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A User Archived Nearly 2 Million Gigabytes of Porn to Test Amazon's 'Unlimited' Cloud Storage (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit user beaston02 was determined to find the true ceiling of Amazon's cloud storage plan, which was killed off in June. He decided to push its limits with a petabyte of porn. For reference, a petabyte is one million gigabytes. "It is nearly entirely porn," he told me in 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." He said it took five or six months to collect one petabyte of porn, and he stopped collecting just shy of 1.8 petabytes. How long would it take one to consume 1.8 petabytes of porn? 1.8 petabytes is about 23.4 years of HD-TV video, but webcam streams are nowhere near that quality. A few good folks crunched the numbers: 720p is about two gigabytes per hour, and at 900,000 hours, that's 102 years of straight calendar time. If the videos are even lower quality, say, 480p, that's around 0.7 gigabytes per hour, or 293 years and six months.
That's so much porn you can't even possibly look at most of it. If you wanted to test Amazon's "unlimited' storage, why not just randomly generate various files. You could probably have a computer make shitty modern art paintings much faster than you could curate a 1 petabyte porn collection, and you still get to test out how much you can store on Amazon's cloud storage service before they pull the plug. And when they invariably do, you won't lose your porn collection.
Whether it's unlimited data, unlimited backups, unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks- this is why we can't have nice things. Regardless of motive, people like this ruin for the rest of us.
There is no way this was 2 petabytes. Cloud companies use de-duping tech. So if two people upload identical files, only one copy is stored. Likely 99.99% of these files are dupes.
Someone has already mentioned the tragedy of this ruining it for other people and in a way I agree, but since he did it using the remainder of the unlimited storage period, I'm not going to feel bad about it either. This dude is a fucking hero even just for making the world's most obvious joke about Amazon's Cloud storage into a reality.
But it's a damned shame that the unlimited storage plans are going away because I really did have about 6TB of actual personal data (mostly photos, which are still unlimited for Prime subscribers anyway) on my account and the amazing thing about Amazon as opposed to every other big cloud service is that they never, ever seemed to run out of upstream bandwidth. I took a 4TB drive to my server colo and sent data to Cloud Drive. Amazon took it at the physical speed of the hard disk. Compared to Google or Carbonite or Backblaze, where data transfer throttles seem to be the name of the game, the idea that Amazon will take THAT MUCH data in so short a period of time is more impressive to me than just having the disk space to store it.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Preaching against watching porn does not reduce the amount of porn being watched but only makes people lie and feel bad about watching porn. There was a time in the distant past when human survival was dependent on humans having multiple partners. Those whose brain rewarded them for this behavior reproduced more and passed this on to their descendants. Tiger Woods is a perfect example of this. Even with an almost perfect mate, his brain rewarded him when he had sex with other women. Which is worse?
1. Watching a movie where it shows how to give pleasure to another human.
2. Watching a movie where it shows how to murder another human.
I just watched a Netflix movie where a large number of humans were killed. The worst was when a woman who was holding on to a ledge of a building was shot point blank and another where a young girl was placed in a box and burned to death.
I am sure there would be calls to shut down Netflix if it shows two women giving oral sex to each other but I am sure this movie will not generate much opposition.