First I thought of the (lame) joke, then it didn’t populate because of some formatting issue, then I thought, “That’s much better!” and left it.
Then codinghorror properly formatted it and now my bad joke is visible again.
Transform-a-joke!
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to answer your questions, yes. yes. and yes… i already see how the data needs to be processed and what it’s output will be. what i need to accomplish this is a combined effort to compile all of the videos. that means 77k downloads… and there are more that started a few hours ago.
Update via the Grauniad The truth behind one YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos | YouTube | The Guardian
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shout out
While on the blog BoingBoing, user @Enkidu speculated that the videos might be a digital version of spies’ “numbers stations”.
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Hey awesome! From the Guardian article you cited:
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.
So there’s the answer. What looked like an insight into the murky world of espionage, or maybe even something otherworldly, turns out to be a little bit of a quality-control system leaking into the outside world.
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It’s even been picked up by the BBC now : apparently there are two non-boxy videos amongst the 77K red & blue box videos, one shows the Eiffel Tower shot from what is perhaps the window of the developer responsible for the uploads…
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The Daily Dot has an update: http://www.dailydot.com/geek/webdriver-torso-youtube/
Have a look at this:
http://ventunosu21.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/the-truth-about-webdriver-torso
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