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So, I'd never heard of this thing until last night, but when I mentioned it in chat, Del (unsurprisingly) knew the nickname right away. In short, there has been a radio tower in Russia broadcasting since at least 1982 over shortwave, and said broadcast has been the subject of much analysis to no real gain. It's mostly just a buzzer with some intermittent chirpy beeps, but in the past people have recorded voices speaking in Russian and, once, even music from Swan Lake.

Here's a wiki article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
And the feature that told me about it from Wired: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/
And some fun videos of the rarer broadcasts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YatKCf42TrM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAbeGSa_Xh8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOWExpS6q0c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLpbI952i0E

I have to admit I've had the broadcast up for 15 minutes on this machine, and I can see why people get sucked into listening for something unique from it. This kind of thing both intrigues me and really creeps me out.

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Numbers Stations in general are intriguing and creepy. It's probably pretty unsettling to people just messing around on radios to suddenly come across a Russian accent listing a stream of numbers, or whatever. Even when you know what they are there's just an unsettling sensation about them, especially since they always seem to have static and noise issues.

UVB-76 is weird because there's so many theories about what it really is. For instance, UK submarines are or were supposedly told that if they can't get Radio 4's signal in times of war, it's probably time to open the letters of last resort and do whatever the Prime Minister wrote in there.

The Buzzer might be a Russian version of that, but without the risk of hearing The Archers instead of an eerie silence indicating the country has been nuked.

This post has been edited by Del S on 13th October 2011 10:38

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I had never heard of this before either, but I am now very interested. So thanks for that!

I read the wiki page, which doesn't give that much more light on the possible theories other than a bizarre Soviet awareness test.

I wondered, could it possibly be an attempt to send communications into space, like SETI?

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Quote (Stiltzkin @ 13th October 2011 08:53)

I wondered, could it possibly be an attempt to send communications into space, like SETI?

Could be, I never really considered that. The Wired article mentions what Del mentioned, that it could have been tied to the execution of Dead Hand, the Soviet autoresponse to a NATO nuclear attack, but one would think that would be largely unnecessary now. Of course, giving it a Wargames kind of vibe makes it all the more creepy, which is probably why I like that theory so much.

What I think needs to happen here is for someone like Dragon Fire to grab some libraries of recordings from it and incorporate them into his next composition.



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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

This is cool. Really cool. It's like the stuff you only read in mystery novels. Interesting is an understatement. Thanks for sharing, Skipper.

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As other people have said, this is really interesting.

I'll have to ask my amateur-radio-using friend about this to see if he knows anything, but I doubt there's anything to know other than basically what's already posted on Wikipedia and the sites it links to.

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On a related note, I heard about this on the BBC News Hour this morning while driving:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332

Somehow this isn't quite as creepy as the things that initiated this thread, but this does seem like potentially a new mystery for our new century. Nearly 80k videos posted to Youtube over the course of just eight months, and then absolutely nothing for the last three weeks and counting - at the very least, it's someone's idea of a very strange, technology-driven joke.

Edit

Looks like The Buzzer is still going on and on too. If you hit the wiki page now you can see that a new recorded voice came on as recently as two months ago during the Crimea annexation.

This post has been edited by Rangers51 on 1st May 2014 20:56

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Quote (Rangers51 @ 1st May 2014 14:44)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332

I decided to mess around with the video pages and found that Webdriver Torso's "attribution partner" (not entirely sure what that is) is a paid YT channel that both shares the Torso name and claims itself to be merely a test account:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ytuptesttorso/featured

Everything still on this channel has DONT DELETE or a variant written in a test-related title (like "P0 Priv5 Torso save plus EDU CTA plus cust thumb - DONT DELETE"). The descriptions I saw (I didn't check them all) were either handcrafted gibberish or automated output. At least a couple of videos were taken from other sources such as SMP Films; this video was uploaded twice to partner Torso, both for free and behind the paywall.

I searched for part of one video name and I found this channel, which is free, that has some of the same videos as partner Torso. In another odd twist, "claim torso" is the title of six of deba exper's eight uploads. Doing a channel search for Torso also turned up utest torso and WebDriverVideos Torso, among possible others, so this isn't the end of it.

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Quote (Master ZED @ 2nd May 2014 12:54)

Quote (Rangers51 @ 1st May 2014 14:44)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332

I decided to mess around with the video pages and found that Webdriver Torso's "attribution partner" (not entirely sure what that is) is a paid YT channel that both shares the Torso name and claims itself to be merely a test account:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ytuptesttorso/featured

Everything still on this channel has DONT DELETE or a variant written in a test-related title (like "P0 Priv5 Torso save plus EDU CTA plus cust thumb - DONT DELETE"). The descriptions I saw (I didn't check them all) were either handcrafted gibberish or automated output. At least a couple of videos were taken from other sources such as SMP Films; this video was uploaded twice to partner Torso, both for free and behind the paywall.

I searched for part of one video name and I found this channel, which is free, that has some of the same videos as partner Torso. In another odd twist, "claim torso" is the title of six of deba exper's eight uploads. Doing a channel search for Torso also turned up utest torso and WebDriverVideos Torso, among possible others, so this isn't the end of it.

Ha, neat. In any event, this new thing is not nearly as interesting as a numbers station and is probably some marketing campaign for some weird thing, instead of being some sort of shadowy government operation.

Or, I can hope that it's a Valve ARG for Half-Life 3.

In any event, I still like the Buzzer.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?