Expired News - Aliens? Spies? An artificial intelligence spreading its digital wings? Exactly what are these bizarre YouTube videos? - The Weather Network
Your weather when it really mattersTM

Country

Please choose your default site

Americas

Asia - Pacific

Europe

News

Aliens? Spies? An artificial intelligence spreading its digital wings? Exactly what are these bizarre YouTube videos?


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 3:42 PM - There are some strange things out on the internet. That's for certain. Some go a bit further than others, though, stepping into the truly bizarre, like the YouTube channel called "Webdriver Torso" for example.

Each of the over 78,000 10-second videos uploaded onto this account (with another 150 or so added each day) follow the same pattern as the one above: a series of 10 slides with a blue rectangle and a red rectangle, both sized and positioned differently in each, and every slide accompanied by a different tonal sound. 

There is more 'strangeness' associated with the account and its videos, though. Each video is listed as exactly 1-second longer than it truly is (11 seconds as opposed to 10). Although some of the videos report having higher or lower number of views, the vast majority of them have apparently been viewed by exactly 301 people (regardless of whether anyone new watches them) (Nevermind, that one was apparently just due to the site not updating the counters. They pretty much all say something different now). Further to that, if you actually type the name of the account into the search at the top of the page, it changes your search results page to mimic the colour pattern of the channel videos. 


Now, that in itself isn't unusual for a page owned by Google (as YouTube is). Perform a Google Image Search for "Atari Breakout" to see the fun they typically have with these kinds of things. It does raise the possibility that Webdriver Torso is run by Google itself, as is pointed out on several other sites, such as Kotaku and Daily Dot. It could be the company's engineers testing something out, or it could be a 'bot' they developed to automatically record and upload these simplistic videos (for whatever reason). 

However, the bizarre nature of the videos does bring to mind other things. Have you ever heard of Number Stations? These shortwave radio stations used to send out strange digitized voice messages reading off number sequences or strings of Morse code, that made no sense except (supposedly) to the Cold War spies that were trained to decipher them. Could there be spies recording and watching these videos, passing information back and forth? 

Or, is it even stranger? Is it someone's attempt to communicate with aliens, or are aliens hacking our internet and leaving messages for us, planning on making public contact when we can finally decipher what they mean? Is it some artificial intelligence lurking on the internet, making its first attempts to speak to the 'outside' world? 

There have been a few videos uploaded that haven't exactly fit the modus operandi of the rest of the channel. This one from October 9, 2013 - a five-second shot of the Eiffel Tower lightning up at night - just adds to the strangeness going on, since it is so different from the rest of them. Others, mentioned by Daily Dot, are only available behind paywalls or have been made private by the channel owner. 

I suppose the weirdest thing going on here is that noone is talking - not YouTube or Google, nor the Webdriver Torso account itself. In an age when there's so much information about everything on the web, there's surprisingly little to grasp hold of about this subject. There's just a lot of speculation going on, without any concrete answers. 

What do you think? What's going on with this YouTube channel? Leave your ideas in the comments section, below.

Default saved
Close

Search Location

Close

Sign In

Please sign in to use this feature.