Author Topic: Some more highlights  (Read 28103 times)

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Offline Spicious

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Eww, I have lost all respect for you.

I don't see the point. This thread is already serving that purpose.

 

Offline Mongoose

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*pretends he knows what the hell is going on*

 

Offline MikeRoz

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"The upload folder is full. Please try a smaller file and/or contact an administrator."

This with a 658-byte file...
Rave reviews of my previous posts:
"Wow.  Just wow.  Well, just about the whole post is devoid of reasonable technical merit and accuracy." -Enki
"Wow, he just wasted about an hour of his life." -MachManX
"There are 5 million things wrong with your post, of which many have already been pointed out..." -blackhole
"Grrr. Someone please monkey mike...He's causing more problems than he's solving" -terran_emperor
"You're not very bright, are you." - General Battuta

 

Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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*pretends he knows what the hell is going on*

Hey, I'm doing this too! :D
My blog

Quote: Tuesday, 3 October 2023 0133 UTC +8, #general
MP-Ryan
Oh you still believe in fairy tales like Santa, the Easter Bunny, and free market competition principles?

 

Offline MikeRoz

  • 26
I don't see the point. This thread is already serving that purpose.
Code: [Select]
But I'm the only one posting encrypted messages. Other people should
post them too.

I'm going to make a new thread. Of the people that can read this,
*everyone* should post encrypted messages in it. Feel free to take
whatever side you want :p

And lol @ the using nano == no respect thing.

[attachment deleted by necromancer]
« Last Edit: October 31, 2008, 06:53:51 am by MikeRoz »
Rave reviews of my previous posts:
"Wow.  Just wow.  Well, just about the whole post is devoid of reasonable technical merit and accuracy." -Enki
"Wow, he just wasted about an hour of his life." -MachManX
"There are 5 million things wrong with your post, of which many have already been pointed out..." -blackhole
"Grrr. Someone please monkey mike...He's causing more problems than he's solving" -terran_emperor
"You're not very bright, are you." - General Battuta

 

Offline Mars

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Okay, has any progress been made on this? I'm totally confused.

 

Offline Spicious

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No.

 

Offline Nuclear1

  • 211
No, and I don't have any idea why we're getting random encoded pieces of texts in these attachments...
Spoon - I stand in awe by your flawless fredding. Truely, never before have I witnessed such magnificant display of beamz.
Axem -  I don't know what I'll do with my life now. Maybe I'll become a Nun, or take up Macrame. But where ever I go... I will remember you!
Axem - Sorry to post again when I said I was leaving for good, but something was nagging me. I don't want to say it in a way that shames the campaign but I think we can all agree it is actually.. incomplete. It is missing... Voice Acting.
Quanto - I for one would love to lend my beautiful singing voice into this wholesome project.
Nuclear1 - I want a duet.
AndrewofDoom - Make it a trio!

 

Offline MikeRoz

  • 26
No.
Code: [Select]
What do you mean no? We've solved the puzzle as far as we can, unless
the message we're supposed to decrypt is somehow hidden in the noisy
Shivan file. We have to wait until next week for a message to decrypt.

[attachment deleted by necromancer]
« Last Edit: October 31, 2008, 06:55:12 am by MikeRoz »
Rave reviews of my previous posts:
"Wow.  Just wow.  Well, just about the whole post is devoid of reasonable technical merit and accuracy." -Enki
"Wow, he just wasted about an hour of his life." -MachManX
"There are 5 million things wrong with your post, of which many have already been pointed out..." -blackhole
"Grrr. Someone please monkey mike...He's causing more problems than he's solving" -terran_emperor
"You're not very bright, are you." - General Battuta

 

Offline Mongoose

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No, and I don't have any idea why we're getting random encoded pieces of texts in these attachments...
Seriously...could someone please explain what's going on in plain English?  If all of us in here are supposed to be working through this whole mystery together, it's entirely self-defeating to have one half leaving the other half completely in the dark about what they're doing.  Mike, I'm obviously not the only one who has no idea what those attachments are, what they mean, or where they're coming from, and quite frankly, it's getting more than a little bit frustrating.

 

Offline faxi

  • 20
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Summary - where we currently are...
Ok, just to sum up where we are in this whole thing:

Obviously, we have found out what 162 refers to and found this forum and this is where the actual puzzle starts.
Our messages come from some GTI person calling himself Aadarsh. The text "2-∞ - User does not compute" for this user seems to be a bug in the forum software and appears, because this user has only posted in a hidden forum, so he has "zero official messages" but there are messages created by him. It really seems to be a bug, I can't imagine that the text relates to the puzzle (MikeRoz, thanks for pointing out the same effect for my user after I had finally registered a my very own user to be able to post here).

