[Admiral Nelson]

Best version of the story, for Mobius: Click to watch.

[Mobius]

Oi...

[Titan]

problem is, does anyone have his email? the one there seems to be related to the campaign, and probably not checked anymore.

[Bob-san]

I still have nothing on it.

I don't think the dictionary attack supports symbols, but it may. I used 4 distortions and 2 misspellings for this run. The PII 400 runs about 14-16 hours a day and the E2140 is now going 24 hours a day. In short, it takes a lot of power to figure it out--the Xieve-optimized attack will likely be the first one to break the password--it ignores complete nonsense and does all other brute-force combinations.

[Titan]

for all we know, that nonsense may be his pass...

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well the 7 character lower case/number combo found nothing.  It hit me that this machine is a quad processor so I made copies of the file and started 3 more runs on it.  Didn't slow the others down very much and it's still only using 50% of the CPU.  Probably an IO bottleneck if I open any more. 

Current results

Quick 1-5 character: nothing
Brute force 1-4 character all ASCII values: nothing
Brute force 5 character all ASCII values: running at 5 billion combinations tried up to starting character !
Brute force 6 character upper/lower/numeric:  almost up to C with 10 billion combos tried.
Brute force 7 character lower/numeric: nothing
Brute force 7 character upper/lower/numeric:  5 currently running.  9 billion combos on 1, other 4 just started at letters A, M, a, and m.
Brute force 8 character upper/lower/numeric:  9 billion combos tried
Brute force 8 character lower/number: just started 2.  One a 0 the other at j

I have a Core2quad 2.4, 2 Core2duos 2.0, a Pentium D 3.6 and a a P3 866 working on it 24/7

[DarthWang]

Has anyone tried www.volition-inc.com?

[Falcon]

Do you think it could be more than 10 characters long?

[haloboy100]

Obviously, if up too 8 characters long doesn't seem to be working.

[blowfish]

Has anyone even tried to contact the author?

Spoiler:

No, I haven't either

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Yes I tried through his ICQ.  While it no longer says awaiting authorization I did not get a reply. 

[ElGuillermo]

Ok, I tried to mail Andrew Bryant on his 3daction planet mail ([email protected]), but the box is dead.

I've send a mail to this guy :
http://www.westwiltshire.gov.uk/index/council/your-council/councillors/councillor_detail_page.htm?id=12515

And find a techie in here :
http://markmail.org/message/3lv3upxxikh5uwpf
... and mailed him too

There's one more in here :
http://www.travellerspoint.com/member_profile.cfm?user=androobe
... message sent

And another one in here (this one seems to be a very good candidate) :
http://www.technologyhorizons.co.uk/features.cfm?faarea1=customWidgets.contentitem_displaypage&cit_id=3726
Can't find a mail link, but I think he's here :
http://www.jobbath.co.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=253628
So, if anyone living in UK can call him :
"Call Andy 07906 446375"
... And maybe he's here too :
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/B88/974
I've send him a message on Linkedin

My messages are pretty simple :

We're searching for you ! Revive Temporal Mechanics mod with Descent Freespace Open...

Please go to :
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=53749.0

...Hope one of these guys is "the good one",
if yes, hope he will respond,
if yes, hope he will remember the pass.

If he doesn't, we'll have to get in touch with the mod's coworkers...

[S-99]

Damn, this sucks ass. For what it's worth, i did download the protected zip file and try to extract it in linux with ark. It still asked for the password, figured i might as well try. Another thing that might work is see if you can open the zip file with an app that just plain old ignores the password protection. Sometimes apps just don't care about passwords and bow to your will if they don't ask for a password. Of course this is a shot in the dark method as well. I guess it'd require trying to unzip the file with some other application that has password protection ignoration, or try a really old version of winzip during a time before they  had password protection written into the evil software.

Of course yes this is a shot in the dark. Two things may or may not happen though. 1. following this method you'll have bypassed the zip file security and extract away. 2. can't extract **** because that password protection might just make the zip file incompatible with archive decompressors that don't support password encryption based on the fact that the archive is password protected, older versions of winzip may yield the same results. Sometimes security bypassing is very easy with easy stuff like popping out someones bios battery or using a simple replacement method, and sometimes it's not

Why the heck would this need to be password protected anyway? IT'S NOT PORN! NO ONE ELSE IS LOOKING TO CALL THIS WORK THEIR OWN! Why the protection?

[colecampbell666]

It's encrypted.

[Mobius]

I think we should try to do whatever it takes to contact the creator before spending time with the password. If the creator turns out to be MIA/KIA...well, brute force is the only option left.

[Bob-san]

I'm up nearly 6 trillion combos for brute-force. My attacker (Passware's Zip Key) is running 3 attacks right now--Brute-force, Xieve-optimized Brute-Force, and Dictionary on a PII 400 (1-15 characters, 4 distortions, 2 misspellings, all characters). As I said before, the Xieve attack will probably be the first/closest getting the password. I'm up at least on 7 characters with brute-force--the password definitely is at least 7 characters long, probably 8+. The Brute-force will go a max of 8 characters, but the Xieve and Dictionary is running up to 15. 5 trillion on brute-force, 4 trillion real on xieve, and 10 billion on dictionary.

BTW--Fubar--try overclocking. I'm not sure how much difference it'll have, but my E2140 has both cores ticking away at 3248MHz. You C2Q should be able to hit 3GHz on air at a minimum, and I've seen up to 3.4 or so on air. It should increase brute-force attacks significantly--30-45% or so.

[Antares]

Watch it turn out to be something silly, like 'muffins'.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I don't think overclocking will help.  I'm only using about 50% on each core as it is without the overclocking.  I did think about creating a ram drive and putting the file on there to see how much faster it would go but I just don't have time or the software to do it.   I/O seems to be what's slowing me down.  I can still run FRED, Firefox, and Thunderbird at normal speed on the machine.  Slight slowdown on load but that's it.  My profiles for Firefox and Thunderbird are on my server so it's not hitting the local hard drive.

Started a numeric only brute force on another machine today up to 10 digits.  Never know might get lucky.  Also started using a p3 500 but that's not going to be much help.  Not enough memory on that thing.

[Bob-san]

Make sure you set core affinity correctly--you want each on its own core, so to not starve any attack.

Anyways--it's definitely not "muffins" or something stupid--it's a pretty good password, since standard attacks (dictionary mainly) failed quickly.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I have each one set to run on one core. 

Still no luck.