What are some good internet mysteries not many people know about?
I want to add a couple of good ones I've found:
Jeff the Killer lost media: no one knows where the original Jeff The Killer image came from.
Mortis.com: old weird website
Also here's a good website on various obscure computer/Internet related oddities: https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/
Do people still know about TimeCube these days? Not sure if that counts as a "mystery" per se, but it certainly has an air of the unknown.
Clintons live here.
XD
The other similar case is 'the ball on a string' guy who went to different communitites including on reddit for years to promote his weird theory. IIRC his theory was that balls on strings of different sizes has their surface rotate at the similar speed if the central axis has a constant rotational speed too. Although many people tried to explain it to him, he insisted that larger ball therefore would spin like a Ferrari's wheel.
These cases are all depressive rather than mysterious.
I was not prepared to remember the Time Cube when clicking on this thread...
I was recently recommended an internet mystery by YouTube. I didn't know about it until then (and I'm generally pretty online), so it's probably not well known.
It's the song, Like the Wind (or Blind the Wind). Story goes that a kid recorded the song in 1984 from a West German radio station, but he didn't catch the name of the song nor the band. Eventually, the recording got posted online, and strangely enough, nobody online seems to recognize it. It's still unknown where this song came from. People call it Like the Wind (or Blind the Wind) because that's what the first 3 words of the song sound like. Speculation is that it's probably from an East German indie rock band that got disbanded, but at this time, it'll probably never be solved
Got wrapped up into that a while back, an interesting tangent is the song So Do I by DCO, which was similarly lost until one of the band's original members recognized it and posted it online. Said member did confirm that TMMS/Like The Wind is not a song they made, tho.
Just like everybody knows https://youtu.be/ZmTcIh632VM?si=yDNEMk09wk-mX-et
So catchy
Did anyone ever work out who Satoshi Nakamoto is?
Based on what I've read, Len Sassaman seems the most likely candidate, but certainly nothing has been confirmed.
I quite certain however that douchebag extrordinaire, Craig Wrigh, is NOT Satoshi.
No but Barely Sociable on Youtube did a pretty interesting documentary with some of his own theories on it.
Some have speculated that Nakamoto is an alias for Adam Beck, or one of the other founders. It is known that nakamoto was living in a European timezone.
No, and at this point probably the proper question is who he was. He has been too quiet for too long and too many important topics that could have been resolved immediately had he taken a side, the biggest example for me is the block size debate.
I mean, for starters, how does it work.
I thought that one was solved decades ago;
The internet is a series of tubes
Honestly this one is for our benefit, A lot of stuff thats free and universally compatable (like email) is that way because the ancient sages who forged the internet built the protocols for that shit into its very backbone so no one could fuck it up later (wether by incredible forsight or lazy implementation who knows). The day someone at google re-discovers/deciphers how all that shit works at once is the day a lot of stuff we don't even think about suddenly turns into walled gardens.
To be clear despite some dramatic word choice its not like lost knowledge or anything but its obscure enough that no single person likely has all the pieces to safely make any signfiicant changes.
Does this count? An oldie but a goodie.
I love the John Titor story, because it's so detailed and rich, but it obviously has to be fake because the 2038 issue has been solved by 64 bit timestamps, and it's impossible that we wouldn't have advanced to 64 bit processors because of the RAM limits that 32 bits impose. Phones have more RAM than what a 32 bit computer can handle, and we're over a decade away from 2038.
It's like someone claiming to be a time traveller going back to the 50s to get an abacus to help prevent the Y2K bug.
Steins;Gate season 1 did it better. =p
Steins;Gate VN did it better than the anime.
What actually ever happened to the Tourette's Guy?
I thought he died?
Oh Bob Saget!!
That was what was reported on the website, but then there was a video of him still alive and well a few years later, then someone claimed he had been in jail, then nothing
It's pretty obvious that Tourettes Guy is an actor. But it's hilarious nonetheless
Cicada . Also i am saving this thread for future use.
I'm pretty sure a YouTube channel researched this one pretty thoroughly. Try checking out the Why Files. The entire channel is fascinating, intertwining, and informative.
Lake City Quiet Pills
There might still be the "Twitter numbers" accounts that post some set of numbers or words at specific times.
Basically it's just the internet version of the "radio numbers" or "radio codes" that are radio signals that randomly or schedule voice a set of numbers or words. There go back decades.
The theory is that it's a commutation network for spies.
There's all the young kids who went viral in the early 2000s, often because the internet made fun of them.
The mystery was would they turn out to have horrible lives.
But it's been so long they've all grown up and no one remembers them and they have normal lives.
Because it was "so long" ago, LonelyGirl15.
There's the evergreen: What good is Virtual Reality, other than some games?
Also useful for enterprise, design - seeing a car in a space when it doesn't exist yet is a useful tool. Looking into every nook is possible, sitting in the cockpit, etc. Doing it in a CAD package isn't the same.
Also, it's good for training and losing weight without leaving the house, provided you are consistent with it and have a good diet.
Almost all the "internet mysteries" I hear of turn out to be overblown normal things, such as that Cicada 1138 thing which turned out to be not an agency recruiting tool but a band gimmick, or that missing Nova Scotia guy who had been known for years but whose identity was ignored to keep the vibes going. The closest things to what you're asking would be stuff like what you'd find on r/TOMT.
It's Cicada 3301 and I have no idea where you heard the "band gimmick" thing but it's just not true. I mean.... It doesn't even make any sense. If it was a gimmick to get a band popular then it did an insanely bad job at doing so after multiple puzzles across multiple years and swearing the winners to privacy.
Was trying to say Cicada 3301 went nowhere. It's been a decade. The puzzle gave no assurance that it wasn't some amateur thing to start out with, and there was a TopTenz video that showed the end of the clue hunting puzzles was simply some obscure musical band making a game with no other prize than front row seats to a personal performance.
Another example of overblownness, if we may call it that, is the CIA's supposed Kryptos statue. Or the Gravity Falls puzzle. When was the last time you heard a puzzle actually culminate or clarify the "race" ended? How do people think cults work?