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The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
- gavanwoolery 13y agoDrink your Ovaltine? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU
- featherdev 13y agoITS: 4chan goes mainstream...again
- hnha 13y agoclick bait headline, this should have been edited. subtitle is "Cicada 3301 online mystery enthralls codebreakers around the world"
- salgernon 13y agoWhenever this comes up, I'm reminded of this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/ Very popular with the teens in my family with fantasies of being whisked away 'cause they're just so damn smart.
- presidentender 13y agoI used to harbor similar fantasies (witness my username and the television series 'Pretender'). But you can't just put some supergenius 8-year-old in a special school and have 'em pop out with the diligence required to achieve great things early in adolescence.
- textminer 13y agoThat's sort of the basis of Plato's Republic, no?
- pyrocat 13y agoFor the darker side of that fantasy, see: Firefly
- tootie 13y agoOh yeah, a Chosen One fantasy: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChosenOne http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChosenOne
- d23 13y ago> Tor [... is] estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web Am I missing something? That obviously isn't correct.
- callesgg 13y agoYou are not missing something the author has obviously mixed up the "dark web" and tor.
- jere 13y agoI think the author got it right and d23 hid that in the ellipsis. >TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. >Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks. [edit: To be perfectly clear, I was only highlighting what was actually said. I don't know anything about the dark webs.]
- LogicalBorg 13y agoTor is a tiny wart on the Internet's nose. Even the darkweb of which it is a part probably isn't that large. The statement is just an attempt by the author to add color and drama to his story.
- d23 13y agoEven so, there's no way in hell the "darknet" is 5000x larger than the "surface" web.
- gngeal 13y agoIt's quite obvious from your very own quote that it's the author of the article who's confused about the three (!) different notions of unindexable contents larger that the indexable one (deep web) vs. anonymous p2p file sharing networks (darknets) vs. Tor hidden services. I'm tempted to call this "a confusion hat-trick". ;-)
- pdx 13y agoI've visited HN every day for years. How the hell is this the 1st time I've ever heard of this?
- dublinben 13y agoI only just stumbled upon a different article [1] recently, but I'm not surprised why it's not a well-known phenomenon. This puzzle seems to be deliberately exclusive, and most people don't have the time to 'play' whatever game is going on. There hasn't been any kind of fulfilling conclusion that would make for a compelling story. 1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10468112/The-internet-mystery-that-has-the-world-baffled.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10468112/The-...
- snowwrestler 13y agoIt's the same article, just got reprinted.
- JackFr 13y agoCause it's fake. AFAICT Google doesn't show anything earlier than 11/26/2013.
- exarch 13y agoComplicated puzzles full of red herrings, medieval European literature references, music... this sounds like the work of 1057.
- cantfindmypass 13y agoFor those confused, he means 1o57 - he created the DEFCON mystery challenge and usually is involved in the badge contest.
- at-fates-hands 13y agoThis is actually what I was thinking since a lot of the same motifs are used. Obscure literature quotes, cryptography, mythology and red herrings. wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed he was working on cahoots with whatever person or organization is running this. With stuff happening all around the world, you'd expect some intern or low level employee would spill the beans sooner or later. I'm surprised nothing has really be released yet on who or what is running this.
- moxic 13y agoDidn't see you post and posted the same thing! Yea, this fits pretty solidly... http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest
- zoom 13y agoAlright. Game on.
- sp332 13y agoParts of this sound like Valve's crazy Potato Fools Day. http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title=Valve_ARG_Wiki http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title... It involved slow-scan TV images encoded in sound files, and Mayan calendar decoding etc.
- Apocryphon 13y agoPerhaps they're related. Gabe Newell is really taking great lengths to obscure the coming of Half-Life (2: Episode) 3.
- Kapura 13y agoI remember back, maybe ten or 12 years ago, there was another difficult online game/puzzle called, if memory serves, notpr0n.com. It was pretty difficult, requiring lateral thinking, some amount of technical skill, and some strange trivia knowledge. I feel like this is just another version of that: hard internet puzzle. I'm also not discounting that this is some sort of ARG for something or another.
- moya 13y agoYes! I think I made is to minus 15 with a friend. I might start again...
- mhb 13y agoBy multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime... Huh?
- Macuyiko 13y agoIt's like a complex Sudoku puzzle, you probably wouldn't understand...
- elohesra 13y agoGenuinely made me laugh. I always crack a smile when I see someone use the "you probably wouldn't get it" cop-out (yes, I realise you're making a mockery of the concept) to avoid explaining something that they evidently don't understand either. I seem to see this fairly often in large, complex fields like mathematics or complex systems programming from people who either have an agenda or are trying to bullshit their way through a job for which they're under-qualified.
- LogicalBorg 13y agoAccording to http://www.onlineconversion.com/prime.htm http://www.onlineconversion.com/prime.htm, the number 845145127 is not prime since it has the factor 503. So the sentence should read "By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new number...".
- cheald 13y agoThe "huh" is that if you multiply any two non-one numbers together, the result can not be prime since the two input numbers are factors of the resultant number.
