Chances are you have yet to hear about the Youtube Channel where a user named “Webdriver Torso” has been busy uploading videos—77,000+ of them to be exact. Each video is an 11-second video of red and blue rectangles along with weird tones..
A new modern Youtube version of a numbers station?
A contact to aliens?
A coded message perhaps for an upcoming movie?
Maybe French spies?
The story has been pretty big in the UK--some suspect that the origin of the weird YOUTUBE account is from France, being that one video was of the Eiffel Tower.
The mystery began in September 2013 when videos being being posted.. hundreds a day in some instances. All 11 seconds.
The BBC discovered a potential French connection to the mystery a few days ago, writing:
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.
In video 1,182 we have what could be our first sighting of Webdriver.
Filmed from a Parisian balcony, the six-second clip shows an Eiffel Tower lightshow followed by a fleeting glimpse of a face.
Below the video, Webdriver has left a comment, their only known communication with the world: “Matei is highly intelligent.”
BOING BOING wondered if this is the modern version of a creepy numbers station.. It actually makes sense. Even spies have APPs now..
The Webdriver Torso account also has some thinking it’s apart of that other weird internet mystery: Cicada 3301—the 2014 net mystery began four months ago with a ‘good luck 3301’ message.
But the bubble of mystery is being burst by the UK GUARDIAN, which claims a bit of a more mundane argument as to what Webdriver Torso’s channel is. The paper writes this:
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.
But the GUARDIAN also had this postscript on their mundane attribution:
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)
So that’s that for now.
You can join the thousands of people commenting on the Webdriver Torso videos…you can be like them and try to unravel the mystery. Or you can safely adjust your tin foil hat and wait for the aliens to beam back their response to the video.
Or just watch the pictures as they FTP through the air.. from France, or some other undisclosed location for reasons of security and therefore insecurity.
