If you say you'll store images, and I make you store things that are not images - taking up hard drive space you didn't intend to let me use - that hurts you financially.

Any other reading of the situation is based on fantasy.

The "financial hurt" is mitigated by the fact that they can just ban your account and your access to your terabyte of stored data and possibly other yahoo services, anytime they want.

>Any other reading of the situation is based on fantasy.

Not necessarily. It is possible that Yahoo engineers may actually be amused and supportive of the way their service was remixed.

How is that "mitigated"? You're saying there's a natural defense to this first attack, so therefore the attack doesn't hurt.

Except it costs engineering time to fight back against this attack.

Then, someone starts putting the file into the RGB channels.

Then, it costs engineering time to fight back.

Then, someone starts putting the file into the low-order bits... which happens to make the file compress terribly, compared to a normal PNG.

Then, it costs engineering time to fight back.

Talk about cynicism. As I wrote, it is possible that Yahoo could be amused and supportive of this project, no? Corps react in various ways, and Yahoo could go either way. So unless you're representing Yahoo, why go about bitching at people for a clever remix that technically doesn't violate the TOS and doesn't exploit any vulnerabilities, when Yahoo hasn't even made an official statement.

Second ... you're characterizing it as an "attack"... really? The people who'll try to use it would be people who just want some cheap cloud-storage. And as I said before, they should use at their own risk, else they may wake-up one day and find their account is banned, and the terabyte of data they uploaded (which takes a non-trivial amount of time) will be gone, along with their yahoo mail and anything else yahoo was hosting for them.

Seriously, why the stick up your ass?

This version makes files 2-4x larger than the original. You think engineers and devops like something inherently 2-4x more demanding of storage than it could be? You think CFOs like that?

I've supported similar services, and people who think they're being clever, to exploit my FREE SERVICE to do things it was never intended to do, really piss me off.

Here's an idea: ASK.

Hey, Flickr, a free TB is awesome! Mind if we store arbitrary files on it?

Yes, it's an attack. It's a classic predator-prey relationship. When you proposed that they prey could exert energy to defend the service, you were merely describing the next single step in that relationship.

> The people who'll try to use it would be people who just want some cheap cloud-storage.

...and they won't pay, and they don't care who they hurt.

Would you defend them, if they each made 100 Flickr accounts, just so they could get some more cheap cloud-storage? 1000? What if Amazon decided to implement their S3 storage on top of this free Flickr storage?

Is your argument that there's nothing inherently wrong with exploiting people who offer you something... only if you REALLY, REALLY exploit it?