77,000 Mysterious YouTube Videos

[Maia Gabrial]

This is too freaky! Leave it to the people of Galactic Connection to find the oddities!




No One Knows The Meaning Behind These 77,000 Mysterious YouTube Videos Wed, May 21, 2014


Since March 7th of 2013, one mysterious channel has been flooding YouTube with a near constant stream of baffling videos. Even calling them videos is generous—they’re more like blips or brief communiques—although communicating what is anyone’s guess. All exactly 11 seconds long, consisting of a 10 slides with red and blue boxes in varying configurations, 77,000 videos and counting have been uploaded in the last year—literally dozens every day.

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Anyone have a clue? Could this be a trigger of some sort?

[RunningDeer]

I clicked off after it automatically came up on YouTube. I wanted to do a follow up check.

My question is, what's behind the sound and visual that's cloaked within the red, white and blue? It could be a trigger for some.

[Sidney]

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/may/01/truth-youtube-mysterious-videos-webdriver-torso

The truth behind one YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos
'Webdriver Torso' has uploaded more than 77,000 cryptic videos. Are they connected to espionage, or even aliens – or is the answer more mundane?
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For the past seven months, a single YouTube channel has been uploading an average of one video every 20 seconds. Each video is exactly the same: 10 seconds long, they flick through 10 still images of a blue and a red rectangle, accompanied by a series of electronic tones. The position and sizes of the shapes, the title of the video and the pitch of the tones all appear to be completely random, but every single video has the caption "aqua.flv" in the bottom-left corner.


The very first video
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The 77,000 or so videos have all been uploaded by an account called "Webdriver Torso", and the hunt for their creator – and purpose – has entranced the internet for a week. Theories ranged from alternate reality games to extraterrestrial activity, through espionage and viral marketing. The Today programme took to Twitter to blame either aliens or advertising:


While on the blog BoingBoing, user Enkidu speculated that the videos might be a digital version of spies' "numbers stations". These cold war relics are radio stations that broadcast seemingly random numbers at periodic intervals. They are thought to be the basis of a method of encoded communication using what are known as "one-time pads", large sheets of random data that let spies create unbreakable messages (so long as the one-time pad never falls into enemy hands). Could the Webdriver Torso videos be fulfilling a similar purpose?


The latest video
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The Daily Dot's Brendan O'Connor tried to track down the videos' creator, but to no avail; whoever is behind the YouTube account ignored his messages, and didn't respond when the Guardian attempted contact either. But O'Connor did find a company called Selenium that makes a product called Selenium Ice, which has a function called … WebDriver. The software is used to automate testing websites, but even its creators don't know what the videos are about. As O'Connor reported:

It looked likely that "Webdriver Torso" was part of this project, not only because of the shared neologism but also because automation seemed like the only plausible explanation for uploading this quantity of video. But Patrick Lightbody, who has been involved with Selenium since 2005, denied that there was any connection between their WebDriver and Webdriver Torso. "Those videos look like they are trying to make contact with aliens," he wrote.

But the truth is, as ever, more mundane.

Isaul Vargas, a New York-based software tester, spotted the videos in a post on BoingBoing and recognised them from an automation conference he had been at a year ago. They were being shown by a European firm that made streaming software for set-top boxes, the kit that sits under a TV and connects to services such as Sky or Netflix.

The company needed to be able to quickly and reliably upload digital video, a capability which it tested by uploading short, randomly generated snippets to its YouTube channel and running image-recognition software on it. "Considering the volume of videos and the fact they use YouTube, it tells me that this is a large company testing their video encoding software and measuring how Youtube compresses the videos," says Vargas.

So there's the answer. What looked like an insight into the murky world of espionage, or maybe even something otherworldly, turns out to be a little bit of a quality-control system leaking into the outside world.

Perhaps some puzzles are better left unsolved.

UPDATE: But there's another twist. Isaul has tracked down the presentation he saw, which was given by the British company YouView. While it features similar videos, it is not identical: so although the general principle of using WebDriver, YouTube and automatic image recognition to test software stands, the culprit has slipped off into the night.

When one door closes, another opens. A thousand videos into the series is one six-second clip that breaks the mould. A short video of the Eiffel Tower, it features a comment from the uploader: "Matei is highly intelligent." Already, readers have been hard at work trying to find someone who fits the bill, but it's tricky. Matei is a common Romanian name, and even assuming that Matei is the uploader, is based in France, and has a public profile, there are at least two possibilities: Basarab Matei, who works on image recognition at the University of Paris North (suggested by @DAddYE), and Matei Mancas, who works on attention modelling at the University of Mons in Belgium (suggested by @marquis).

The Guardian has asked both if they can shed more light on the question, but has yet to receive a reply.

heres more.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/05/weird-and-wonderful-the-webdriver-torso-mystery-videos-explained-and-remystified/

[Operator]

Perhaps, an alternative for the numbers stations ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24910397

[loc333]

i was playing it as my dog went by made her a little jumpie,,,,but she is a little jumpie anyways. eh?:confused:

[Sidney]

Those tones made me a little jumpy. Hummm

[DeDukshyn]

I believe a bot is creating these videos. Likely for testing automated video creation and upload.

[Yetti]

To me it looks a direct and undisguised communication system for trigger an action in someone who was brainwashed like the Manchurian candidate! clear as pure water! be careful , be aware , my pure hunch is: this is no joke! keep an eye open!

[Maia Gabrial]

Alot can be programmed into 11 seconds. Our subconscious minds will pick up on it whatever it is. If a person is feeling uncomfortable listening to this, then maybe it's a trigger for them. Sorry, I hope there are no nefarious reasons for these transmissions.

[Nick Matkin]

The recipient of a numbers station radio signal is (almost completely) untraceable by any organization - that's the reason they still exist. (The transmitter can easily be located, but that's in another country. And if you're within a few tens of yards the receiving radio, its local oscillator signal may sometimes be tracked down, but for all practical purposes it is untraceable.)

Surely something appearing on the web can be tracked down at both ends (i.e. 'sender' and 'receiver') given the will and software - not very anonymous.

Nick

[Operator]

The recipient of a numbers station radio signal is (almost completely) untraceable by any organization - that's the reason they still exist. (The transmitter can easily be located, but that's in another country. And if you're within a few tens of yards the receiving radio, its local oscillator signal may sometimes be tracked down, but for all practical purposes it is untraceable.)

Surely something appearing on the web can be tracked down at both ends (i.e. 'sender' and 'receiver') given the will and software - not very anonymous.

Nick

True ! And very logical explanation why it cannot be an alternative ...

I was inspired by a method we used at a cable television company ... we aimed a camera on a led-panel and
tracked the status of all kind of stuff in the head station. It could be monitored on every location having
a cable connection and could be interpreted by a guard on duty. Coding of the leds was of course 'unknown'
to the public.

Tracking a local oscillator (I guess you are referring to superheterodyne receivers) is probably very difficult.
It suggests that you know the intermediate frequency of the receiver so you know what spectrum to check.
Professional receivers will probably also be very good shielded to prevent the oscillator's leakage radiation.

[Magnus]

A bot could be creating graphic and audible output based on the health of some sort of oceanwater samples, percentage of red representing danger to the ocean vs blue representing healthy oceanwater. The oceans are hurting from a lot of damage, when the ocean dies it's questionable whether humans could count on longterm survival.

[Or, this could be a graphically and audibly encoded message, requiring a specific set of instructions for decoding a.k.a. heavy-duty communication]

[ghostrider]

color , tone and sounds not audible to the 10 percent brain are used for MIND CONTROL ... nuff said ... don't watch or listen to them ...