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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    7 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.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    7 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

    • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Every few years I look up if new evidence has been found and/or new suspects show up.

      It’s always entertaining, but I’m guessing Satoshi Sakamoto is as smart as they come and we’ll never know who he/she is.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      I thought that obe was solved decades ago;

      The internet is a series of tubes

      • smoof@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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    7 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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      7 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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        7 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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          7 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?