- leephillips 13y ago"To create encryption keys, RSA uses two huge prime numbers and multiplies them together to produce an even bigger prime." -- Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com August 9, 2002
- 13y ago
- jd_free 13y agoThe hilarious part is that all of these "geniuses" are being tricked into spending tons of time on a puzzle that has no solution or end.
- Dylan16807 13y agoWhy does it matter if a puzzle has an 'end'? And each stage clearly has solutions.
- stormcrowsx 13y agoIts not wasted time if you enjoy doing it.
- leephillips 13y ago"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." -- Bertrand Russell
- tedunangst 13y ago"Time isn't wasted, when you're getting wasted." -- Asher Roth
- nagrandom 13y agoI created an account just to say how much I agree with this statement. There's also an interesting cultural difference here.. in many cultures, there's no such thing as "wasted" time. Nautil.us had an interesting article on this. http://nautil.us/blog/for-billions-of-people-wasting-time-makes-little-sense http://nautil.us/blog/for-billions-of-people-wasting-time-ma...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mariusz79 13y agoWell, they may find the smartest 4chan users this way, but in reality how many really smart people have time to visit that website?
- nickthemagicman 13y agoYou would be surprised. The amount of creative and intelligent expression that anonymity allows makes it a magnet for smart people trying to get a break from the culture of 'satisfiers'. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
- gesman 13y agoMostly it amuzes [and targets] people who feel a never ending desire to prove their own worth by taking tests, and going through ladders, games and rules imposed by others, presumably "smarter and more powerful". Someone has to say loudly "who gives a shit about this crap" and just move on.
- zoom 13y agoIt's mysterious. Rarely does one say this about js, or ruby.
- barbs 13y agoOr, maybe, it amuses and targets people who love an intellectual challenge? Or who love discovery and mystery? Think about it - you have an anonymous entity posting on an internet forum, leaving an elaborate string of clues involving multiple technologies and real world locations, solved collaboratively by a bunch of people all around the world. How is that not in the slightest bit intriguing? Evidently there are a lot of people "who give a shit about this crap". Hacker News is known for its intelligent reader-base, but also for its critical tone. Whilst comments can often appear cycnical or pessimistic, they are usually also insightful and truthful. But I think people assume that its overall negative tone is the norm, and make negative comments without much thought or rationale behind them, and feel like they're "contributing". Your comment is a completely baseless claim, and contributes nothing but vitriol.
- badman_ting 13y agoHa, totally. Especially coming across a "clue" like that on 4chan, I would expect the end result to be goatse or something similar.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoSo, what are chances that TOR website was made from the start to announce that "talented" individuals had been found? And rumors about emails were just circulated by organizers.
- mburns 13y agoNon-zero.
- memracom 13y agoWe think of cryptography as the best way of information hiding. But it is not the only way. This sounds like some group is testing the limits of non-cryptographic information hiding. In particular, multiple possible messages encoded. How do you craft a message so that everyone is led to the decoy except those who know the secret key? And the size of the plaintext is completely hidden. Most likely this is a group associated with an intelligence agency, although they are likely not running an official project. They have an idea and are exploring it for now. Interestingly, the NSA has access to enough Internet traffic to be able to identify people who are playing this game, even if they don't get to the final round.
- downer91 13y agoWHEELS WITHIN WHEELS!
- ableal 13y ago"Nerd sniping", http://xkcd.com/356/ http://xkcd.com/356/
- willvarfar 13y agoAha I remember him talking about that problem in a talk at Google! He got that question in a screening interview for Google itself, and be got nerd-sniped :) Apparently he now this ks about it every time he uses public rest rooms. His xkcd talk at Google is we worth googling :)
- rohall 13y agoThis looks really fun.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoHere is full story of 2013 hunt and all the puzzles: http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_1_%282013%29 http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_1...
- jere 13y ago>For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive — proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organization of talented people. But who? Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately, and disappointingly, promote a new movie or car...Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed I Love Bees ARG campaign. Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization." I didn't do much detective work on I Love Bees, but somehow one of my friends was paying attention when dozens of GPS coordinates were released. One of them was clearly pointing to the student center at NCSU. We were freshman living on campus (2004-2005) and we simply walked there at the prescribed time. There were two other guys standing there next to the payphones: "Watcha doing?" "Oh, just waiting on a phone call." We all laughed. My friend answered one of the phones and had to answer some trivia question about the ILB backstory. It was quite surreal. Again, my pattern matching indicates a PR stunt more than a recruiting tool (there seems way too much fluff for that), but who knows.
- JackFr 13y agoColor me skeptical, but it seems like bullshit to me. The newspaper article has basically one source. The Wikipedia article dates from the day the newspaper article was published, and only has the article (and a reprint) as its sources. http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com doesn't seem to have any activity from more than 6 days ago. I'm really not a cyber-sleuth like the guy in the story, but the first two pages of Google didn't show anything from before 11/26/2013. I'm sure the puzzles are engaging, but this looks like fake buzz.
