SLUniverse Forums

Vaalith Jinn

Bah, running in circles more or less.
I'm pretty sure the jpeg's password is somewhere in the message.
But it might be the other way around, whatever the jpeg is hiding
might be used to decrypt the message.

Wish there were more clues. *whine*

Ten

Why have a partially decipherable code ("Shanti is coming") and then gibberish at the end?

I'm sure whoever sent this is loving this, but whatever, it's a fun game. The site itself is shit though. (Also, don't go there. I'm not entirely certain there isn't some kind of scripted digital "bomb" in there. Osama Cipher.)

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Vaalith Jinn

No, the rest is not gibberish.

We have this so far:

VKDQWL ZLOO FKDQJH ZKDW BRX WKLQN BRX NQRZ

// SHANTI WILL CHANGE WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW

DRSC SC DYY OKCI DRYEQR BSQRD MKOCKB GKC K MREWZ
DRO XOHD VSXOC GSVV LO K WYBO GYBDRI MRKVVOXQO

// THIS IS TOO EASY THOUGH RIGHT CAESAR WAS A CHUMP
// THE NEXT LINES WILL BE A MORE WORTHY CHALLENGE

the rest is encrypted differently, and that's where i am currently stuck.

Also, the image on that site has a file inside of it, a file(text or image or.. dunno)
which i cannot extract because i don't have a password for it.

Ten

Oh, by the way - since I kinda refuse to let you kids put your digital selves at risk and visit the actual website - that "cyan sunset" thing displayed as actual letters when viewing the page. Not a .jpg to my knowledge, but text. It was a strange bit of coding.

Vaalith Jinn

Am at the site, it's displayed as an image, although as i said - the image is simply a container
for something else, most likely either a text file or another image file.
There's absolutely nothing risky about that site from what i see.

It's merely a challenge, but having never manually decrypted anything before i'm kind of stuck.


p.s.: what i am currently hoping to do is this:
take this part:

GNNEZ WEXTE VGIIS EZEUE XIELF BZXII BNKEW
AEMSE ZKGOA DVXAT DADGK WXPEF BZMBZ EGNFB
ZMXAG BNXNL TDXII ENPEK XIKBL ZGNHM BZEBU
XIAGN E

and hope that one of these parts with two identical letters together
is actually a five letter word, such as: ii = ee, making TDXII = "agree" (amongst other possibilities).

then using these letters to try and understand the rest of it,
but uh, no joy so far.

Ten

Well, if any of you have time, keep at it. We're playing into their marketing hands, but whatev.

Vaalith Jinn

Also i hope to <insert your favorite deity here> it's not marketing.
And if whoever did it is reading this: one more clue, seriously, i'm stuck.

Ili Roviana

Was there anything else to the email? Thought about posting over at unfiction...

Iris Seale

Jesus Christ, you guys are smart. I just ROT'd the next part, but didn't get anywhere. I fail. Anyway, here's the original email as forwarded to me:

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 7:50 PM, bob ross <secondlife.shanti@gmail.com> wrote:

Don't tell anyone about this. Don't click on it. Knowledge is dangerous.

Shanti is Coming

Vaalith Jinn

Damnit i want to crack this. :/

Vaalith Jinn

The file inside the image contains information on the encryptions used, i got it out.

^^ exact layout of the file; meaning that:

substitution:
bullshit/ignore: (thank you, those three letter groups drove me crazy)
substitution:

p.s.: wondering what the password was?..
there wasn't any.

LoganBauer

In case anyone hasn't found this or is trying to figure out the substitutions via a more complicated method/by hand...
Substitution Cypher Cracker's Workbench

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Beezle Warburton

Sounds like generic spam filler to me.

__________________

Second Life®, SL®, $L™, Lindens™, Linden Dollars®, Linden Lab®, Missing Image™, [RESOLVED]™
and the color gray are trademarks or registered trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Vaalith Jinn

I'm using this one Simple Substitution Decryption
But i'm trying to understand if there are any words in the english language that
contain any other letter than E or O in a pattern such as "EyEzE", y and z being random,
with the added possibility that there can be anything before and after that fragment.

Ofcourse, i'm talking about the "EZEUE" part.
So far i'm thinking the E's can either be E or O, nothing else, but please correct me
as english is my third language, so it's a tad tricky for me.

p.s.: i'm -never- playing hangman ever again after this.

p.p.s: ofcourse i might be entirely off course with this as the EZEUE part may actually be two,
or three separate parts combined into a five letter block.

LoganBauer

I started to do that exact same thing with the "BZMBZ" part, and then also realized that the 5-character spacing makes it impossible to determine.

I've been trying to replace the letters that had the highest frequency with vowels (AEIOU) and/or common letters (RSTLNE)...

Vaalith Jinn

Been there, i'm almost convinced that E is E, also i'm trying to think what that number means
in the end of the extracted txt file, but no joy.

Also, the last part may provide some boundries, namely
Since we pretty much know that it ends at NV and if we can trust it beginning at S, after the dots,
then it can either be one word or two short words.

Small and compact and a good test case,
but yet extremely error-prone, as you can 'decypher' it in many different ways
and testing each against the whole line would be a pain.

Gigs

etaoin shrdlu is roughly the frequency spread in english (E being far more common than the next)... it is also common filler text, it goes back to the linotype keyboard that used etaoin shrdlu as home row for most efficient typing.... qwerty made it less efficient on purpose to prevent jams.

I always sucked at these sorts of puzzles though... Takes me 30 minutes to solve a cryptoquote in the newspaper. You guys are amazing!

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-
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"Green" is half marketing, the other half is self-satisfaction, and the rest is actual environmental benefits

Vaalith Jinn

Ok i'm tired ^^
i tried the normal, frequency-based substitution but failed, either i did it wrong
or the text is too short for any serious statistical information.

I'm sure i'll come back to it later though, but good luck

LoganBauer

You'd better, I'm also completely stumped and giving up for a while.

All I've found out is that "Shanti" means "Inner Peace" in sanskrit, something that this puzzle is definitely not giving me.

LoganBauer

The page just changed:
Shanti is Coming

And changes as I refresh it, looks like it's counting down?


Also, it appears to (randomly?) replace the cyan sunset image with this text:

don't wear your mouse out, it's just a game

and this image :

Joshua Nightshade

I bet this is something Qarl did. He did a similar kindof viral thing before sculpties were released.

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Ili Roviana

Um. Okay, I followed the link that Iris posted, and got a different website than the one we were looking at earlier. Or something. The addy is the same but the content is different. I think they listened to Vaalith's request for help **edit** - ok yeah refreshing I occasionally get the new layout/pic.

The site I was looking at earlier today has changed, the background color changes on refresh, and there is a number that changes with each refresh as well, beneath the 'Shanti is Coming' message. Also, there's an mp3 embedded now (may have been there earlier but I don't recall seeing it in the source.

The site I get when following Iris' link.




There is also new text in the new layout

Joshua Nightshade

Well if it's a countdown we'll know pretty soon, 9900+ seconds is under three hours.

Joshua Nightshade

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