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tiltingwindward
Devoted Fan
Joined: 04 Oct 2006
Posts: 549
Location: The Land of Nefarious Purposes
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 Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:16 pm Post subject: [RECAP][PUZZLE] 12/1 Tachyon Craigslist puzzle |
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Like so many others, I wasn't here this morning when this puzzle went down, so I've tried to reconstruct the sequence of events, based on the forum thread, shifty's Aphidpedia update, and interviews with people who were there. If there's anything wrong with the post, please accept my profuse apologies and tell me so that I can correct it!
Note: This post has been edited for clarity and later discoveries which clarify the steps we were supposed to take to solve the puzzle.
Early this morning PST, Tachyon updated her profile to read:
| Quote: |
"Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn."
///
Lately, I am not having the easiest time with the situation i am in. But i can handle it, right? What other choice do I have?
///
Oh, and if you think you can beat Stalin (because he's a punk)... http://the-K12.redirectme.net/
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If you chose to look at Tachyon’s full profile, there was also this line:
| Quote: |
d3c0d3 4 k3y / c0d3d 1n70 l337 5p34k 17 3qu4l5 'T' |
The first quote from the profile
| Quote: | | "Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn." |
is from “Better Off Dead” (1985) –the same year that the movie from Tach’s last profile quote was produced. This movie, like “The Sure Thing,” also stars John Cusack.
The redirect link, http://the-K12.redirectme.net/, leads to a Craigslist post, which reads:
| Quote: |
Bagged like my favorite character in Mallrats. - w4m
Reply to: pers-242500710@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-12-01, 4:58AM PST
After Mallrats, I finally watched that crap mid-90s movie on cable. The one you love with the dude from Dogstar. I can't believe you actually spent your hard-earned money on something that awful! I am still going to keep quoting that one line from the trailer though. Ask me how I do it, that's totally my answer!
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You can’t see it here, but the words in the Craigslist post show up in different font colors if you copy-paste them into Word. This is a tactic Tachyon has used before, and told us that we needed to look at the source code for the colors. Xrynaem did this, and this is what he got:
| Quote: |
"000000""000000""636173""73616e""647261""206875"
"676865""732020""000000""000000""706f6c""795b61"
"6d6f72""6f7573""5d2073""75625b""6d6973""736976"
"655d3f""205b75""207769""736821""5d2020""000000"
"000000""75206d""617920""62205b""726f75""67686c"
"795d20""333231""383620""6b696c""6f6d65""746572"
"732061""776179""206275""747420""657965""206361"
6e2063""207961""000000""000000""747572""6e2069"
"74206f""757420""676f20""5f2033""362033""342020"
"000000""000000""537570""657242""6f7920""666974"
"747920""666f27""000000""000000"
http://www.snapdrive.net/files/229709/4U.jpg
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That URL doesn’t appear to lead anywhere, but the rest of code is still useful. It turned out to be hex, and decoded to
| Quote: |
cassandra hughes
poly[amorous] sub[missive]? [u wish!]
u may b [roughly] 32186 kilometers away butt eye can c ya
turn it out go _ 36 34
SuperBoy fitty fo'
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Lola discovered that Cassandra Hughes is a character in a British show, called Hex:
| Quote: |
Hex appears superficially to be a standard teen soap with gothic or supernatural overlays, but the overarching plot is difficult to summarize thanks to an unexpected twist introduced early in the second series. From its outset, Hex appears to be the story of Cassie Hughes, a beautiful but withdrawn young woman who enrolls at the school but can't quite seem to fit into the social milieu. The second series twist forces the viewer to realize that Cassie was never the heroine of the series, but merely a pawn in the schemes of the villains, and her role is overshadowed and replaced by that of an entirely new character, Ella Dee, who may be the true heroine of the show or may be merely another piece in a larger scheme. |
Surrealisticpill (through Google and not her own CD collection, so she says) had discovered that
| Quote: |
u may b [roughly] 32186 kilometers away butt eye can c ya
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was a quote from an NSync song, “Digital Get Down.” The connection works if 32,186km is converted to miles--roughly, 20,000. Covedweller has hypothesized that this is an indication to convert to binary.
evaB identified a Rob Base song called “Turn it out (go base)” which filled in the _ in
| Quote: |
turn it out go _ 36 34
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36 34, when put through Hex, decode to 64, so this clue directs us to use Base64.
