Webdriver Torso. 80000 bizarre videos. What could it mean? - General

These videos are quite old so theres a chance some of you have seen them. But it was [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27238332]this BBC article[/url] posted today which brought my attention to it. An Excerpt: [quote=Stephen Beckett]On 23 September 2013 at 14:45, YouTube user Webdriver Torso quietly uploaded a video.The mysterious 11-second sequence of red and blue rectangles could easily have been lost, unexplained and unappreciated among YouTube's plethora of kittens and music videos. But 28 minutes later Webdriver uploaded an almost identical video, and another an hour after that, and another, until eight months later - apparently happy with nearly 80,000 clips - they fell silent, with 236 hours of video to their name. Almost all of the uploads follow the same pattern - 10 slides, each with a red rectangle, a blue rectangle and a computer-generated tone. The shapes change size and the notes change pitch. Each video appears to be unique, but the format stays the same.[/quote] Here's one of the videos, there are tens of thousands like this, all apparently unique. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8bqIDOevM[/media] [quote=BoingBoing]The "Numbers Station" of youtube The YouTube channel for the user "Webdriver Torso"contains over 77,000 videos, each 11 seconds in length, with a series of one second pitches, each accompanied by a frame containing nothing but one blue and one red rectangle on a white background. No one seems to have any idea where this channel came from, who the user is, or what the purpose of the videos might be. "Webdriver" is the name of a product in the Selenium suite of browser automation tools (for instance, used to test performance and stability of a web application), and it's plausible that this is the very tool used to automate the uploading of the videos to YouTube. This is begging for an analysis of the data represented in these videos. For anyone fascinated by numbers stations but frustrated that they missed the heyday of the Cold War, this might just be your chance! I'm a developer, but this falls well outside my areas of expertise...but I'd be happy to try to cooperate with anyone interested.[/quote] The BBC reporter investigates further: [quote=Stephen Beckett]At the peak, over Christmas, Webdriver was uploading a video on average every two minutes, presumably in between opening presents. Webdriver also never sleeps, uploading about 400 videos on most days, every day Monday to Sunday. I then turned my gaze to looking for anomalies in the data, discovering that of the tens of thousands of videos on the channel, they are all exactly the same length, except for two. The very first video uploaded to the channel, over a month before the first rectangle classic, reveals a completely different side to Webdriver. Locked behind a 1.99 euro ($2.76; £1.63) paywall and only accessible if you're in France, is a clip from the cartoon series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, in which the show's three anthropomorphic fast-food items - Frylock, Meatwad and Master Shake - fail to win a pub quiz. The second anomalous clip only raises more questions.[/quote] [quote=Stephen Beckett]In video 1,182 we have what could be our first sighting of Webdriver.[/quote] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKvIyDB5FRU[/media] Has someone taken the time to generate and upload over 236 hours of these clips just to drive people crazy with speculation? Probably! But what if there is indeed a message here? What if there's more to this...

wow that is indeed crazy if it some kind of arg, i'd have no idea at all where to start deciphering

Shame that last bit on the paris vid is out of focus. Its a facebook chat window

This is some Creepypasta shit right here.

a lot of the videos have 0 views

Couldn't you like trace where that building is? With the Eiffel Tower so close and all.

[QUOTE=Kenneth;44694897] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKvIyDB5FRU[/media] Has someone taken the time to generate and upload over 236 hours of these clips just to drive people crazy with speculation? Probably! But what if there is indeed a message here? What if there's more to this...[/QUOTE] Most likely where he/she was -> [url=https://www.google.com/maps/place/48%C2%B051'29.4%22N+2%C2%B017'54.0%22E/@48.858162,2.298324,2458m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0]Google Maps[/url]

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

Reminds me of what happened with Pronunciation Book, except much more ominous. [editline]1st May 2014[/editline] and I just read the above post

[QUOTE=Arc Nova;44697175][url]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/may/01/truth-youtube-mysterious-videos-webdriver-torso[/url][/QUOTE] Seems plausible, but 80,000 videos just to test video compression??? Did they accidentally leave a computer on somewhere?

[QUOTE=Shugo;44697405]Seems plausible, but 80,000 videos just to test video compression??? Did they accidentally leave a computer on somewhere?[/QUOTE] Maybe tons of combinations of video/audio codecs, qualities, resolutions?

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

[quote=The Guardian]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)[/quote]

Someone probably lost a bet or something and had to upload that eiffel tower video as a result.

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