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One YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos
- zatkin 12y agoThis is by far the strangest approach to quality control I've ever seen.
- lucb1e 12y agoYeah... they're testing compression for 7 months 24/7 or what? It seems odd. Like they forgot to turn it off.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- vezzy-fnord 12y agoSee also: A man who has uploaded 6,300 videos and counting of him doing nothing but smoking pipes and grumbling unintelligible streams of broken English that are conveniently transcribed in the descriptions: https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/ https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/ YouTube is full of bizarre channels.
- tensafefrogs 12y agoPeople think Weird Twitter is weird, but it's no competition for Weird YouTube.
- owenversteeg 12y agoThank you so much for introducing me to that channel. The Internet never fails to surprise me with how strange it can be.
- Snail_Commando 12y agoCheck out 'alantutorial' if you're into bizarre yt/web things.
- ttty 12y agoWtf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1lgmEDCfq8&list=UU0JSXBqfEM4PQt3s_zzaTog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1lgmEDCfq8&list=UU0JSXBqfEM...
- swatkat 12y agoalantutorial is an alternate reality "game" starring a fictional character named "alan", made by Alan Resnick[1]. It seems all those videos are narrating a story!!! Now, I need to see them all :) [1]http://tutorialheads.wikia.com/wiki/Alantutorial http://tutorialheads.wikia.com/wiki/Alantutorial
- pmarin 12y agoHe has 1,751 subscribers, this is something to think about.
- vezzy-fnord 12y agoI'm more surprised by the fact that there aren't more. You would think the Internet would have gone ballistic over this discovery, but no one has yet to pick him up.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- morenoh149 12y agoThat's exactly what they WOULD say. I still think it's aliens.
- fblp 12y agoSpoiler from the article: "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."
- Trufa 12y agoThe signal to noise ratio of this article is amazing.
- sirdogealot 12y agoYou read it on The Guardian; a news service, not a Q&A website.
- interesting_guy 12y agoupdate says that they were similar not identical. willing to be corrected though.
- relampago 12y agoUnsatisfied by the conclusion
- dang 12y agoThere was another post about this today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920.
- y3rsh 12y agoWe automation engineers are really good with the bailing wire and duct tape.
- ____a 12y agoMinor note, it is baling (from a bale)
- aluhut 12y agoReminds me of Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".
- relampago 12y ago"Webdriver Torso" even sounds like a character from a Gibson novel. Also note that the word "torso" appears multiple times throughout his work. Search for yourself, http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/ http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/. Ok I've gone too deep into this
- devindotcom 12y agoeven weirder, Gibson himself has a torso
- jsmthrowaway 12y agoI'm surprised nobody noticed that the names of the videos are from mktemp(3). >>> tempfile.mktemp() '/tmp/tmplOcKyZ' >>> tempfile.mktemp() '/tmp/tmpW0dJUR' tmpwxm2CP 3 weeks ago - 31,842 views tmpElnFwp 3 weeks ago - 112 views Betting aqua.flv is the source file, the name of the video is the temporary output file (probably from a transcoder), and the article's conclusion about testing is accurate.
- 33W 12y agoaqua.flv would probably match the Aqua Teen Hunger Force clip behind the paywall? To do some math (that may be helpful or not): 77000 YouTube videos * 10 frames per YouTube video / 24 frames per second / 3600 seconds per hour = 8.91 hours of video
- corin_ 12y agoWhy did you convert from time to frames to frames to time when you could just have kept it in time? Also, your maths is off: 77,000 videos * 10 seconds = 770,000 seconds 770,000 seconds / 60 / 60 = 213.89 hours
- herokusaki 12y agoIs this in accordance with YouTube's TOS?
- spyder 12y agoIt's art! :)
- Grue3 12y agoBBC has a different take on this [1] and denies Isaul Vargas's explanation. The part with hidden Aqua Teen Hunger Force clip and the fact that it's named aqua.flv is curious. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332
- devindotcom 12y agoIf it's a set-top box, it's not hard to imagine some set of circumstances where it uploads a stored or live clip instead of the random one. Or possibly the ATHF could have been uploaded from the company itself as a test of automatically uploading copyrighted content. It's behind a french paywall and the other video is a vid from a french balcony, so that could be a test of user-uploaded video.
- runn1ng 12y ago>Or could it be the latest iteration of Cicada 3301 or another such public challenge Oh, Cicada 3301? That's what it was. I played their "challenge" back in 2012, didn't get very far, and I immediately forgot about it. They still exist and post "clues", apparently.
- varjag 12y agoAlso the palette is one of Russian tricolor! There must be a beautiful conspiracy theory in it..
- DanBC 12y agoIt's also the French tricolor and one of the videos takes a small payment from French credit cards to display a french thing (eifal tower?)
- hellbreakslose 12y agoYes i bet if aliens were invading they would do it via youtube... Who reads newspapers and stuff nowadays anyways?
- sjclemmy 12y agoThis ran as a piece on BBC Radio 4's today programme (quintessentially English), er, today. "Do you think it's a machine producing these? Or is somebody sitting there all day producing these?", and other such questions for the non-technical. As mentioned in the article they compared it to the phenomena of the 'Numbers Station' and suggested it might be governments communicating with their overseas spies. Priceless. One interesting point they raised is that out of the 77,000 uploads there are two non-rectangle videos, both of scenes in Paris, France - so I bet the 'European' company is French.
- DAddYE 12y agoInteresting one guy pointed me a similar thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769
- callesgg 12y agoWhy not set the videos as private.
- mxxx 12y agoIn the hope that this very situation arises, I'd say.