FallingintoSin discovered that SuperBoy is another comic:
| Quote: |
Super Boy is a comic book, and story number 54 is: 54 (January 1957) The Sixth Clark Kent....where a character called "Hex" is turned from a man to a woman. Maybe we need to look at pages 34-36 of this comic?
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Remember that URL that didn’t work just a minute ago? A re-examination of the link revealed that it was really a .rar file. When the phrase “havefun” was added to .rar, we got an encrypted file. It was in Hex, which decrypted to Base64, which decrypted to Binary, but at last we got this:
Now for a slight digression…
Some people were still working on trying to figure out what movie Tachyon was talking about in her Craigslist post. The actor that Tachyon was referencing turned out to be Keanu Reaves, and the movie was “Chain Reaction” (1996), discovered because Sphinx, when decoding the earlier hex, had noticed that the letters not decoded were KLMNO—a chain of letters. With a little research, wstabeo found out that the original working title for “Chain Reaction” was “Dead Drop,” and that the movie did have a Cusack in it—Dick Cusack, John’s father. The movie discovery turned out to be helpful when solving the .rar file’s puzzle because, as Mike879 pointed out in the chat,
| Quote: | | <Mike879> I think the movie may be Chain Reaction. In the trailer they say "Oh is that how you do it, backwards" |
Using that information, our intrepid puzzle-solvers reversed the “text” in the .rar file and got this:
Some quick work by Sphinx and others cleaned the message up so that it read this:
| Quote: |
Did I ever tell you that as a child I always wanted to go to Disneyland?
I would pester my parents, but they kept saying we couldn't travel that far "because of my sister's oblitgations". I hated her for that. I hated her so much.
I bet you know what that's like, in fact, I know you do. It keeps you awake at night, that anger that you can't let go of. All because someone drilled into your head a sense of inferiority. It isn't that the other person is better than you. It's that the situation helps you convince yourself that they might be, and you're deathly afraid that they are.
Knowing what you dealt with awhile back really helped me put things in perspective. It helped me make peace with that part of my past, because I realized that my sister was never the enemy. There are other people to blame for creating that situation, but I also blame myself for not even trying to do anything about it except act like a spoiled brat.
But your situation is different in many ways... it's almost the opposite actually. Although from what you've told me, maturity was neither of your strong suits (so at least we have that in common). Still I know that how it all played out left a really bad taste in your mouth that you'll probably carry around for the rest of your adulthood (the same way I held onto mine to the point where it almost ruined what little childhood I could cling to). And yes, you can at least feel better about blaming yourself for the mess you got yourself into because a lot of it was actually your fault. (I may suck at sympathy, but writing it out really does wonders for my own issues lol).
However, there might be an opportunity for you to resolve some of these feelings that you are still carrying around, or at the very least settle the score. I'll tell you more about it in a few days, once I do a little more research, because I want to be absolutely sure, plus there's another pressing task at hand that needs to be dealt with, once and for all.
I don't want to ruin the surprise, and you shouldn't get your hopes up yet, but I will tell you this much> We're not going on vacation, and no one is going to Disneyland, but if what I suspect turns out to be true, well.. it damn well proves that it's a small world after all.
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If we had followed the steps laid out for us in the Craigslist post and solved the movie clue earlier, we would have realized that the five-line Craigslist clue actually read like this:
| Quote: |
cassandra Hughes – Hex
poly[amorous] sub[missive]? [u wish!] – polyalphabetic substitution, or the Vignere cipher whose key was ‘ieo,’ discovered by deagol after the letter was decoded
u may b [roughly] 32186 kilometers away butt eye can c ya – Binary
turn it out go _ 36 34 – Base 64
SuperBoy fitty fo' – Hex
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Put this together with the advice from “Chain Reaction,” we learn that we should apply these 5 steps—Hex, Vignere cipher, Binary, Base 64, Hex—backwards, or Hex, Base 64, Binary, Vignere cipher, Hex.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
…shifty had decoded the leet speak in Tachyon’s profile:
| Quote: |
d3c0d3 4 k3y / c0d3d 1n70 l337 5p34k 17 3qu4l5 'T'
=
Decode a key / coded into leet speak it equals 'T'
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...and alysaface, working from shifty's decode, noted that 10033 (Brother's number) was IOOEE in leet speak, the same letters that deagol had found as the key to the Vignere Cipher.