- JoblessWonder 13y agoHere[0] is a reference from 2 years ago. I found a few more from the past. [0] https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cicada-3301-wiki https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cicada-3301-wiki
- krazydad 13y agoThe "original image" linked to on this site also does not contain the plain-text "TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR" etc. described, according to my hex editor.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoThere are claims of few reddit messages from 2012 on that wikia site. Can anyone confirm that?
- RivieraKid 13y agoOfftopic - do you have an account on abclinuxu.cz or is it just a coincidence of usernames?
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoSecond one.
- hkolek 13y ago
- fchollet 13y agoFascinating story, but that article reads like the journalist took troll stories from 4c as sources. Seriously, whoever wrote this appears to be clueless. > "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime" Excuse me? > "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks" Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.
- clarry 13y ago> > "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks" > Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best. They seem to have confused some concepts. But the deep web isn't something mythical made up by 4chan trolls or science fiction writers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web
- tedunangst 13y agoYour wikipedia link would include my bank account as part of the deep web, since it's hidden behind a password login. Good to know I'm keeping company with human trafficking rings and terrorist networks.
- enkephalin 13y agofrom the wikipedia article >> Private Web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources). so, yeah.
- na85 13y ago
- Tycho 13y agoThere was an episode of Numbers i saw recently about an augmented reality game where people were tracking down QR codes and such. Reminds me of this.
- parktheredcar 13y agoDid anybody ever figure out what the twitter user googuns_prod was?
- toddsiegel 13y agoI am apparently using TOR wrong. > "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"
- jcannon98188 13y agoI don't know about the terrorist networks part (although I would not be surprised) but TOR does have an active black market scene (read: silk road) as well as other illegal websites on there.
- ameister14 13y agoIs that going again? I did most of it a couple of years ago, got to the personalized e-mail stage before I decided to work on other things. It was strange how the pictures got put up all around the world at the same time, though.
- canvia 13y agoEasy to organize with craigslist.
- ameister14 13y agotrue; some of the stuff wasn't though.
- smartician 13y agohttp://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_2_(2013) http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_2... "After completing the test each solver was sent the following email to the address they had inputted. [...] 'In the programming language of your choice build a TCP server that implements the protocol below. The server code must be written by you and you alone, although you are free to use any modules or libraries publicly available for the selected programming language.'" Sounds like a very elaborate hiring process for a global organization. After solving all those sophisticated puzzles, being told to implement a TCP server is rather anticlimactic...
- bsamuels 13y ago>Sounds like a very elaborate hiring process for a global organization. I agree. In addition, the amount of chance involved in actually solving one of the puzzles in the OP article reminds me of those stupid brain teasers big companies used to ask in interviews years ago.
- nickthemagicman 13y agoExtremely curious how this turns out.
- keithpeter 13y ago"Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately, and disappointingly, promote a new movie or car." How about a shadow-crowdsourced game? You know, just a forum of people hacking stuff up and suggesting new twists. Like the submarine captains and destroyers in the 2nd world war. They almost felt they 'knew' each other.
- derleth 13y ago> How about a shadow-crowdsourced game? You know, just a forum of people hacking stuff up and suggesting new twists. There are probably multiple extant communities where such a thing could be started. SCP comes to mind for already having a mostly-coherent fictional universe in which such a game could take place: http://www.scp-wiki.net/ http://www.scp-wiki.net/
- girvo 13y agoI only came across SCP last year. So awesome, though it's more fun if you don't read the comments.
- runn1ng 13y agoI saw this years ago on 4chan. I stopped at about 2nd riddle. (Basically because I googled the solution and found all the results posted on some pastebin, deducing that somebody surely found the results first, plus, I am not THAT smart and good with riddles.) Who cares, basically.
- mathnetic 13y agoFrank Shoemaker would call this noise.
- moxic 13y agoThis bares a striking resemblance to the DefCon Mystery Box and badge puzzles that Ryan Clarke (aka LosT/1o57) designed. Lots of crypto, hidden messages, esoteric references, ancient languages and symbols, quasi-mystical, etc. I don't know if he's behind it, but I wouldn't be surprised if he designed the puzzle(s). http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest
- Siecje 13y agoSeems silly that is was a first come first serve basis for recruiting.
- arjie 13y agoIt wasn't. Seems to me that it's a way to keep things going. No one was recruited.
- gwu78 13y agoI would think someone would have been able to figure out who is behind this by ascertaining who registered the domainname mentioned in the article. It is, practically speaking, impossible to have an anonymously registered .com domainnname. Identities of .com registrar customers, as well as those who are authorized to process .com registrations, can be "hidden" from the public, but they do exist in at least one database, or several. And even the mere threat of litigation is usually enough to get the requested information released. Why even use a clever dommainname? An IP address would work just as well.
- mindcrime 13y agoFor some reason I keep thinking "Google" when I read about this. It seems very Google like somehow... didn't they do something similar to this before (albeit at a smaller scale)? That said, this does seem like it's a bit, erm, big, to be a simple recruiting initiative, even if it is recruiting for the NSA or something. I'm leaning towards some movie / game promotion angle. There was at least one TRON reference in there, so maybe all of this is leading up to a TR3N announcement?