- heywire 12y agoThe audio reminds me of some of the slower digital modes used in HF ham radio... Would be interesting to see if there is any pattern to the frequencies.
- Theodores 12y agoPeople see things and recognise things that aren't really there in clouds, as in internet clouds. If you are building some type of API or interface then this stuff happens. The behaviour - when a machine does it - is inexplicable to the Radio 4 listening types that get other people to 'write their API's'.
- tyler_ball 12y agoReminds me of @googuns_staging: https://twitter.com/googuns_staging https://twitter.com/googuns_staging Here's an article about it from last year: http://www.theawl.com/2013/03/spy-twitter-is-weird-twitte http://www.theawl.com/2013/03/spy-twitter-is-weird-twitte
- matthewmcg 12y agoI was hoping this might be an internet version of the old shortwave "numbers" stations [1] but now I see that there is likely a more mundane explanation. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
- octagonal 12y agoIn an age of asymmetric public-key cryptography there would be very little to gain from number stations and a lot to lose.
- dfc 12y agoHow does an operator reliably, repeatedly and securely use "asymmetric public-key cryptography" in an environment where the possession of a laptop is cause for suspicion?
- jrockway 12y agoThe places that ban laptops love one-time pads...
- bananas 12y agoOTPs and number stations can't be cracked mathematically and the channel is secure as long as the receiving end doesn't let the pad get into bad hands (this is achieved by compartmental communications and code words on top). I would have thought that recent OpenSSL, SecureTransport and GnuTLS news would disprove your point. Not only that, we don't know what bad actors with unlimited resources can do with our communications if tapped. So number stations and OTP are still viable and always will be. With respect to numbers stations the transmission is centralised as well which means it's hard to break the channel infrastructure without crossing a border physically.
- sgtpepper 12y ago"old"?, there are hundreds of ACTIVE numbers stations today: http://priyom.org/ http://priyom.org/
- gbl08ma 12y ago500+ hours of similar video content, most clearly computer-generated, with junk titles (from mkfile), and a new video being uploaded every 20 seconds. No "normal" videos other than the one behind a paywall and the one of the Eiffel Tower. I don't know what the YouTube TOS says about automated bulk uploads, but I think such a user would have raised many flags on the system, regarding abuse, and the account would have been deactivated by now, right?... I'm betting that whoever is behind this has a special permit from Google. edit: grammar
- legohead 12y agoYou are just adding on to the ambient conspiracy. It may be abusing terms, but I doubt google (especially the youtube team) is bothered at all by this.
- chrismcb 12y agoIf only there was a way to read the YouTube TOS and see what it says about automated bulk uploads (hint, it doesn't say anything) I don't see anything in the TOS that says doing something like this isn't allowed.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoThere is one organization that does not need special dispensation to violate the youtube terms of service.
- chrisBob 12y agoSo your guess is that google is testing automated uploads to their own service with public videos?
- vvoyer 12y agowebdriver = selenium automation. nothing strange
- gregoryw 12y agoBrowser compatibility testing FTW.
- DAddYE 12y agoIt's a guy: http://www.math.univ-paris13.fr/~matei http://www.math.univ-paris13.fr/~matei ->> Laboratoire Analyse, Géométrie et Applications Sounds `real`. Source: https://twitter.com/model500/status/461978031578701824 https://twitter.com/model500/status/461978031578701824 Edit: also this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682360 seems to confirm it.
- dekhn 12y agoThis was a machine learning experiment and has since been shut down, due to the agent's unexpected capabilities. We hope to re-enable it once we've managed to control the psychosis inducing effects. Also, please don't watch more than 8 of these in a row.
- ryanfreeborn 12y agoshame about that near-eastern medical attache in Boston...
- irremediable 12y agoAnd now I feel compelled to reread Infinite Jest... a compulsion which is satisfying, in a self-referential kind of way.
- dzhiurgis 12y agoIt's Bitcoin 2.0 blockchain
- subdane 12y agoThis sounds _very_ similar to the work of Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, the team behind Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book. More here (paid content alert) http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/horse-ebooks-and-pronunciation-book-revealed.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/horse...
- bkmn 12y agoVALVE = 22112225 77,000 / 22112225 = 0,003 HL3 Confirmed!
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoTimecube?
- squeakynick 12y agoA couple of years ago I was researching the distribution of filenames people uploaded onto flickr. One user there had multiple accounts and was uploading thousands of versions of an identical image with the same filename. http://datagenetics.com/blog/december22012/index.html http://datagenetics.com/blog/december22012/index.html
- heywire 12y agoI wonder if they're identical from a binary point of view, or if this was being used as some form of steganography...
- Lightbody 12y agoThis is by far the strangest way I've ever been quoted in a published story. I still vote aliens.
- gretchen_204 12y agoFood for thought.
- robmcm 12y ago> as the caption "aqua.flv" in the bottom-left corner This is clearly Flash, and would never happen if they were using HTML5!
- maouida 12y agoThis shows how easy it is to keep people busy. Just make something random, mysterious, use strange name and make it look like a cryptography thing...and enjoy watching the internet goes into a storm.
- jasey 12y agoFirst thing that came to my head was it's some kind of Raven's Progressive Matrices test Then at the end YouTube gives you 4 related videos so you have to next watch the one related to what you just saw... Just first thing I thought it might be...idk
- username42 12y agomaybe he is using youtube as a hardrive backup.
- fireant 12y agoThere is one channel similar to this, but this time its purpose seems to only be "marketing".. https://www.youtube.com/user/epoGuSBef/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/epoGuSBef/videos