Yesterday when I was surfing YouTube for videos, I came across a rather curious banner:
Naturally, I tried to find out whatever I could about this. What is it? Why is it there? Is there really confidential content in my search results? Many people suggested a number of preposterous ideas, such as that the U.S Government have taken over the internet and are spying on us...
Soon after this began, Yahoo News released this article.
This banner would appear indiscriminately with a YouTube search, but as far as I know, this was only happening in the late hours of yesterday; I first noticed it at 21:48 - 9th May 2013 GMT.
Later that night, YouTube released the following statement through their official Twitter account:
Seeing this, I initially thought that this was correct - just a bug, until I right-clicked on the banner in YouTube and click "Inspect Element" to view the HTML. For those of you who are unfamiliar with HTML, any "element" can be named, so to speak, to whatever the creator wishes to call it, so that it can be identified later should the creator wish to style it a particular way in what is called CSS, or make it functional using JavaScript etc. YouTube named this particular element "alert-banner-trick" or if I remember correctly, I do however remember that it contained the word trick - this is the one thing I didn't take a screenshot of, what could be the most important part of finding out what this is - nice going James!
One idea I have heard, which seems perfectly feasible, is that this is really an experiment. As YouTube and Google are owned by the same people, it would be dead easy for them to monitor trends, so it could be that this is simply an experiment to see how quickly information travels over the internet.
Those of you who watched/read the news or listened radio this morning will know that YouTube have announced that users can now make their channels require a paid monthly subscription, National Geographic now requires a 60p subscription per month and Ultimate Fighting Championship costs £4 per month to watch. Are these two events coincidental? Confidential information banner promptly followed by announcement of subscription, could the two be related? If so, what kind of confidential information could be disclosed via YouTube? YouTube is not exclusive or premium, so anybody can access it, therefore all results are available to anybody, so it doesn't make sense that YouTube would mark them as confidential.
Perhaps this was just a genuine glitch, but there are still a few things unexplained, so leave any ideas in the comments box below.
