
One YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos - swatkat
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/may/01/truth-youtube-mysterious-videos-webdriver-torso
======
fblp
Spoiler 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
The signal to noise ratio of this article is amazing.

~~~
sirdogealot
You read it on The Guardian; a news service, not a Q&A website.

~~~
NamTaf
Moreover, the Guardian is a news service with a relatively high standard of
quality. They're not your typical CNN.

~~~
retube
> They're not your typical CNN

Seriously they are, just with a different agenda.

------
jsmthrowaway
I'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
aqua.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_
Why 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

~~~
alandarev
Because people perceive video not to be 1 frame/second.

~~~
sesqu
If so, those videos had perhaps 240 frames each, not 10.

------
vezzy-fnord
See 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.

~~~
DanBC
See also Gluse which is a man riding elevators in various buildings.

[http://youtube.com/user/gluse](http://youtube.com/user/gluse)

(I am not mocking him. I admire the ability to create so many videos about a
focussed topic.)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I bet his viewers would be willing to pitch together some money and get him
some sort of steadycam rig; the random video I clicked on was very hard to
watch.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
YouTube actually offer to fix videos that the algos find to be shaky; I wonder
if they are choosing not to run the fix or if it's failing (the vid I viewed
has some really fast transient wobble that doesn't seem like normal camera
shake).

~~~
bagels
The youtube video stabilization makes for wobbly video. I take video inside of
race cars, and they're unwatchable if you use the youtube stabilization. They
turn out much more watchable without it.

~~~
cordite
The spatial warping that happens is also very disorienting sometimes.

------
Grue3
BBC 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)

~~~
varjag
Also the palette is one of Russian tricolor! There must be a beautiful
conspiracy theory in it..

~~~
DanBC
It'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?)

------
Lightbody
This is by far the strangest way I've ever been quoted in a published story. I
still vote aliens.

------
dekhn
This 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
shame about that near-eastern medical attache in Boston...

~~~
irremediable
And now I feel compelled to reread _Infinite Jest_... a compulsion which is
satisfying, in a self-referential kind of way.

------
gbl08ma
500+ 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

~~~
thrownaway2424
There is one organization that does not need special dispensation to violate
the youtube terms of service.

~~~
chrisBob
So your guess is that google is testing automated uploads to their own service
with public videos?

------
DAddYE
It'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.

------
sjclemmy
This 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
Interesting one guy pointed me a similar thing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769)

------
zatkin
This is by far the strangest approach to quality control I've ever seen.

~~~
lucb1e
Yeah... they're testing compression for 7 months 24/7 or what? It seems odd.
Like they forgot to turn it off.

~~~
driverdan
It could be performance monitoring. A company could be doing it to monitor how
long it takes YT to process new videos.

~~~
lucb1e
That actually makes sense!

~~~
cLeEOGPw
That doesn't make sense actually. Who would need to test for youtube
performance 24/7 at 20s intervals?

------
squeakynick
A 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
I wonder if they're identical from a binary point of view, or if this was
being used as some form of steganography...

~~~
nikkun
After testing around 10 at random, they seem to have the same md5 hash.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/11391873@N05/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/11391873@N05/)

~~~
psykovsky
Russian programmers testing blackhat marketing automation tools.

------
Theodores
People 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'.

------
matthewmcg
I 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
In an age of asymmetric public-key cryptography there would be very little to
gain from number stations and a lot to lose.

~~~
dfc
How 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
The places that ban laptops _love_ one-time pads...

------
morenoh149
That's exactly what they WOULD say. I still think it's aliens.

~~~
ProAm
Aliens looking to hire engineer #1 (YC S14)

~~~
dekhn
Non-technical alien looking for technical alien co-founder (Centaurans
preferred)

------
herokusaki
Is this in accordance with YouTube's TOS?

~~~
spyder
It's art! :)

------
y3rsh
We automation engineers are really good with the bailing wire and duct tape.

~~~
____a
Minor note, it is baling (from a bale)

------
dang
There was another post about this today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920).

------
heywire
The 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.

------
subdane
This 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...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/horse-
ebooks-and-pronunciation-book-revealed.html)

------
aluhut
Reminds me of Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".

~~~
relampago
"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
even weirder, Gibson himself has a torso

------
tyler_ball
Reminds 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)

------
callesgg
Why not set the videos as private.

~~~
mxxx
In the hope that this very situation arises, I'd say.

------
fireant
There 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)

------
jasey
First 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

------
relampago
Unsatisfied by the conclusion

------
maouida
This 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.

------
robmcm
> as the caption "aqua.flv" in the bottom-left corner

This is clearly Flash, and would never happen if they were using HTML5!

------
dzhiurgis
It's Bitcoin 2.0 blockchain

------
username42
maybe he is using youtube as a hardrive backup.

------
bkmn
VALVE = 22112225

77,000 / 22112225 = 0,003

HL3 Confirmed!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Timecube?

------
vvoyer
webdriver = selenium automation. nothing strange

~~~
gregoryw
Browser compatibility testing FTW.

------
gretchen_204
Food for thought.

------
hellbreakslose
Yes i bet if aliens were invading they would do it via youtube... Who reads
newspapers and stuff nowadays anyways?

