrated for the type of content you’re making

[@Spiderfffun]

ty you reminded me to subscribe to this amazing creator

[@suvantmsuvantheminecraftia7407]

I JUST saw your part 1 video of stealing storage from discord and your part 2 is up by the time I finished the video(uploaded an hour ago)!

[@devdetour]

1 correction, when I mention at 10:37 that Telegram is doing some encryption stuff and maybe that's why it's slow, this is incorrect. Though Telegram DOES support encryption, this was not an encrypted chat, so that wouldn't make things slow. Another clarification, I knew what RAR was before my last video, just not that it could break files into chunks and password protect them. I guess I phrased this badly :)

[@Yoshidzo]

The thing you mentioned is actually about end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Every chat is encrypted by default. The difference is whenever this encryption is E2E (telegram secret chats) or client-server (default).

[@DarkxPunk]

And to add, the data is not only encrypted to the server, it’s is obfuscated by breaking it into pieces and storing it on multiple servers so if only one server is access the data is junk.

[@prawnproductions234]

The algorithm has brought me back. Thank you.

[@UtkarshKoppikar]

Can you open source this? Would like to contribute. Or you have already and I haven't reached that point in the video

[@devdetour]

Yeah! GitHub repo link is in the description. Contributions very much welcome!

[@sketchychillandchill]

​@@devdetourand the discord fs?

[@-john-9438]

Me not knowing how Github works (Im not a programmer)

[@guinea_horn]

​@@-john-9438then why comment

[@xynocode]

this project may help me archiving my interpolated video project when I don't have any available HDD storage. thanks

[@jamlie977]

that's amazing lmao to be honest, this approach is much easier than the previous one. it took me around 8 seconds to think of a way to create this, but the only difference is that i would have to use something like a /sync to send the new pictures/videos

[@smith3463]

You're amazing. I had always given up on my dream of becoming a programmer, but you sparked it once more.

[@ohmygosh6176]

Anyday Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage can change their policy or go down. That is why it is always a good idea to have multiple backup plans.

[@GreatTS]

Same here. First I watched your video related to Discord unlimited storage and then realised why didn't i used telegram and then i upgraded my code for telegram.

[@JamesSmith-ix5jd]

Telegram is slow for non premium especially in the evening (in Europe), sometimes downloading a simple 20MB video takes forever.

[@luizansounds]

Honestly just for the unlimited file size, it's worth paying the premium just for the speed, specially if you compress everything in 2gb chunks for backup

[@phizicks]

I would've written each chunk as their own file and have a metadata file (FAT) for each message id part to the file. if you overwrite, you replace the initial X block files and delete the rest if they are smaller, or create new block files if they are bigger.

[@Kalphalus]

On discord, why dont use another channel to save the name and the file ids? Or at least make a backup of the id list every once in a while on Google Drive, Dropbox, (Telegram, Discord,) etc.

[@killervacuum]

i use telegram as a backup mainly for the photos from my phone but also other important files. the main drawback is that the download and upload speeds can be quite slow sometimes.

[@CodeF53]

7z supports encrypting, splitting, and compressing files into chunks and has better compression ratios than rar. I would also use the brotli fork, as it has an even better compression algorithm.

[@TunisiaSparx]

awsome i always wanted to do omething like that ! uploading photos to some place and showing them dynamically from my deployed web app

[@skygnd]

I’m from the future, you’ll have at least 500k subs by the end of this year man

[@Girgoo]

I would love to see a fuse system that cache usb-drive metadata only. Meaning I dont have to connect the usb-drive to my computer to check what files I had on it last time it was connected.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

I think Windows has that and calls it hierarchical storage management

[@Slada1]

Everything from voidtools can do that too

[@excessiveanalysis2982]

One thing I noticed in your design layout was the decision to encrypt each segment of the total file separately. While this does not affect functionality, it can impact the information security of the uploaded data. By encrypting each chunk separately, with what I assume is the same symmetric key, you run the risk of crypto-analysis on the file chunks revealing data on the key and or plaintext. The reason for this is due to the fact, because of the segmented nature of the encryption, you are effectively re-using the same key for multiple encryptions. While this is not a huge deal practically, it is still a possible attack vector. A simple solution would be to simply encrypt the entire file once, and then split the encrypted data afterwards. Other than that (unrealistic, you used CBC mode by the looks of it, so IV helps a lot) security vulnerability in a scheme that was made for fun, amazing video! I must say, I love over-the-top systems that solve problems in a way-more-than-necessary manner simply because it can 😂

[@JyothisJayanth]

btw the teldrive owner got his own rclone fork that supports teldrive. I was using rclone mount and it was working perfectly fine :)

[@oussama7132]

can you reduce the background music volume next time?

