The quest to solve “Unfavorable Semicircle”, a mysterious YouTube channel | Hacker News Reader

The quest to solve “Unfavorable Semicircle”, a mysterious YouTube channel

bbc.com

56 pointsPerados27 comments

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.

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

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.

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?"

Radio 4 documentary about numbers stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr6o7fBcTY

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.

It was suspended, not deleted.

YouTube uploads engineer here - AFAIK it wasn't us.

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

Wasn't it called The Footage?

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

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

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.

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

That's what I thought too. My guess would be Bend Sinister.

Bad Egg

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

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.

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.

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).

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

-- Dorothy Parker (attributed)

"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."

-- Vladimir Nabokov

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...

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.

that reddit number subreddit thing

I must have missed that, could you elaborate?

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/Solving_A858

The curiosity is what makes it interesting! People have been spending tons of effort analyzing the Voynich manuscript for a hundred years. If someone suddenly solved it, it would quickly become uninteresting.

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