What do you make of this fiendish challenge?
Boring - it smells like the Illuminati rebooted.
The internet is full of daft things. Animated cat GIFs, stupid headlines, NSA spies, etc. But the online world isn't just fields of mindless dreck. For instance, you could always take a crack at the web's toughest crypto-puzzle: the ever-baffling Cicada 3301. Appearing each year since 2012, these strange series of challenges …
Oh bloody Zalgo-text, I hate the way this abuse of ͏o͠f̕ ̢u̢nico̢de̵ f͢eat͝urȩs͡ k̴͝e̕͟͟ȩp̢҉̧s҉ ̛d͏̛͞e͜͞sc̛͢͞ra͞҉t҉ìn҉͢g̕ ͘͞͏m̡̧̛̛͢y͜͞͞͡ ͝͏̕͝f̀̀҉è̵҉e͏̀͜b́͞l̡͢e͢͟ ̷̷҉́m̛͝o̸̧̡r͘͢t͝͝á͘͢͡l̸̸̛̀̀ ͞f̢́̕͠l͘e͟͠s̴̛͡h͜͢͡. B̢҉̱̳̫͞eͅw̸͉͈̣̬̭͓̳̞a̪̟r̷̳̀͢e̠͕̕͢ ̯̻̳̪̰̪̙́͡t̪͖̱̼̻̙͞h̛̳̠͙͉̖̟ę͏̲̙̠̺̜ ̸̢̝͍̟̳̭̤͚͘m̧̩̝͉͇̞ạ͚ͅn͍͔̺̬̻̩̹͝͡f̛̰̜̰͚̖̟̱͖͟ͅr͉̯̯̞̹͇̖̣̕͟o͇͚̹͚m̵̖͇̙m̡͎̲̻͉̬̮̞̩͔ą̰̙̮̮̫͇͈̫̀r̴̬͎̖͔̯̺̰͍̰͘͜s̷͉̜͕̣͝͡.
Dunno, but I'm not sold on the 'recruitment' angle.
Whatever the purpose, it seems to me that it will have the (maybe unintended) effect of providing a training exercise resulting in a lot of people learning information-hiding skills, whether they win or not.
Things being as they are these days, if I did solve it I'd be inclined to keep it to myself.
Unless you were following the trail of breadcrumbs entirely via tor or other proxy, you can't be sure the puzzle setters don't already know the identity of those they are interested in, even if you did decide to keep the solution to yourself.
And shame on the Reg for trying to blag the answer. Cheaters never prosper. :-)
@JustaKOS
". . .if I did solve it I'd be inclined to keep it to myself."
I don't know how things will pan-out this year, but last year's puzzle requiredco-operation at one point*. From what I know of it, the whole thing requires co-operation from a community of like-minded individuals.
It's certainly a test, but what the reward is is unknown. I can only assume that it is something very desirable for those with the abilities to get that far as there is next to no information out there from the later, individualised steps of the process. From that, the only possible conclusions are that:
* - The 'reward' was near-universally desirable for those who got that far.
* - The initiators won enough respect that the participants voluntarily decided to keep quiet.
* - The initiators made credible threats that scared the participants into silence.
I suspect it's a combination of the first two.
* - Well, it wasn't absolutely essential, but clues were placed on posters distributed across the US and the world, so if you didn't have access or resources to visit enough (5) of them, you would have had no chance - no matter how talented you were.
Some possibilities:
Crewman/Captain/Admiral Braxton: Why? SOMEhow, Janeway is violating time travel sanctions again...
Leoben: Why? Here, he states: " To know the face of God is to know madness... I see the universe. I see the patterns. I see the foreshadowing that precedes every moment, of every day. It's all there. I see it, and you don't. And I have a surprise for you. I have something to tell you about the future. ... But, we have to see this through to the end."
NSA: May the Lords of Kobol bless and scold their souls... They are seeking the best and brightest to either clone or hyper-sleep preserve due to an impending arrival of an EKCB (Earth-Killing Celestial Body), not for Human RESurrection, but PRESURrection (pre resurrection)
NSA-within-NSA faction that spawned Section 31: Why? Dr Julian Bashir and Chief O'Brien finally dumped their wives and wanted to play Command And Conquer The Timeline in a Holosuite during one of their mutually-facilitative hydraulic dreams....
Working at GCHQ and NSA may be pretty awful for anyone with imagination, and also jolly boring most of the time. These coded messages are actually a plea for help for someone to write something a bit more challenging than the usual run-of-the-mill stuff they have to decode from trrrrsts, drug dealers, pr0n addicts and politicians.
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Its a recruitment drive
but not by the alphabet soup government agencies, or by a commecial contractor
Its for the latest Evil overlord project.
