Many internet providers or storage hosts will often throw the word “unlimited” around when it comes to data allowances. To the everyman, that simply means you can stream as much Netflix as you want without worrying about paying for extra data.
But there has to be a ceiling, right? Particularly when we’re talking about cloud storage. After all, data stored in the cloud is still stored somewhere physical, so how much could it really take?
Reddit user beaston02 was determined to find out, so he uploaded a petabyte of porn to Amazon‘s cloud storage. How big is that, you ask? Only a million fucking gigabytes.
In order to gather this ridiculous amount of pornography, beaston02 wrote scripts (a short executable code that carries out a task automatically) that recorded public webcam shows from a bunch of sites, including Chaturbate, CamSoda and MyFreeCams.
“It is nearly entirely porn,” he told Motherboard 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 collected about 1.8 petabytes of porn over five or six months. That equates to roughly 23.4 years of HD-TV quality video. Because webcam streams are nowhere near that quality, a bunch of Reddit users did the numbers at 720p, which is about 2GB per hour. This would equate to 102 years worth of porn. Fuucckkk.
“I know plenty of people have labeled me some huge pervert or someone with a huge porn addiction, but that’s really not me at all,” he said. “I have more of a problem with collecting or hoarding data than I do with porn.”
He says he used the project in order to help him learn about handling large amounts of data, along with learning the Python programming language and SQL databases. Now that he’s gained the knowledge he was after, he’s no longer interested in the project and has since stopped collecting the videos.
Amazon killed off their unlimited storage plan back in June, a move many credit directly to beaston02 and his gigantic collection of porno, but he reckons that had nothing to do with him.
Hmmmmm I reckon you definitely caught their eye there, pal.
