
The quest to solve “Unfavorable Semicircle”, a mysterious YouTube channel - Perados
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160225-the-quest-to-solve-youtubes-strangest-mystery
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bjackman
Interesting. I don't think it's a numbers station-style system. Generating
videos and uploading them via relatively complex protocol (where you have the
potential to fuck up and leak info about yourself) to a server you don't
control seems like a very roundabout way of broadcasting information to
someone. Once you bring computers and the internet into the mix there's a
_huge_ number of simpler and safer ways to broadcast encrypted information
without requiring particular equipment or expertise of the receiver.

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nefitty
Relevant podcast: 99% Invisible's incredibly creepy look into number stations
[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/numbers-
stations/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/numbers-stations/)

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bjackman
Great podcast! I didn't actually learn anything new but the producer has that
great talent of making it interesting anyway. It reminds me of the better
documentaries we sometimes get on BBC Radio 4 in the UK.

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nefitty
Glad you liked it! Podcasts are finally giving US creators the chance to
match, or at least approach the quality of BBC content. There's a joke going
around, two guys are sitting at a table recording a podcast and one of them
goes, "Hey, remind me, are we recording your podcast or mine?"

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Sanddancer
From the description, it sounds like a Webdriver Torso-style account that was
accidentally set to public. Muddied images like from an out of focus camera,
items that last only a few frames, distorted audio. All things that would let
someone tune codec settings over difficult corner cases. Once the account was
discovered and publicized, they deleted the account, probably with someone
being chided before the test corpus was set back up on a properly locked down
channel.

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ikeboy
It was suspended, not deleted.

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failrate
This is very similar to the MacGuffin from William Gibson's Pattern
Recognition.

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Pelerin
Wasn't it called The Footage?

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S4M
The ironic part is that the videos included in the article don't exist anymore
because the account associated with them has been terminated.

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stepvhen
I suppose for some that will just add to the mystery.

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imgabe
The name sounds like it's a more common phrase where someone substituted two
synonyms.

Hostile Arc? Adverse Frown? Obviously that's not it. Semicircle could be a lot
of things.

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marshray
It reminds me of one of the Xbox profile auto suggested gamer tags. "Disliked
Sphere" was one.

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thekevan
It seems all the attention today brought the account to a close.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfavorable_semicircle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfavorable_semicircle)

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jack9
The last time I heard about something like this, it was the automated output
of a machine learning project. Even if there is an interesting purpose, you
have to be really bored and have an active imagination to worry about it.

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duderific
There are apparently two videos being uploaded per minute, so it's almost
certainly something automated. No human being would sit there and upload
videos every 30 seconds all day.

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proksoup
I found some comments on Reddit that proposed:

> It's probably a channel dedicated to a paint-2-sound generator. Example
> (that's very old software: Coagula). Pixels actually represent the spectrum
> over time (X), and the color intensity the magnitude at frequency (Y)

>

> But what is its purpose?

>

> Synthesize mouth-like sounds. Anyway that's just an hypothesis. But the
> pseudo of the guy matches to something in the domain, aka the sampling
> theorem (unfavorable semi sircle: full circle = full spectrum = 2PI, but in
> sound over 1PI = nyquist frequency, there's the folding phenomena).

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EC1
Man I can't get into this stuff at all because the curiosity and uncertainty
alone would kill me. This thing, the cicada thing, that reddit number
subreddit thing. Ugh.

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mindcrime
_that reddit number subreddit thing_

I must have missed that, could you elaborate?

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jmduke
Likely referring to the subreddit (now private) which this subreddit is built
around 'solving':

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Solving_A858](https://www.reddit.com/r/Solving_A858)

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Houshalter
I'd love to look at it, but all the videos have been taken down : (

I found this though:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UnfavorableSemicircle/comments/47l7...](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnfavorableSemicircle/comments/47l7ma/all_the_videos_i_got_to_download/)

