Hundreds of Messages Are Lost in Cyber Black Holes

You might have run into a black hole and not even know it. Not a real one, like those that are in outer space, but an internet black hole. It can happen when the website you are trying to access doesn’t load or your email seems to get lost forever in cyberspace, never reaching its destination.

A research team at a famous university in the US started looking at this phenomenon and what they found was amazing. For starters, the situation of things getting lost on the internet happens way more often than you think. To help with identifying these internet weak points, researchers have put together an online, interactive map, which updates every 15 minutes. On this map, online black holes are pointed out with red flags.

If your message fails to get through to your friend while you’re emailing each other, it may be because your wireless network has some sort of error or even because a specific server is momentarily going down. Those are the simple, explicable cases. Others are more mysterious, and harder to piece together. At this precise moment, a lot of messages all over the planet are lost to online black holes. Think about it this way: all information sent across the internet moves around like packages, being transported from one area to another, even to the remotest corners of the world.

Most people have experienced getting something they’ve ordered lost in the mail, a letter, or a package. It may get destroyed, or it may even fall off from the delivery vehicle when it was loaded, during transportation. Either the transportation company or the seller usually takes the loss, simply refunding you the money you’ve spent or resending the product. It’s the same with information online, only in this case, we have no idea where it goes once it gets lost.

Here’s how the interactive map works: researchers send test messages across the globe to look for computers that can be reached. Short communication failures are ignored. These sorts of problems become “black holes” when they fail to respond within 15-minutes.

Overall, the research uncovered that more than 7% of computers all over the world experienced this type of error at least once in three weeks. Did this map help manage to figure out what internet black holes are? Not really, but it is a first step in uncovering the mystery. So far, it’s been most useful for professional network operators, who really need to keep the Internet running smoothly.

Another one of those internet sensations was that of the story of the most mysterious song on the internet. And it goes back to 2007 when a person posted a clip of a song on a Canadian radio station fansite. The same comment stated that the song was recorded from a German radio station some time back, but had no idea who the singer was or how old the song may have been.

The tune itself didn’t help much either: it had a simple beat, monotone vocals, and sounded very similar to most 80s hits. It sounded familiar, but at the same time, it was really hard to pinpoint where it might have come from. The information about this song spread like wildfire on the internet, but at one point, no one knew who wrote it, who sang it, or even when it might have come out.

It wasn’t long until most music aficionados on the internet started calling this “the most mysterious song on the internet”. The person that initially posted the comment joined the search eventually, saying that it was her brother that recorded the song from a radio station years prior. He thought the song was nice and hoped it would be replayed eventually so that he could find out the name of the artist. That never happened.

Over the years, countless people have tried to claim ownership of the song, but they’ve all been proven as fake. Some have even thought that the original post looking to find out who the singer was had no other purpose than to draw attention and create a frenzy online. To this day, no one has yet to figure out the author of that song, but communities online have helped a lot of people ever since this first case identify their favorite lost tunes.

Other internet mysteries are way creepier. In June 2011, a young man named Frank passed away suddenly from a heart condition. Five months later, his best friend Tim started receiving emails from him with a weird subject line. It simply said: “I’m Watching.”

Apart from the intriguing intro, the email also contained information that only the two men could have known. Sometime before, they were both in Tim’s attic, having a conversation about what to do with that space. As far as Tim knew, no one else heard that conversation. Weirdly enough, the email urged Tim to start cleaning up his attic, so he could finally use it.

His best friend wasn’t the only one that received emails from the beyond. Frank’s cousin also received a message from him, talking about a broken ankle. Surprisingly, his cousin really had injured his leg a week prior to receiving the email. To this day, no one knows who sent those emails. As far as his friends and family know, nobody had access to Frank’s computer or passwords. Most of them didn’t believe his account might have been hacked either.

If you’re a fan of internet unsolved cases, you’ve surely heard of the name “John Titor”. It all started back in 2000, when a user under this name started posting information on the Internet one day, claiming he was a time traveler. He claimed to be from the future and went on to make some predictions about the future. For starters, John Titor said he was a soldier that came all the way from the year 2036. In this specific year, apparently, a computer virus had already destroyed the world.

The reason why he came back was to retrieve a 1975 IBM computer, which was crucial for saving the world from the virus. Technically, he didn’t need to travel to the 2000s, but he made a short detour because he wanted to visit his 3-year-old self. Over the course of a couple of months, this user answered every question people threw at him, describing the future in a very cryptic manner. He always made sure to add a disclaimer to the information he provided, stating that alternate realities do exist, so his rendition of the future might not be the one bound to happen.

The most obvious question people asked was: How did Titor manage to time travel? Throughout his many replies online, he gave people a series of technical specifications on how time travel ends up working in the future. He also provided complex algorithms and even pictures of the machine! The photos were really bad quality though. Will cameras get really bad in the future? Hard to believe.

At some point during his online existence, John Titor simply stopped posting. His followers were quick to assume that he might have finished his mission and that he had to travel back to the future to save humanity. After he disappeared from online forums, a lot of people claimed to know what was behind the story. A journalist was even contacted by two different people claiming to be John himself. Both were a tad bit offended they weren’t contacted in the first place for an interview.

The weirdest of them all is probably the story of a woman claiming she had been John Titor’s girlfriend when he traveled back to 1975. Their relationship even produced a boy, which, if you think about it, was technically born before his father. Most of the things John Titor predicted did not happen. So why did his story become so popular? Out of sheer luck, some would say.

The internet is filled with all sorts of weird stories, mysteries and hoaxes. Some of them get enough attention that they get rapidly spread throughout the internet, even if there is no proof, and some people believe they are real.