BB reader Enkidu describes what looks curiously like a modern counterpart to the mysterious “numbers stations” of the cold war, radio frequencies carrying baffling sequences–spy codes!–of numbers and words.
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.