The tech world is awash with claims from companies about their level of engagement, user numbers and revenue, but most of these go unverified, particularly for companies that don’t generate revenue.

When a company says it has “X” number of users or posits other grandiose marketing claims, don’t just be skeptical; try to test it out for yourself.

A story recently came to mind of a rather unusual verification process – using pornography as the means of proof. It all started when Amazon offered “unlimited” cloud storage to its users.

Reddit user beaston08 put Amazon’s cloud storage plan to test in an unusual manner, uploading 1.8 petabytes (a petabyte is one million gigabytes) of pornography to the storage service. Of course, he didn’t do it manually, rather he developed a series of scripts to record public webcam shows and upload the data automatically.

Vice’s tech reporting site Motherboard considered how long it would take to watch this collection: “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.”

Yes, that’s right, you would need 293 and a half years to watch the whole collection. And yes, Amazon stopped unlimited cloud storage for non-Prime members in June 2017. A victory for the small guy? Or did he just ruin it for everyone else?

read more at ejinsight.com