  • The first message ("Can anyone hear me?", October 10, 1926, 05:07:28 PM) seems like it is just an introduction to see whether people get here and to set the mood
  • Next message was: "Not as it appears", October 26, 1926, 06:54:58 PM. Here, we have a mission briefing for a science vessel sent to Ross 128, shortly before the Shivan incursion. The briefing consists of an image and some text. "Not as it appears" probably refers to the image, because after the image data, a zip file has been appended. When the file is renamed to .ZIP, many programs can extract it. The password for the zip file is "hUj-Ge!ru_AraS-e?ewrE=e3e+uru9r5w*he+u=W=yetAju9puCRe@ume$EwResT", as stated in the post itself. The hidden zip file contains the actual, classified mission briefing of the science vessel and a probe image showing Shivan ships. It seems that the official mission briefing was just a cover-up, but in terms of the puzzle there seem to be no obious hints in either the secret mission briefing or the secret probe image.

    The image in this post is loaded from the address http://holonet.hard-light.net/restricted/aadarsh/POINTS%20OF%20INTEREST.PNG which makes us aware of the existence of a web site at http://holonet.hard-light.net. So this must be the "holonet" but we can currently only read some public reference information and don't know how to log in. At some later point we will probably need to use the information that is given about the Vasudan language but at present, we don't seem to need that yet.
  • The next message ("Interesting times...", October 30, 1926, 06:18:24 PM) talks about the fact that people from outside have found the first messages. These people are us. They (i.e. we) only use four byte-addresses (for the current Internet Protocol, each address uses four bytes) and come from outsite the holonet. However, the title "Interesting times" is probably a hint that the DATES of the posts are quite "interesting", as has been noted by others. So far, nobody seems to have found out what these times refer to. Some speculations about a bible verse reference connected to the number 1926 have been officially stated to be wrong.
  • Then comes the fourth message ("Some more highlights", November 05, 1926, 02:34:55 AM). There we have some image that shows a probably classified ship. On the image itself, there is some hidden text that can be made visible by subtracting the regular dot-pattern that is overlayed over the complete image and by a few colour manipulations to make things more readable. The name "Points of interest" for the previous image might be a hint that now, one needs to remove the dot-pattern that covers the image so that the text becomes readable (or I could just be over-thinking). The text in that image is a key that can be used to decrypt information together with the words "God of Ohio State". The prase "God of Ohio State" is taken from a horrible translation of the Freespace Reference Bible and these words are the password which is needed to use the key for actually decrypting something. As a result, we have a usable key for decrypting things, but we have not yet found any encrypted message for which we could use the key.
    In addition to key data itself, any PGP key also contains some more data about the key's possessor (this is how PGP keys work - they contain additional information about a key's possessor and this information is used by encryption/decryption programs). The key that our friend sent us contains the information that it belongs to "Isaac Stone <[email protected]>". This is of course a fake email address, because there is no such thing as a .gta domain on OUR internet. But it alerts us of the fact that this is the private key with which a person called "Isaac Stone" decrypts (and also digitally signs) his messages. This means that if we now find encrypted messages for mister stone, we can read them because we have his key and the password for his key.
    It's also said that the image in this post is "only a thumbnail" and the image has the address http://holonet.hard-light.net/restricted/aadarsh/blueprints-thumb.png but playing with the image URL does not easily give access to a bigger version of that image (for example, there is no image called blueprints.png, blueprints-full.png, blueprints-normal.png, blueprints-big.png, etc. lying at the same place).

So what are the next steps? Obvious things that we are lacking are:
  • we have a key that can decrypt messages for a certain "Isaac Stone" but we don't have any such message yet.
  • we don't have a login for the restricted functions of the "Holonet" website at http://holonet.hard-light.net.
  • We don't know what the post dates mean (The year is "1926" and even the days are weird).

And on a further note: MikeRoz tries his best to keep people from focusing at the puzzle by spreading attachments with self-created messages that have nothing to do with the puzzle. So again for everybody: MikeRoz's Attachments have NOTHING to do with the puzzle. Mike has created these attachments by himself. Mike, you are not helping.

Also, it would be great for everybody to not make posts that don't help for getting further or ask questions without having read everything that has been posted here so far. Posts that just contain things like "Thank you", "I don't get it", etc. are cluttering everyting and will make things harder to follow and understand for everybody. And on the other hand it would be nice if those who have found out something could explain it clearly enough so that everybody can understand it and not just computer-hotshots.

(sorry for typos and for the many edits after posting this originally)
« Last Edit: October 31, 2008, 05:45:36 am by faxi »

 

Offline terran_emperor

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Grrr. Someone please monkey mike from the Pheonix boards. He's causing more problems than he's solving
e = m csarged - Relativity according to Sarge [Red vs Blue]

TRUE SHIVAN

HLP's only Goro Naya (Great Leader) fan


"I really wasn't expecting this much losership"


"Only one thing is impossible for a Vorlon to understand: How to change the IRQ setting in any DOS computer."

HLP Brit

 

Offline MikeRoz

  • 26
And on a further note: MikeRoz tries his best to keep people from focusing at the puzzle by spreading attachments with self-created messages that have nothing to do with the puzzle. So again for everybody: MikeRoz's Attachments have NOTHING to do with the puzzle. Mike has created these attachments by himself. Mike, you are not helping.
Grrr. Someone please monkey mike from the Pheonix boards. He's causing more problems than he's solving
Code: [Select]
I'm not helping, eh?