If you can crack the puzzle, then you'll offered a job for life* implementing the evil overlord's plan for world domination, after which you'll be offered part of the world to live in and rule.**
Boris
* unless you screw up in which case, the sharks are used to large regular solid meals or the plucky secret agent succedes in stopping your boss in which case , you'll burn to death when the volcano explodes
** except scotland.... because theres nothing worth ruling there :)
>Its a recruitment drive but not by the alphabet soup government agencies, or by a commecial contractor [...] Its for the latest Evil overlord project.
Let's assume that's true. Can anyone comment on the how the traditional Three Letter Agencies might fare at deciphering this puzzle, if they haven't already? Genuine question.
and most of them know each other, I think. Their effort just might be sponsored by an organisation for which some of them work, but I think it's more likely that they decided to do it for fun, to amuse themselves and to recruit like-minded people into their circle.
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There was a book, forgot the title and author, where something very similar took place and it all turns out to be a marketing campaign.
The hook was that the players were being heavily manipulated and herded, but they believed it was their cleverness and abilities that were allowing them to solve the puzzles. The reality was that in the process of solving the clues they were being constantly exposed to marketing messages but they didn't realize it.
The creators of the puzzle were charging their clients for ad space inside the puzzle with the most expensive spots being nearer the end of the puzzle. The premise is genius as marketing you don't recognize as such is extremely valuable. Additionally, if you're in a state of concentration looking for little details your brain will see and retain the marketing message more readily even if you don't realize it.
>The premise is genius as marketing you don't recognize as such is extremely valuable.
If that is true, the chances are that the adverts are on the forums that comment on this puzzle, rather than amongst the breadcrumbs of the puzzle itself. Why? Because (I assume) far more people are following the progress of this treasure hunt than are actually participating in it.
There is still the cost/benefit analysis to be done by the marketing team... for the cost of setting up this puzzle (okay, probably far less than creating and airing a TV advert) they want in return either lots of eyeballs, or to market to a specific (self-selecting group). You only want to advertise to a select group if they are a, much more likely than your average punter to buy your product, b, if they are very rich (higher margins), c, you have a way of getting your message under the viewer's radar (as you suggest), or a combination of the above.
I would still go for a recruiting job ... kinda like how the brit intel agency in WWII found people who were good at crosswords , and used that as a selection starting point.
Spy agencies need peole who you can tell, we know that messages are being swapped through the XXXXX messageboard, without them going ``yeah, Duh .. it's a message board, what do you expect '' and in stead find the steganosaurs
Crosswords and Intelligence Agencies.
There is that lovely story of a leading WW2-era newspaper crossword compiler being a master at a boarding school. The school was based near an American base in England. The security agencies were concerned because words associated with the secret planning of D-Day were appearing as answers in the crosswords this school master set. The agencies had to consider if this was coincidence, conspiracy, or if boys at the school picked up on words being used by the nearby US servicemen and repeated them in the school, thus subconsciously influencing the crossword compiler.
For me the most interesting aspect is that no one has heard from any of the supposed 'winners' and there seems to be a remarkable lack of information about who they are. The one guy who documented his path supposedly was 'too late' but I would expect at least one of these people to brag to friends, family, lovers, colleagues etc. Surely they can't all be basement dwellers.
The only plausible explanation I can think of off-hand is that everyone got the 'you're too late' message.
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They pay two million brozgnats (alien money) to partake in an annual limited seating gourmet meal which consists of the "winning" human contestant. The contest is supposed to self select the smartest, and therefore tastiest, human available. The cicada connection? Simple, cicadas are descendants of the first alien visitors to arrive on earth but they didn't have an adequate supply of humans to eat on the first trip so they devolved into the tiny insect we know. The original alien species is much larger but looks surprisingly similar and the picture isn't our familiar insect it's actually the head alien chef that prepares meal.
That without any evidence to go on, every theory advanced so far as to the provenance and purpose of this puzzle is simply wild speculation.
Boring, but true. Although I'd be pleased if the answer after a further series of tortuous redirections was "ever get the feeling that you've been cheated?".
Even better if every "congratulations, you have solved the puzzle" message turned out not to be true, but contained even more puzzles and they just kept going on forever, keeping plenty of hackers busy chasing their tails rather than devoting their energies to more harmful pursuits. The "keep going, the prize is $200 million" message at the 33rd level of redirection is a particularly good ruse in order to achieve this.
What if I followed along what the others posted about their work, even though I was unable to solve anything on my own, and then the very last puzzle happened to be something that hit my field of specialty (for example, for certain people it might be a literary reference so obscure it will never be found on Google) No one person is capable of solving this, and the person who was first to finish may have had little or nothing to do with the rest of the solution. What's the point, other than to prove they have a lot of time on their hands to keep up to date on the puzzle so they're in the right place at the right time to be the first to the end?
I think everyone gets the "someone beat you to it" message, and some Internet troll who is a slightly more malicious version of the guy who writes xkcd gets a good laugh watching so many people putting effort into solving his puzzle.
