That text was last updated in 2010; currently the repository is about 1.1TB.

http://search.maven.org/#stats

Ack! This does not do anything to increase my confidence in the Maven project's guardianship of our collective security.

> How hard would it be to just mirror it to S3 and use it from there via HTTPS?

Trivial.

Now ask: how hard would it be to pay the bandwidth charges, assuming it were a public bucket. I don't know the answer, but it's a much more interesting question.

Yes, a very interesting question. It'd be very expensive.

It occurs to me that BitTorrent technically solved the problem of high bandwidth costs long ago; millions of people transfer 1.1TB files around every day without worrying about bandwidth costs at all.

Can we come up with a similar system for jars? Why are we still relying on central servers for this at all?

I am guessing with Amazon, even though they run Java, they wouldn't do it out of the good of their hearts.