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/

  • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, it’s fun to laugh at these weird theories, but a bit depressing when you realize a lot of them come from a place of serious mental illness.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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

  • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Stamets@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        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?

        • Stamets@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I cannot find a single credible source for the band thing. There is a band called Cicada 3301 but they are completely unrelated. They named themselves after it but do not have any connection or affiliation. I wouldn’t exactly use a Top 10 video as a reputable source.

          As for Kryptos, it’s a world famous and unsolved bit of cryptography. If it’s overblown then solve it?

          • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            I mean its status as a piece of world class cryptography is overblown. Anyone can jumble a message together and say it’s something special. I have a coding reputation and can attest there’s strength in having applicability be in the balance. Not only that, but the amount of times the sculptor had to correct himself, and the fact that the decoded messages are jibberish even when decoded, just makes it sound like he wanted to kill time.

            • Stamets@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              You have been consistently and provably wrong throughout this entire exchange. Forgive me, but your opinion on its status holds exactly zero weight. Especially when you said that you heard the Cicada 3301 thing (something you got the name wrong of) from a TopTenz video.

              I’m going to stick with the people who have worked with the NSA for years and who have broken the first three codes into something that was not jibberish. While I abhor what the NSA does, they are good at what they do. Which is cryptography. And if they’re saying that it actually is something, as well as every other expert in the field, then I’m going to believe that over someone who has a coding reputation.

              This is a waste of my time lol

              • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                Is Wikipedia a good enough source for you, because I linked to that too, as long as you wish to posit I am “provably wrong”. Aside from solving it, the NSA, who like anyone in existence can only go by the knowledge given to them in preparation (hence why it took an AI to solve the Zodiac Killer messages, as if one killer is more capable than a whole agency), did not in particular have anything to actually say about the code, which comes off as randomly assembled utterances if you go down to the “solutions” section of the page, the code explicitly having connotations with the CIA, who admitted in the very same section…

                On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle to inform them that what was once the accepted solution to passage 2 was incorrect. Sanborn said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an S in the ciphertext (an X in the plaintext), and he confirmed that the last passage of the plaintext was WESTXLAYERTWO, and not WESTIDBYROWS.

                The only reason I haven’t given more sources is due to the temporary rule on Lemmy right now to only use sources from known sites in order to make it easier to spot spam. Had this not been an issue, I’m sure you’d be asked right about now about your, erm, sources.