Do we even know the entire path is laid out prior to the first message? So long as he stays a few steps ahead the "perpetrator" could make this game last as long as he wants. When he gets bored he makes the next clue point to the "someone beat you to it" website.
In fact the accounts of past puzzles make it fairly clear the whole thing is not laid out ahead of time. For instance more than once they arrived at a .onion site displaying hexadecimal digits with a new digit being added every few minutes until it reached its final length after about a day.
This seems to suggest they only started it once someone got close, as it would have already reached full length if it started at the same time the first clue was given out, although it's conceivable that it was automatically triggered the first time someone visited the site. But it also looks like a pretty good stalling tactic for someone who's at least partly making this stuff up as they go along.
Another explanation for the delays would be to stop one person from getting too far ahead, though if it truly is a recruitment tool, it's unclear why they would want to do that.
@DougS
From what I have read, that doesn't seem to be the way of it. Yes, there are cultural references, such as books and a painting but these are always tied into cryptography. The non-IT parts are likely a test of information gathering as they are not so complex as to require knowledge of a particular work.
With the painting mosaic from this year's puzzle, it seems that the composition of the image is largely unimportant* and the pseudo-masonic theme of protractors could be a simple bit of misdirection as the relevant part was the data steganographically hidden in the image.
The resulting message clearly pointed at a book cipher so from there it was just a matter of finding the correct work. If you search for in writer transcendental in Google, all of the top five results will give Emerson as the most important of these writers and several list "Self-Reliance" as amongst his most important works. Indeed one of the sites - http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/amtrans.htm gives it as a link near the top and I saw it just scanning the page.
Even more specifically, searching for writer transcendental private man -meditation -meditate gives this direct link to the correct work as the very first result.
From what I have seen of last year's challenge, once people got to the final stages, there were tasks to be carried out by individuals and these tasks were decidedly IT-based, such that should someone have reached that point by just hanging around the people doing the real work, they would quickly have been weeded out.
In addition, as multiple people were needed to get to those final stages (as you recognise) I don't think it's supposed to be a first-past-the-post affair.
Further, while it's entirely possible that it is a prank, rather a lot of effort has gone into it so it stands to reason that there is some pay-off for the organisers. That's one of the reasons that a recruitment/membership test is the prevailing theory.
* - As the current puzzle is ongoing, the painting may prove to be relevant to a latter stage but, given the strong infosec focus, it seems unlikely that the organisers are targeting Art History majors.
If it was recruiting for biz then that firm would probably have de-cloaked by now to a mediagasm of ridiculous proportions.
My money is on a security agency and that everyone gets a too late message at the end. Some finishers might be approached however.
If you have rather a lot of access to internet traffic (raw, logs, and metatdata) then working out who is a real solver of the riddles and who is merely following on would be trivial.
Cheers
Jon
One problem with this sort of approach is that "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member" either. Granted, I'm not exactly in the target audience here. But if I were, I'd feel distinctly uncomfortable painting a big-ass bullseye target on myself with my own hand...
The premise of this book was an electronic thingamijig which the US & UK had fed information to the USSR about, claiming it was part of a revolutionary radar system which could see down to the ground, and over the horizon.
In reality, it was a circuit board with every single odd and anomalous electronic effect designed it. (At one point in the book the protagonist asks an engineer to examine it, and the engineer is baffled by it's behaviour).
The idea was to let the Russkies "intercept" the component when a jealous UK had supposedly stolen it from the yanks. And then waste many man-years of their expertise trying to examine it.
That reminds me of a story involving time travel. The Clever Scientist figures out that as soon as time travel was invented, someone was bound to travel back in time to kill Hitler (Or some other Interesting Historical Figure). Once that happened someone else was guaranteed to travel back to stop him from doing that, and so on and so on. The only change to history which could not possibly be undone by another time traveller was to prevent time travel from being invented in the first place.
This explained precisely why his last two attempts to build a time machine had each met with mysterious setbacks and disasters, but it also provided a guaranteed technique for using time travel to win The War: Just allow The Enemy to steal all of your research, knowing that they will throw everything they had into trying to beat you in the "Time Machine Race" which they can't possibly finish, let alone win.
There was either a short story with that as the plot, or a future version of me travelled to the past and told it to me many years ago. I have never been able to figure out just which explanation of that story is true.
If it is the strange people on 4chan having a laugh, I wouldn't want to give them details on how to reach me.
And if its an agency like the NSA then they have been watching your progress as you have been solving it anyway so don't need to be told your information.
All of the physical locations of hints, both inside and outside the US, correspond to locations of Google offices which are currently hiring, with only two exceptions Hawaii and Louisiana.
The word CICADA appears to be an anagram of a trie mapping of the word GOOGLE.
7 g 111 1 1 a
17 o 1111 11 3 c
14 l 1100 100 4 d
5 e 101 1001 11 i
Further, the number 3301 can also be derived as
GOOGUL
10^100
10100
10 10 00
XOR 01
11 11 01
3 3 01