The Hole In FriendFeed’s File Sharing Strategy

June 24, 2009 in Technology Comments

Disclaimer: What I’m about to go into while simple it is an unethical practice. You may very well end up violating FriendFeed’s TOS or possibly the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)

Today, the folks at FriendFeed unveiled a new addition to their service, file sharing. Though they say that they have only supported a few file types at this time, they don’t offer any video support and you can only share up to 3 .mp3’s within a 24 hour period. The only other current restriction appears to be that you have an undisclosed cap on how much you can share, this is also set on a revolving 24 hour period.

However, as soon as I found out I instantly though of file type obfuscation, in which you pass a file off as a different type. This allows you to share any type of media across the service, including video, and allowing you to beat the “.mp3″ quota.

In order to slip through FriendFeed’s monitoring you just have to select the file and rename  it from “FileName.xxx”,(Note: “.xxx” could be a “.mp3″, “.mp4″, “.avi”, or any other file type) to “FileName.pdf”. Upload the “.pdf” to FriendFeed, and leave a note for others to change it back into the correct file type, once they download it on their side.