Boing Boing calls it the numbers station of the internet. But no one knows for sure. The vast majority of the 80,000+ videos on this mysterious YouTube channel are like the one above: 10 slides in eleven seconds. But there are some… notable exceptions:

The Onion AV Club sums up the speculation:

But the most intriguing mystery by far is the channel’s origins. No one has stepped forward to claim credit for Webdriver Torso; earlier this month, The Guardian thought they had explained the mystery as a series of test patterns used by a European telecom company, but that turned out to be a dead end. Now all eyes are on Google as Webdriver Torso conspiracy theorists claim to have traced the channel back to Google’s offices in Zurich. YouTube’s themed search results for the channel could be seen as a tacit admission of guilt, as could the one comment Webdriver Torso has ever left on a video: “Matei is highly intelligent.” Could the Matei in question be Google Senior Research Scientist/robotics expert Matei Ciocarlie? Is Google developing a sentient YouTube channel that will one day rise up and enslave us all? Is Webdriver Torso secretly communicating with extraterrestrial life? Is it issuing commands to brainwashed operatives à la The Manchurian Candidate? Or maybe, just maybe, is this just some mundane technical exercise that Google isn’t bothering to explain because conspiracy theories are hilarious? Who knows.

Full Story: Onion AV Club: “Webdriver Torso” is either something incredibly sinister or nothing at all

(via Tim Maly)

Update: Turns out Google admitted to being behind this just days before I published this post.