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I Stored a Website in a Favicon

I Stored a Website in a Favicon

theanonymousone

Comments (77)

  • Tepix
    Instead of going via pixels, why not use a SVG favicon and directly store markup inside it and extract it?Use this favicon.svg: <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> <circle cx="50%" cy="50%" r="50%" fill="orange"/> <p>hello HN!</p> </svg> use this in your <head> to use a svg favicon: <link id="favicon" rel="icon" href="favicon.svg" type="image/svg+xml"> finally, use this in your <body> to extract it and add it to your document body: <script> fetch(favicon.href).then(r => r.text()).then(t => document.body.innerHTML += t.match(/<p[\s\S]*p>/)[0]); </script>
  • Retr0id
    > You still need a tiny bootstrap loader to decode the image.Nope, you can do it all in a single file with an html/png polyglot (and nowadays you can get better compression ratios with newer formats like webp).https://web.archive.org/web/20120801001616/http://daeken.com...
  • sheept
    You can use the favicon cache as storage too, by redirecting users across domains. It's been proposed as a potential fingerprinting risk[0], and if a browser naively reuses the cache for incognito mode, it could be used to track users across browser profiles.[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/browser-track...
  • franciscop
    Is this timing coincidence? I just submitted 1h (30 mins before this) ago a website I just made about storing your stock porfolio in a URL + favicon!https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606396
  • Walf
    PNG has comment chunks tEXt, zTXt, and iTXt. You can have a completely normal image whose file is stuffed with as much content as you want. That is less fun, I suppose.
  • MomsAVoxell
    Oh, I am so aligned with this mentality: A monitor is storage. A keyboard is storage. Forum posts are storage. Markov-approved tweaks in an edit, over time, certainly enough for quite a lot of storage. Dual-use storage to boot, since .. you know .. sometimes the comments are socially interesting.Best thing is, nobody really knows if their chicken casserole recipe isn't just a handle to a carefully constructed GUID pointing across to .. lets say, for humor .. a thousand different forum postings ...I do have to wonder if the author is familiar with PoC||GTFO, for this is certainly a technique one will find deep within the depths of the Alchemist Owls' holy tomes...
  • esquivalience
    I found the agressively staccato, clearly LLM-generated content extremely difficult to read.
  • inglor
    Cool! Here is a GH repo demonstrating unbounded favicons I made 11 years ago - it crashes some browsers - wanna guess how long it took each one to fix it :D https://github.com/benjamingr/favicon-bug
  • jorisw
    Fun Fact: You can use any inline SVG for a favicon and keep it right in the HTML document.This also allows you to use an emoji directly as a favicon, like so: <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 100 100'><text y='.9em' font-size='90'>(your emoji here)</text></svg>" /> (HN isn't showing the emoji)
  • Gabrys1
    Have an index.html that's also (byte-to-byte equal) served as favicon.ico. If that page "works" and the favicon doesn't show garbage, it is a website stored in a favicon (by my standards).
  • berkes
    I'd imagine the (aggressive) caching of the favicon by browsers makes it a challenge, but you could generate the favicon dynamically, then have JS extract the sequentially. Basically streaming arbitraily large content to a webpage via favicons. Via blocks of 239 bytes.It may be a fun, novel way to proxy webpages that are otherwise blocked. Though, i guess, the service rendering the favicons can just as easily be blocked then.
  • herodoturtle
    How long before someone ports DOOM into a favicon? ^_^(For the technical gurus here, would that even be possible?)
  • franze
    also https://pong-in-a-favicon.franzai.com/ for further favicon (mis)use
  • titularcomment
    Painful read.Related interesting project: https://github.com/EtherDream/web2img
  • brtkwr
    Hmm this is cool but what are the practical use cases?It didn’t load first time round on my browser (Brave) without disabling its prevent tracking feature…
  • tetrisgm
    Love it. Did you see the old effort to store the page in the url? https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages
  • momoraul
    The browser already asks for the favicon on every page. Might as well put it to work.
  • fvckaigotohell
    AI generated garbage. Blocked
  • Izmaki
    Wait 'til the author discovers that you can use ping (ICMP) to transfer data, too! :)
  • aaubry
    A neat improvement would be to make the decoder into a bookmarklet. This would avoid the overhead of serving the script. Of course you would rely on the user having the bookmarklet installed, but when you serve HTML you also rely on the user having a web browser installed.
  • superjose
    Pretty cool tbh!!! Would have loved seeing the decoder code!!!It's also pretty interesting to think how an attacker could exploit images on his behalf. Never thought that would be a way!!!Thanks!
  • beardyw
    I would have used a minimal service worker to unpack the web data and present it as if it were just a normal page being loaded.
  • soanvig
    Honestly it didn't interest me, but I do remember from back in the days full websites rendered by a browser from... Empty files. https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/css-without-html
  • abc123abc123
    Bravo Maestro! Wonderful performance! =)
  • frankzero
    I personally won't do things this way, but this is really cool and I could see the applications already.
  • bozdemir
    Very cool. I wonder is it possible to make a simple game with also leveraging the webassembly?
  • ab_wahab01
    Fascinating concept! Thanks for sharing this!
  • fitsumbelay
    very cool and interesting after reading just the title I wrongly assumed this would be about svg
  • neon_me
    Is it cake? Game for devs.
  • scoot
    Would have been more fun if the blogpost was rendered from the favicon.
  • jibal
    Surprised that a minimal "website" only requires a small image = few pixels = few bytes to store it? Um, ok.
  • charcircuit
    You can literally just use the file itself as the favicon. There is no need to over complicate it.cp index.html favicon.png
  • deemwar
    looks good
  • swordlucky666
    [dead]
  • anon
    undefined
  • pizzaballs
    [dead]
  • heroku
    [dead]
  • anujshashimal98
    [flagged]
  • shaharamir
    Amazing!