What started out as a part of a bigger project, a Redditor by the online name ‘Beaston02’ uploaded tons of porn online to test some new codes, and the servers at Amazon. The report filed by Motherboard, stated that Beaston02 uploaded the data in order to check if the unlimited online storage on Amazon’s servers were true.
Previously, Amazon had offered a new online cloud storage for as cheap as $60 a year. Now the plan has been reduced to just 1TB for $60 a year, and the alleged reason could be because of Beaston02, who overloaded the server’s capacity singlehandedly.
Beaston02 wanted to know if the Amazon servers were really offering unlimited storage, so he started pushing almost 300 years of live porn webcam feeds to the Amazon servers to check if the storage servers could really push the envelope, and to see how much data he could capture. He set off his project and after around 5 or 6 months, he managed to capture nearly 2 petabytes of porn videos. He simultaneously recorded various Livestream webcam shows, which, if calculated, was an average of around 293 years of videos in 480p resolution.
He has now stopped recording the same, but has released his research code which helped him record the simultaneous streams.
Beaston02 managed to hoard on to so much of data by coding some scripts that recorded public webcam shows from a variety of adult cam sites, which included CamSoda, Caturbate and MyFreeCams. The entire data uploaded to the servers was porn, stated the Reddit user to 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 a huge amount of data being created daily, so it was a good fit for the project," he told Motherboard.
Beaston told Motherboard that he later stopped recording the streams simply because his interest in it died. "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 said 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."
While he is no longer running the scripts, he has shared it on Github, where another Redditor names ‘-Archivist’ took up the project for the “Petabyte Porn Project,” recruiting other hoarders to help continue the live recordings each day. –Archivist said that he uploads around 12TB each day and those helping him are uploading close to 2 petabytes daily. The uploaded data is being stored on Amazon and is being mirrored on Google.