[@devdetour]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll keep this in mind. Still trying to figure out the right audio levels :)

[@toggenburger]

@@devdetour please dont go way lower. often videos have comedically quiet background music. Guess its a matter of preference

[@kabul891234]

NIce, just installed teldrive, just make sure to use your own api id and hash

[@ErikUden]

Sure, these are “bad” download and upload speeds if compared to transferring files to a local drive, but what about enabling it to sync just like Nextcloud or OneDrive does? Wouldn't it be awesome to use this in order to have locally stored files backed up to the cloud. I could assume the Nextcloud client would be a huge help to implement something like this here! What do you think?

[@edicarlosmartins1562]

Hey man! Could you mentioned in the description that people also can TELEGRAM-UPLOAD from Pypi?

[@supernenechi]

Yay, got into the video! Great video dude!

[@Twisted_Code]

FUSE sounds like it might be relevant to a problem I've had on my to do list to solve. Is this the same term used by the Windows ecosystem for the concept?

[@maciej.opalinski]

The caching scheme you implemented does not let you read files if they don't fit in RAM. Fuse manages data in chunks to allow working on files larger than free memory.

[@kleins0]

Very interesting video again!

[@KaptanUfuk]

yes. i found this method about 2,5 years ago but i never automated it, i couldnt do it. i was waiting for someone to do this application. thanks

[@sassas4557]

TIP: Try to send all the zipped files togheter and to download all of them togheter and then allow the user to modify, etc., so the flow should look like "read:download all (storing in temp)->check if they are all (by seeing witch are the missing ones checking their names from the DB file)->once they're all merge the file->show the file", " write: if the new file was used less then x time ago (ex. 2 hours ago), wait; else, move the file to temp->split in chunks->check and write to db->upload->check with db". Like 3 months ago, I tried to do the same thing by hand, separating the files with Winrar and uploading them slowly, and it worked, but if I have to upload a lot of things, it could get messy. PS: We also have to think about resuming upload after power-up and checking partially uploaded files during shoutdown, but it can be resolved by leaving the files in temp until they're fully uploaded with the checks mentioned before and other checks when booting and shutting down the PC (we write the queue of files to upload and download somewhere in the database to know what we were doing before the shoutdown). Nice video, keep on going man, I love these kind of things. Sorry for my bad english btw.

[@wrathofainz]

There are no good fuse tutorials in yt search, you should add fuselib or something to the tags or title of the video. I intend to use this for a personal server of mine if i can figure out how to get it working on my linux machine. Theres already some fusefs stuff going on under the hood so it can't be too bad... right? Edit: i downloaded the example script amd your telegram fusefs script as examples so hopefully I can make sense of it with those.

[@realcheez795]

this is amazing

[@Girgoo]

Maybe it is better if you just sync the file in the background, possible make small chunks to have multiple upload run simultaneously? Now with 2 different providers(telegram + discord) you can actually have raid 1?

[@weak]

i never thought of telegram for storage

[@davia.sampaio8633]

This is actually good if you dont want certain files on four system. This way you can just drop them on a "cloud" that has no connection to you

[@ManIkWeet]

A lot of specialized file download software can download a file using multiple connections simultaneously, maybe you can use that to improve speeds more?

[@kairu_b]

Another great video!

[@rovicrosales5547]

I have a question?? Does the files last as long as the telegram exists?

[@parkour_pain]

You mentioned having to do some unconventional things to get the library to work for dlscord, what might those things be? I’m working on a different project but I’m needing to call functions in my bot too and I’m struggling

[@parkour_pain]

I’ll take any help I can get I would appreciate it so much I am very desperate

[@nand3kudasai]

KISS instead of fighting against the cache. Upload the chunks and not the whole files. That would improve random access times in case you want to read or start reading from a random part. Pretty much the same way FAT stores files in chunks. It might even help if you implement some sort of parallelization in the pipeline. Ive seen mny of these tools, i find them interesting, i remember there was one to store files on email accounts (back when goggle falsely advertised infinite storage). Good job on using py fuse. Like others i would have used 7z to split and encrypt.

[@nand3kudasai]

It will also improve your ram usage problem.theres a reason why libfuse uses samll chunks and youre basically going against that.

[@mehregankbi]

did you also purchase premium? it's cheap iirc and it says speed does increase for premium users.

