It is suspected that a machine could be posting thousands of short repetitive videos of tones and colored shapes to the web, but why it's happening is still a mystery.

Dan Jones, Mobile Editor

May 2, 2014

1 Min Read
Is This the Real M2M?

This may not quite be what AT&T or Cisco have in mind when they talk about how prevalent machine communications is becoming on the Internet.

Someone -- or, more likely, something -- has been posting thousands of short, repetitive videos of blue and red rectangles and computer-generated sine wave tones to YouTube since September. The videos all appear very similar, 11 seconds in length, cycling through 10 patterns of the colored shapes, with a 1960s sci-fi soundtrack-like tone row as accompaniment. (Full disclosure: I haven't watched all of them to be sure that are all so similar, because I value what's left of my sanity.)

Here's just a taste of YouTube user's Webdriver Torso's 77,390 videos posted so far.

Because the account posts so many videos, the expectation is that it must be computer software doing it. However, the speculation about why gets much, much wilder: everything from aliens to French spies to cable set-top box testing software.

I certainly don't why these videos are being posted. I do suspect that, as more and more largely mundane communications gets automated, we'll see these weird anomalies and blips more often. Think of it like the 21st century version of a fax machine constantly ringing your phone on auto-repeat.

Epilogue: Oh, yeah, Webdriver Torso stoped posting for a couple of weeks, but it just posted a fresh video today. So the truth is still out there... somewhere.

About the Author(s)

Dan Jones

Mobile Editor

Dan is to hats what Will.I.Am is to ridiculous eyewear. Fedora, trilby, tam-o-shanter -- all have graced the Jones pate during his career as the go-to purveyor of mobile essentials.

But hey, Dan is so much more than 4G maps and state-of-the-art headgear. Before joining the Light Reading team in 2002 he was an award-winning cult hit on Broadway (with four 'Toni' awards, two 'Emma' gongs and a 'Brian' to his name) with his one-man show, "Dan Sings the Show Tunes."

His perfectly crafted blogs, falling under the "Jonestown" banner, have been compared to the works of Chekhov. But only by Dan.

He lives in Brooklyn with cats.

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