Where are EC2 manifest files located and how can I access them?

Question

When creating EC2 instances via the AWS Management Console, there are manifest names provided, like

amazon-linux-mono-2-10/image.manifest.xml

but they are not links.

Could someone point me to the location of the manifests and tell me how I can read the contents? (I know how to use XML, but there seems to be some problems with accessing manifest files). For example, manifest

 amazon/CloudFormation-insoshi_1.0.0_2.0_8e1fece7-64bit-20110727-1654

seems to be located at

 https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazon/CloudFormation-insoshi_1.0.0_2.0_8e1fece7-64bit-20110727-1654 

but is inaccessible (AccessDenied)

Answer 1

They're on Amazon S3 and they're not meant for you; they are just pointers to the machine image files and such EC2 needs to grab to deploy that AMI.