[@DanDrakeV]

This is so good!

[@MightyElemental]

sounds great for a backup system that has no guarantee the data will remain there 😅 Those file upload speeds don't seem right though... Would adding more upload/download workers improve the performance? The data may need to be split into chunks for each worker, but it may be faster overall?

[@AtaGunZ]

I'm pretty sure it is rate limited per account or even per IP

[@myfather7893]

wasn't there Unlim Cloud app which used telegram for storgae. Or did it stopped working?

[@lancemarchetti8673]

Great video!

[@Sircliffe]

Store files on KZbin with digital data modes like OFDM-3500.

[@ayte1549]

It'd be fun to have a whole OS stored in telegram, and have your bootloader fetch if form there every time you boot up the PC.

[@luizansounds]

Dude making a suggestion of how a data center can boot x3

[@hoangduong5954]

What about creating a bunch of google/microsoft account and store files in there?

[@D0Samp]

I see we have advanced pretty far from the time I used a free ad-supported web hoster with filesize limits and a PHP script to concatenate split files.

[@nameq]

On a TDLib level for telegram you can request parts of the file instead of the whole file from the storage

[@erikehlers7006]

I have noticed, that the download speed is kinda slow even when you download files normaly. So I think it actually has to do something with their servers

[@talhahussains1b47]

start teaching coding ngl your really fun to watch❤❤

[@DealazonDaily]

I have an idea can you create an GUI for telegram only for uploading the files like if the members is free the file limit will be 2GB I'd the premium users is 4GB limit so if this idea create an GUI project is bit more powerful to use ??❤

[@MrPeepa]

Why not use read write streams for uploading and downloading. And then in the pipeline add a counter for the amount of chunks that got written or read.

[@ErikUden]

Imagine you could sync with this like with Nextcloud ^ ^

[@SMASHTheGamingCanuck]

Wonder if Guilded would be faster then discord as it offers 500mb file upload limit

[@_Karlsson]

Telegram download is slower than upload on purpose to decrease people misusing the service as much. But it's still really useful in a pinch.

[@tutacat]

Actually, HTTP supports something called download range, which only downloads the requested range from a file.

[@heated1333]

How is this not a negative for telegram? I love telegram as a service, I don't think I'm a fan of potentially them bearing more load then they need to when the provide such an amazing service so cleanly. Is it reasonable to ask to rethink this? Maybe do it to someone like Apple?

[@Chicken_Soy]

thank you

[@juuujuuu1564]

What about pings? You can give them data and they'll send it back. Just do that a lot of times a second sending data to different IPs and you're storing data.. over internet wires!

[@Spiderfffun]

I swear I saw a video like that already.

[@juuujuuu1564]

@@Spiderfffun Please link it if you can find it! Would be interesting.

[@Jsephos]

@@juuujuuu1564 kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJSthIpth9Wln9E

[@realminecraaftt]

@@juuujuuu1564 kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJSthIpth9Wln9E

[@devdetour]

Yes, someone has done this! kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJSthIpth9Wln9E. It's really really interesting!

[@brennanlaurent4748]

What about steam could you store files on steam using there cloud save feature

[@nourmagdi6031]

i loved the Rick and Morty reference

[@AnoshterHaar]

Does this provide any form of redundancy? Cause why would you otherwise even bother the slightest... There are zip programs out there making raid like redundancy possible for zip files. Multipar for example.

[@this-one]

No need for Samba on your Linux host, if you want to run it on windows there is WinFsp, which is basically FUSE for Windows.

[@notchieuwu]

i LOVE fuse stuff, i've tried to do a similar thing in windows with terabox because the client sucks, but it didn't work out

[@LovelyNucleus]

2:50 Literally me with all of my projects 😭

[@Hoopaugi]

I completely forgot rar files were a thing. Don't really run into them outside of torrenting games.

[@hanspeter9636]

Can it run DOOM?

[@bootmii98]

Stealing Storage from KZbin next? Is there any stego in this video?

[@undead2146]

tbh when you live in a country where an SSD costs an entire months paycheck, a free but shitty cloud service doesn't seem that bad.

[@Bromon655]

People who experiment with these free storage tactics are a large part of the reason why tech companies have started putting up paywalls for their services. Server space doesn’t grow on trees.

[@Kipruto254]

This is why we can't have good things. Telegram will likely impose a restrictions after this.

[@Spiderfffun]

@@Kipruto254 didn't this guy mention something like this existing already?

