One YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos | Hacker News Reader

One YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos

theguardian.com

259 pointsswatkat106 comments

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."

The signal to noise ratio of this article is amazing.

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

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

> They're not your typical CNN

Seriously they are, just with a different agenda.

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.

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

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

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

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

Because each video posted was 10 seconds with one frame per second. If this came from a source video, it would have been at a higher framerate.

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/

YouTube is full of bizarre channels.

People think Weird Twitter is weird, but it's no competition for Weird YouTube.

Thank you so much for introducing me to that channel. The Internet never fails to surprise me with how strange it can be.

Check out 'alantutorial' if you're into bizarre yt/web things.

Wtf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1lgmEDCfq8&list=UU0JSXBqfEM...

alantutorial is an alternate reality "game" starring a fictional character named "alan", made by Alan Resnick[1]. It seems all those videos are narrating a story!!! Now, I need to see them all :)

[1]http://tutorialheads.wikia.com/wiki/Alantutorial

He has 1,751 subscribers, this is something to think about.

I'm more surprised by the fact that there aren't more.

You would think the Internet would have gone ballistic over this discovery, but no one has yet to pick him up.

This is his second or more account. It blew up a number of years ago and he deleted everything.

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

http://youtube.com/user/gluse

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

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.

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).

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.

The spatial warping that happens is also very disorienting sometimes.

I've only used it once, for hand wobble correction (it did quite well), perhaps higher frequencies break the algo used.

I bet there are some days where the video is steadier because he is in a better mood. After all, I'm sure he has his ups and downs.

Never thought a video about lifts would make me laugh, but this one did. "This a project?" "No, I actually do elevator reviews"

Dover Traction Elevator At 302 N Second Street (W…: http://youtu.be/SUnJt3LaFRo

The elevator community is actually huge with hundreds if not thousands of channels like that.

At a former work place, we were gathering data about where entrances, lifts, passageways were in different transit stations. These videos (or someone on the same kick) helped us get an inside view of many of these stations.

I was going to make a poor taste joke about people with ASD diagnoses being on watchlists.

But then I remembered Gary McKinnon.

Real life Hodor :)

I looked at his channel, and it is mostly what you described with one exception - every few months he seems to post some variation of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnvX3NvE5j8

Maybe it's just me, but it takes him from simply being an internet crazy to something very human and makes me a little bit sad.

Thanks for posting that, it was moving in a strange way.

This is his second account. A while back his first account "ConradsCigars" or something like that was posted on somethingawful and it got quite popular. At the time it was implied that these were some sort of smoking fetish videos. He didn't like the attention and deleted them all. Looks like he's going strong again now.

Thanks guys for sharing these pearls. I though I have seen "everything" but yep, I'm so pleased to be so wrong.

Brilliant. Andy Warhol recorded 8 hours long movie of his friend sleeping. In the youtube era he would make even greater fame than he managed in his time.

Certainly is. During uni I did some work in a bar in a hotel, and one day the manager came in and said he'd been googling the name of the hotel and found a video on youtube. It was a video of a toilet in one of the rooms being flushed, and the dude who uploaded it had thousands of videos of toilets all around the world being flushed. Nothing else, just a single flush of the toilet.

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

If it's a set-top box, it's not hard to imagine some set of circumstances where it uploads a stored or live clip instead of the random one. Or possibly the ATHF could have been uploaded from the company itself as a test of automatically uploading copyrighted content. It's behind a french paywall and the other video is a vid from a french balcony, so that could be a test of user-uploaded video.

>Or could it be the latest iteration of Cicada 3301 or another such public challenge

Oh, Cicada 3301? That's what it was.

I played their "challenge" back in 2012, didn't get very far, and I immediately forgot about it.

They still exist and post "clues", apparently.

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

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?)

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

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.

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

And now I feel compelled to reread Infinite Jest... a compulsion which is satisfying, in a self-referential kind of way.

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

You are just adding on to the ambient conspiracy.

It may be abusing terms, but I doubt google (especially the youtube team) is bothered at all by this.

If only there was a way to read the YouTube TOS and see what it says about automated bulk uploads (hint, it doesn't say anything) I don't see anything in the TOS that says doing something like this isn't allowed.

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

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

It's a guy: http://www.math.univ-paris13.fr/~matei

->> Laboratoire Analyse, Géométrie et Applications Sounds `real`.

Source: https://twitter.com/model500/status/461978031578701824

Edit: also this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682360 seems to confirm it.

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.

Interesting one guy pointed me a similar thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769

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

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

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

That actually makes sense!

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

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

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

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

https://www.flickr.com/photos/11391873@N05/

Russian programmers testing blackhat marketing automation tools.

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'.

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

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

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?

The places that ban laptops love one-time pads...

OTPs and number stations can't be cracked mathematically and the channel is secure as long as the receiving end doesn't let the pad get into bad hands (this is achieved by compartmental communications and code words on top).

I would have thought that recent OpenSSL, SecureTransport and GnuTLS news would disprove your point. Not only that, we don't know what bad actors with unlimited resources can do with our communications if tapped.

So number stations and OTP are still viable and always will be.

With respect to numbers stations the transmission is centralised as well which means it's hard to break the channel infrastructure without crossing a border physically.

"old"?, there are hundreds of ACTIVE numbers stations today: http://priyom.org/

I had just a bit of fun with it [1] but it's easy to see that no more that a few bits per frame can be accurately encoded this way.

[1]: http://jsfiddle.net/zenojevski/EHh3Q/4/

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

Definitely aliens.

...

Honestly I'm surprised The Guardian even types that nonsense in a news lead.

FALSE FLAG - You're obviously working for the aliens and you just want us to think it's nonsense.

Smart human. We should keep this one.

First 2 upvotes then 2 downvotes. I'm getting mixed signals up here.

You know there is more than one kind of alien, right?

Aliens looking to hire engineer #1 (YC S14)

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

Is this in accordance with YouTube's TOS?

It's art! :)

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

Minor note, it is baling (from a bale)

There was another post about this today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920.

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.

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...

Reminds me of Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".

"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/.

Ok I've gone too deep into this

even weirder, Gibson himself has a torso

Reminds me of @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

Why not set the videos as private.

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

There is one channel similar to this, but this time its purpose seems to only be "marketing"..

https://www.youtube.com/user/epoGuSBef/videos

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

Unsatisfied by the conclusion

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.

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

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

It's Bitcoin 2.0 blockchain

maybe he is using youtube as a hardrive backup.

VALVE = 22112225

77,000 / 22112225 = 0,003

HL3 Confirmed!

Timecube?

webdriver = selenium automation. nothing strange

Browser compatibility testing FTW.

Food for thought.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com