…and wstabeo had done some quick research to discover this:
Chain Reaction
1652 W Lincoln Ave
Anaheim, CA 92801
which is an all-ages concert venue
Now, the loose ends (courtesy FallingIntoSin and others):
_________________
"A step in the right direction? It only turns out to be so if you're willing to step much further."
-Samuel R. Delany
Last edited by tiltingwindward on Sat Dec 02, 2006 4:18 pm; edited 7 times in total |
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Caslynn
Casual Observer
Joined: 01 Dec 2006
Posts: 75
Location: Ohio
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Thank you so much Tilt, this is very beneficial to me as I worked all day and missed everything, and spent forever wading through the forums not making sense of anything. |
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Sad Panda
Devoted Fan
Joined: 27 Oct 2006
Posts: 689
Location: On Tachyon's Heels ...
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:23 pm Post subject: |
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ALL HAIL THE RECAP QUEEN!
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Got Drama? |
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tiltingwindward
Devoted Fan
Joined: 04 Oct 2006
Posts: 549
Location: The Land of Nefarious Purposes
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Sad Panda wrote: | | ALL HAIL THE RECAP QUEEN! |
Oh, I'm pretty sure romanceismusic is the Recap Queen. At best, I'm the Recap Arch-Duke :)
_________________
"A step in the right direction? It only turns out to be so if you're willing to step much further."
-Samuel R. Delany |
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covedweller
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:31 pm Post subject: |
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Awesome!
But why do we think the Chain Reaction concert venue in Anaheim would be the location of a dead drop? It seems like the "backwards" part was the give there with that movie reference.
That, and each part of this post seems like it is meant to help decode the message.
See the recap I did in my edited original post thread for a link to the Chain Reaction movie trailer, and feel free to add/edit any parts of it you want to merge into this thread. |
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deagol
Thor's Hammer
Joined: 28 Oct 2006
Posts: 1068
Location: No, not here.
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:35 pm Post subject: |
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Can someone explain how they got from the binary to the messy text? I just get [EDIT:4600] letters and numbers that start with 2s6g6k...
Did anyone attempt that base conversion? None of the base converters I've found can handle this number of digits.
Last edited by deagol on Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:56 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Glory285
Casual Observer
Joined: 27 Oct 2006
Posts: 113
Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:44 pm Post subject: |
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Has anyone figured out the significance of the leet speak? i read it and i was like, T in leet speak = 7, but what is she trying to say? could T be a key to something or is she just saying like "my name is T, for Tachyon"... lol
This post brought to you by the letter T and the number 7.
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tiltingwindward
Devoted Fan
Joined: 04 Oct 2006
Posts: 549
Location: The Land of Nefarious Purposes
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:50 pm Post subject: |
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| covedweller wrote: | Awesome!
But why do we think the Chain Reaction concert venue in Anaheim would be the location of a dead drop? It seems like the "backwards" part was the give there with that movie reference.
That, and each part of this post seems like it is meant to help decode the message.
See the recap I did in my edited original post thread for a link to the Chain Reaction movie trailer, and feel free to add/edit any parts of it you want to merge into this thread. |
The reason this is suspected is because the original working title of this movie was "Dead Drop."
_________________
"A step in the right direction? It only turns out to be so if you're willing to step much further."
-Samuel R. Delany |
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Caslynn
Casual Observer
Joined: 01 Dec 2006
Posts: 75
Location: Ohio
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Glory285 wrote: | Has anyone figured out the significance of the leet speak? i read it and i was like, T in leet speak = 7, but what is she trying to say? could T be a key to something or is she just saying like "my name is T, for Tachyon"... lol
This post brought to you by the letter T and the number 7. |
The only thing I can think of to tie in to this is that 7 is a prime number, and the Culper Ring gives its agents prime numbers to identify them. |
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deagol
Thor's Hammer
Joined: 28 Oct 2006
Posts: 1068
Location: No, not here.