[@kaidenrogers]

@@Kipruto254 Telegram just deletes old files when they start running out of space. Your uploaded files aren't guaranteed to live there forever. The faster people use it up like this, the faster they delete. So it's really no sweat off their back. Other than increased bandwidth usage, but we saw Telegram's mitigation for that, they throttle it, hoping you'll upgrade to premium.

[@R_Samnan]

exactly dude, free storage doesnt mean it auto generates itself with no costs infinitely

[@kaidenrogers]

@@R_Samnan It's a loss leader. And it's not like it's guaranteed storage. If they need more space, they just delete your old files. The storage may not auto generate, but it does regenerate.

[@simon_roy]

Can you get ban from telegram for doing this ?

[@ALoonwolf]

I didn't have enough storage space so I used KZbin to store all my videos, including my own film which took months of tedious work to make. Then KZbin deleted my channel, destroying everything. Don't trust online storage!

[@algj]

You used FUSE and still - no random reads/writes, missed a huge opportunity to allow streaming media with low latency, torrent seeding and many other things.

[@wrathofainz]

6:39 Code salesman: **Slaps roof of Time Complexity** "This bad boy can fit so much N in it."

[@reilshat]

The download speed in telegram is limited just so that you don't use it as a file storage

[@hwtw]

How about make telegram and discord on a raid like thing?

[@shubhsharma19]

Can we do same thing with Javascript? if someone can update me on this coz i have no idea about python but i want to try this in JavaScript

[@abasgames]

you can store your data on KZbin by uploading videos and use them as filesystem

[@tomerbs440]

any windows alternative to FUSE?

[@MrImodre]

fsync/fflush: exists devdetour: reinvented cache goes brrrrr

[@devdetour]

I did actually look at pyfuse3's fsync(), but I don't think it behaves like a cache. As far as I can tell from the pyfuse3 docs (www.rath.org/pyfuse3-docs/operations.html#pyfuse3.Operations.fsync), it just passes the fh, not actually the data, so a separate cache is still needed - and I couldn't actually get pyfuse3 to call into fsync() in testing, so I kept it in release(). Maybe not optimal, but it works!

[@Viralvlogvideos]

how to make a video player that is hosted online but it uses telegram data

[@czypherth]

what if you emulate how ssd works

[@ivanromanchenko459]

What if telegram will cut this feature?

[@om1431]

Brother do you know how to link yt dlp on telegram

[@bananprzydawka7129]

so like, when is someone gonna install arch linux on it?

[@Spiderfffun]

that would be hilarious, and im not sure if it's possible. Even if it was, there's probably hundreds or thousands of files your system accesses on boot, meaning the process might take very, very long. Not to mention the instability and general slowness of the system. A virtual machine tho.. I could give that a shot 🤔

[@Grogueman]

@@Spiderfffun Btw, do you use Arch LInux?

[@_varianta007]

I do the same thing for years with files, links, music etc

[@mizukun9037]

i wanna learn computer science like coding stuff how to start

[@esecallum]

MEGA does 50 gb ?

[@user-wz7sx2ii3w]

Telegram really slow sometimes in uploading/downloading

[@frankruan6842]

The reason why Telegram download is so slow is that Telegram limits regular users' download speed cuz they want to make use buy their premium subscription. That was intentional.

[@matheuswmac]

bro, the worst day was when I lost my group with my files and there was no backup, (I was banned from my group somehow) so I don't trust Telegram much for backups

[@kaidenrogers]

Yeah, Telegram doesn't guarantee they'll keep your messages. That's how they can offer storage for "unlimited" files. If they start running out of space, they start deleting old files.

[@ohhim.]

Oh man do we need a windows version of this

[@JellyRockFN]

Is this safe to store content in telegram?

[@selachian]

This is the type of abuse that ruins things for everybody else. Well, I guess the fact that you don't abuse it by creating hundreds of accounts to accomplish this and only use your single account makes it a little less problematic.

[@kaedriz]

I thought the same, like I hate corporations more than other guy, but this will only hurt legit users in the end, like restrictions on max file upload, max attachment size etc. And it's even funnier when people do it to backup data like there exists specialised products to it, my fav Backblaze, for just 9$/m for unlimited data. I understand someone in third world might be burdened by it, but then do you realy need that much storage for backup important documents, like gigabytes? Someone testing it if it works is ok, but abusing it longterm like that? 🙄

[@flamingkillermc2806]

Didn't know about winRAR and telegram 💀💀💀💀

[@zine_eddinex24]

Cool keep up 🆙 👍 😅

[@raceup]

I think the download speed on telegram can be improved by buying telegram premium..