293 years worth of live porn cams uploaded to Amazon cloud storage in Reddit experiment

A Redditor has gone to extreme, X-rated lengths to test whether Amazon's "unlimited" cloud storage scheme was truly unlimited by flooding the service with around 293 years worth of porn.

Curious as to whether the retail giant's now-defunct offering had a hidden storage cap, Reddit user "beaston02" set about recording a whopping 1.8 petabytes of explicit "live cams" and uploaded the behemoth collection of adult streams to Amazon's cloud servers.

To achieve the feat, rather than manually select and record the adult material, beaston02 programmed Python scripts to do the work for him.

Said scripts captured live footage from a broad range of livestreaming porn websites, including CamSoda, Chaturbate, and MyFreeCams.

For context, 1.8 petabytes translates to over two million gigabytes - that's the equivalent of roughly 62,500 regular 32GB SDcards.

With a little help from another Redditor, the report also examines how long it would take to watch the entire collection, assuming the quality of each recording is in standard definition. At 720p resolution the smorgasbord of smut would take 102 years to watch in total, while at 480p it would stretch to over 293 years.

'People have labeled me some huge pervert'

"It is nearly entirely porn," explained beaston02. "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."

Amazingly, it appears that the user did not find a storage cap in Amazon's service, which the company shuttered in June. While he has since abandoned his smutty experiment, the "Petabyte Porn Project" lives on with fellow Redditor "-Archivist" and several volunteers pushing the total up by "upwards of 12 terabytes per day" using Github data released by beaston02.

As for why the project's original instigator stopped, beaston02 said: "Plenty of people have labeled me some huge pervert or someone with a huge porn addiction, but that's really not me at all.

"I have more of a problem with collecting or hoarding data than I do with porn. The project ran its course, I got the knowledge I was hoping to get, and I just had no interest in it anymore."

While recording the adult livestreams falls into a legal grey area, the practice of hoarding porn without the cam participants' consent raises moral questions. When asked about the subject, CamSoda model Charley Hart told Motherboard: "Part of me is ok with some of it. It's one thing if I do it — I think that's the whole thing, it's all about consent."