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:55 pm Post subject: |
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Also, the 32186 must be related to the 4600 characters x 7.
[Edit: more precisely, 4592*7=32144]
Last edited by deagol on Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:08 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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wstabeo
Casual Observer
Joined: 28 Nov 2006
Posts: 44
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | wstabeo found out that the original working title for “Chain Reaction” was “Dead Drop,” and that the movie did have a Cusack in it—Dick Cusack, John’s brother. |
Dick Cusack is actually John's father, not brother. But what the hell...close enough! At leat we found a link to John Cusack, right!
| Quote: |
2. Why the constant John Cusak references (IE: Better off Dead, in T's profile).
3. What's the significance of the Chain Reaction address? Is it the local of the next drop?
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I was the one who linked these various ideas to get the address...I still think I could be off on this. I'm really good at grasping.
1) Keanu Reeves, who is in a band named Dogstar, was in the mid-90's movie Chain Reaction. John Cusack's father, Dick, was also in that movie. There's a bit of a chain reaction right there.
2) The "have fun" entry mentioned Disneyland, which is in Anaheim. But it said "we" weren't going to Disneyland. It also left out a chain of letters, KLMNO.
3) The 20,000 miles referred to lyrics from song by a band.
Putting these three things together (thanks to Google) gave me the Chain Reaction club in Anaheim...a concert venue. That's the significance of the address. Is it the drop? It is near the drop? Who knows? For all I know, it could be a freaky coincidence. |
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tiltingwindward
Devoted Fan
Joined: 04 Oct 2006
Posts: 549
Location: The Land of Nefarious Purposes
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:12 pm Post subject: |
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wstabeo, thanks for tying up those ends. And...I totally meant to put father and not brother. I don't know why my brain decided to change the relation. I'll go fix that right now.
_________________
"A step in the right direction? It only turns out to be so if you're willing to step much further."
-Samuel R. Delany |
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horcruxes
Devoted Fan
Joined: 22 Oct 2006
Posts: 740
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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*bangs head on desk*
i swear once i get the internet i won't be so lost and retarded. i hope...
my lovely shifty was nice enough to tell me the end result. i figured it was a hard one since it took well over three hours to solve.
is it bad that i don't even want to bother reading the recap thread?
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if i speak, i am condemned.
if i am silent, i am damned.
who am i? |
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MoonWatcher
Suspiciously Absent
Joined: 22 Nov 2006
Posts: 14
Location: London
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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Deagol, I understand your confusion, the explanations about the how the "HEX" from the binary was decoded is confusing in some of the threads but maybe I can explain:
The string you refer to is not pure valid hex. Hex only allows 16 digits, up to "f", and in the binary-decoded string the second character is an "s" for starters  . However, you need to ignore those two-byte pairs containing illegal hex values - these are the garbage characters you see in the screen capture of the decoded message above - a fiendish ploy by Tachyon. To convince yourself, look at the last 9 byte pairs of the file (as the message is in reverse):
Hex Dec Char
72 114 r
65 101 e
76 118 v
65 101 e
20 32
49 73 I
20 32
64 100 d
69 105 i
44 68 D
Simple ignore the dodgy bytes!
There are no other base conversions needed (base 32/34 etc). The base idea came from the "rob base" line in the colour codes.
As a note, a small error in the recap above:
"When the phrase “havefun” was added to .rar, we got an encrypted file" - havefun was actually the name of the file in the RAR archive.
Last edited by MoonWatcher on Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:41 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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MrsCop
Devoted Fan
Joined: 31 Oct 2006
Posts: 525
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 6:37 pm Post subject: |
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| horcruxes wrote: | | i swear once i get the internet i won't be so lost and retarded. |
I wish it had been that easy for me 
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"Not dumb just severly off topic"
~tigerlilylynn |
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