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Man stores 2 million gigabytes of porn to test Amazon’s cloud

A Reddit user who goes by beaston02 tested Amazon’s “unlimited” storage claims by loading nearly two-million gigabytes of webcam porn onto the cloud.

First reported by Motherboard, the user wrote scripts that recorded X-rated webcam streams from several popular porn sites to see if there was a cap on Amazon’s “unlimited” storage option. He collected five to six months of footage, ending up with 1.8 petabytes of data. For reference, one petabyte is equal to one thousand terabytes or one million gigabytes. To give you a better idea of how much data that is, the biggest hard drive you can buy at most electronics retail stores is between four and six terabytes.

“It is nearly entirely porn,” he told Motherboard via a Reddit message. “Ever since I got into computers, I found myself learning more, and faster when it was something more interesting. Call me crazy, but women interest me more than most other things on the internet and there is a huge amount of data being created daily, so it was a good fit for the project.”

Motherboard estimates it would take anywhere between 23 and 293 years to watch 1.8 petabytes of porn depending on the video quality.

Beaston02 says he stopped his crude project because he got what he was looking for and lost interest. After he stopped collecting the porn, the anonymous user published his scripts on Github, where several other redditors took up the reigns and began collecting their own webcam footage from popular sites, including CamSoda, Chaturbate, and MyFreeCams.

One redditor told Motherboard that the “Petabyte Porn Project” now stores more than 12 terabytes of porn per day on Amazon’s cloud, and that many users were close to meeting the two-petabyte mark.

As Motherboard points out, recording live public video falls in a legal grey area, even if it’s webcam porn. Most free webcam porn models are paid by viewers with tips made directly from whichever platform they’re streaming on. By downloading the videos, users circumvent the system in place to keep funds flowing.

“We all have different places where we draw the line morally, and that happens to be one of my lines, at least as far as publicly releasing code goes,” beaston02 told Motherboard. “Although I have no control over what any captured content is used for later, I also have asked any content gathered by the scripts not be shared or sold on websites.”

Beaston02 has been accused of forcing Amazon to end its unlimited storage option—a decision it made in June. He denied the claims.

We have reached out to Amazon and will update this article if we hear back.

H/T Motherboard