* I gave you guys the correct private key (there were numerous
        transcription errors in Nuclear1's last posted plaintext
        version).
* I was the first to successfully import this key.
* I was the first to post how to import the key yourself, and how to
        decrypt messages. All the necessary commands are in post #54.
* I also helpfully explained what was going on in post #73.

This is about the point where I decided to start encrypting my
messages. People who were following along should have easily been able
to decrypt them, right? I'm sorry if, after explaining what we had and
didn't have several times, some people couldn't be bothered to read, and
were left wondering what those attachments full of weird characters
were. Guess what - everyone who took the time to decode them now knows
how to decode the *real* message once it comes out, and might have even
learned something in the process.

Decent summary, though, faxi. I agree with just about everything except
the part about the dot pattern in the image. The thing about our friend
Isaac's key is that it's in ASCII - there's a representation for every
character involved. Lots of the chracters in encrypted PGP messages like
this one don't *have* ASCII representations. When we get this message,
it's probably going to be an honest-to-goodness file, which we find
either in an upcoming post or on the holonet. Oh, and I also disagree
with the part about me trying to mislead people, for numerous and
obvious reasons. Other than that, it looks right so far :)

[attachment deleted by necromancer]
« Last Edit: October 31, 2008, 06:54:51 am by MikeRoz »
Rave reviews of my previous posts:
"Wow.  Just wow.  Well, just about the whole post is devoid of reasonable technical merit and accuracy." -Enki
"Wow, he just wasted about an hour of his life." -MachManX
"There are 5 million things wrong with your post, of which many have already been pointed out..." -blackhole
"Grrr. Someone please monkey mike...He's causing more problems than he's solving" -terran_emperor
"You're not very bright, are you." - General Battuta

  

Offline terran_emperor

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Okay...Now he's just doing it deliberatly to piss us off...
e = m csarged - Relativity according to Sarge [Red vs Blue]

TRUE SHIVAN

HLP's only Goro Naya (Great Leader) fan


"I really wasn't expecting this much losership"


"Only one thing is impossible for a Vorlon to understand: How to change the IRQ setting in any DOS computer."

HLP Brit

 

Offline Colonol Dekker

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I'll boot him from gen_disc if i see it again.

I'll have a Mod-to-Mod word in goobs shell.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2008, 06:52:14 am by Colonol Dekker »
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
GO GO DEKKER RANGERSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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NEWGROUNDS COMEDY GOLD, UPDATED DAILY
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Offline Spicious

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I'll boot him from gen_disc if i see it again.
:wtf:

 

Offline MikeRoz

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Look, it was never my direct intent to confuse or piss-off anyone. Maybe at first, but only enough so that they figured out how to decrypt messages for Isaac Stone for themselves.

I've edited all my "encrypted" posts to include the decrypted text.

[attachment deleted by necromancer]
« Last Edit: October 31, 2008, 07:04:06 am by MikeRoz »
Rave reviews of my previous posts:
"Wow.  Just wow.  Well, just about the whole post is devoid of reasonable technical merit and accuracy." -Enki
"Wow, he just wasted about an hour of his life." -MachManX
"There are 5 million things wrong with your post, of which many have already been pointed out..." -blackhole
"Grrr. Someone please monkey mike...He's causing more problems than he's solving" -terran_emperor
"You're not very bright, are you." - General Battuta

 

Offline Droid803

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So...care to explain what the hell this "post8.rar" is?
(´・ω・`)
=============================================================

 

Offline Mongoose

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faxi, you freakin' rule.  That was utterly brilliant.  Kudos to Dekker for editing it into his thread, too. :)

And Mike, it's nice and all that you're trying to teach us how to decrypt files, but I (and apparently others) had no idea that that's what you were doing in the first place, since it seemed like you were being intentionally vague in earlier posts.  I have no access to a Unix-based machine myself, and I'm not about to go out and download some random programs to gain the ability to perform PGP decryptions.  All of us here presumably have different skill sets, and if those who are well-versed in such topics as text encryption are willing to take on this aspect of the puzzle, maybe the rest of us will be able to pitch in in some other respect down the line.

 

Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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faxi, you freakin' rule.  That was utterly brilliant.  Kudos to Dekker for editing it into his thread, too. :)

And Mike, it's nice and all that you're trying to teach us how to decrypt files, but I (and apparently others) had no idea that that's what you were doing in the first place, since it seemed like you were being intentionally vague in earlier posts.  I have no access to a Unix-based machine myself, and I'm not about to go out and download some random programs to gain the ability to perform PGP decryptions.  All of us here presumably have different skill sets, and if those who are well-versed in such topics as text encryption are willing to take on this aspect of the puzzle, maybe the rest of us will be able to pitch in in some other respect down the line.

I'm guessing that writing won't help here, right? :nervous:
My blog

Quote: Tuesday, 3 October 2023 0133 UTC +8, #general
MP-Ryan
Oh you still believe in fairy tales like Santa, the Easter Bunny, and free market competition principles?