Webdriver Torso

Throughout 2013 and 2014, Webdriver Torso was the most perplexing internet riddle for about a year. It was what? Basically, it was a YouTube channel that uploaded tens of thousands of 11-second clips with blue and red rectangles in them. That was all there was, but human imagination did the rest, and soon enough, people online were speculating that the channel might have been used by spies sending encrypted messages to one another, or it might have been used for some sort of covert experiment, or, of course, it might have been used by aliens.

Online sleuths finally located the source of this rife conjecture after around ten months, and, spoiler alert, it turned out to be a quality control channel that Youtube utilized to make sure that the videos that were posted online were identical to the original files. What made them choose arbitrary color rectangles? because making them was simple.

The first person to unravel the puzzle was an Italian statistician by the name of "Soggetto Ventuno" or "Subject 21," who discovered that the channel was a part of a YouTube network with Swiss registration that also comprised other channels that published video from the Google offices in Zurich. After that, Google issued a statement that was aptly Rickrolled, reading:

“We’re never gonna give you uploading that’s slow or loses video quality, and we’re never gonna let you down by playing YouTube in poor video quality. That’s why we’re always running tests like Webdriver Torso.”