Man Uploads 293 Years of Porn Videos to Test Amazon’s ‘Unlimited’ Cloud Storage

He stopped collecting just shy of 1.8 petabytes after his interest faded and made his collection available on GitHub.

As customers, we love to test the product claims made by their companies. But this guy went overboard while testing Amazon’s ‘Unlimited’ Cloud Storage plan. A Redditor who goes by handle beaston02 wished to check the upper limits of Amazon’s plan, and he did it by uploading almost two petabytes of porn videos, which is 293 years of adult content in 480p resolution! The determination of the person to check if Amazon servers are actually capable of backing their claims of ‘unlimited’ data plan has got other Reddit users ponder if he is responsible for Amazon canning the plan altogether.

Amazon had been offering new online cloud storage subscription as cheap as USD 60 per year. But they dramatically reduced to 1TB for USD a year in June. This step by the company is seen by many as the consequence of beaston02 stockpiling million of GBs porn videos. According to a report published by Motherboard, beaston02 wrote scripts that recorded public webcam shows from a variety of adult cam sites, including CamSoda, Chaturbate, and MyFreeCams to gather this massive amount of data.

“I have more of a problem with collecting or hoarding data than I do with porn. It is nearly entirely porn,” beaston02 writes in a Reddit message reports Motherboard. “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 an enormous amount of data being created daily, so it was a good fit for the project.”

The project of testing Amazon server’s limits took ‘five or six months’ to collect one petabyte of porn. He stopped collecting just shy of 1.8 petabytes after his interest faded and made his collection available on GitHub. In the same report, beaston02 is quoted saying, “I know plenty of people have labelled me some huge pervert or someone with a huge porn addiction, but that’s really not me at all.” It had more to do with his love for collecting or hoarding data than with porn. He used the exercise to learn Python, SQL databases, and how to handle that much data. “The project ran its course, I got the knowledge I was hoping to get, and I just had no interest in it anymore,” he said.

While beaston02 might have got bored of his hobby of collecting porn videos in online storage, there is another Redditor, -Archivist, who has taken upon himself to add to the collection. Giving it a name “Petabyte Porn Project,” he has recruited other hoarders to help continue recording live public cam sessions all day every day. The report publishes -Archivist told of adding “upwards of 12 terabytes per day.” Those helping hoards are close to two petabytes now, stored in Amazon’s cloud and mirrored on Google Drive. Amazon is yet to comment on the whole ordeal about the plan, a Redditor’s determination to check their claims and Amazon’s decision to kill the project. (Edited By: Rashmi Mishra).