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."

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Is this in accordance with YouTube's TOS?

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

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".

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.

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!

undefined

undefined

It's Bitcoin 2.0 blockchain

maybe he is using youtube as a hardrive backup.

VALVE = 22112225

77,000 / 22112225 = 0,003

HL3 Confirmed!

webdriver = selenium automation. nothing strange

Food for thought.

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