Cicada 3301: The web's toughest and most creepy crypto-puzzle is BACK

Re: What do you make of this fiendish challenge?

"it smells like the Illuminati rebooted."

Now there's someone who doesn't know a Thetan when he sees one.

Re: What do you make of this fiendish challenge?

W̼̹̝͞͠E̡͍͉̩̙̬͖͘͡ͅ ̴̖̙͍̼̻̀D̶̲̥̳̪O̸̢͈̪͙̹̰͇͕͞ ̶̩̙̼͜N̢̥͕̙ͅO̯͕̜̺͘Ţ̧̼̗̦̹̙̣̹̫ͅ ͉̹̻̳̕D͇̖͖̩̪̹͓̕͠O̜̳͇͙͖̟̘͇ ̷̯͓̼͓̮̙̙̀͘"̷̟̮̘̲̭̦̥̯͞Ṛ̺̩̝͈͇̕Ę҉̜̤̺B̡͏͔̠͚̫̦ͅO̡̮̩͡O̤̪̟̭̱̟̫̱T̻͔͖̹̘̥̱́S͍͍͡"̷̧̺͖̲̮̥͝

* but we have a special on weddings and bar mitzvahs!

Re: Why?

No, the NSA (or one of their competitors) is not recruiting; just trying to locate its enemies.

Re: Why?

Maybe it's just a way to learn about interesting people. Kinda like a fun public game you play to get in touch with other people with similar interests.

As you mention, it does have educational side-effects.

Re: Why?

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. :-)

Re: Why?

@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.

Re: Some possibiities...

amanfrommass, is that you?

Why are the MASONIC lodges with connection to the TELECOMMUNICATIONS industry?

A baffled person demands to know!

Re: What can you say about chocolate covered manhole covers

Oh, kudos, sir.

And remember what happened to the chocolate covered manhole cover?

Re: Its simple

even if you screw up, it's still a job for life .... just a very short one ...

Re: Its simple

>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.

Re: There are not many people in the world who can pull this off

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Re: Aliens recruiting

Or Mercury Rising

Re: For fun.

A lone funman?

Highly unlikely.

Images posted on Youtwitface tend to be legitimate. It is probably a link to the new Kony 2014 or something

>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.

Ah-Ha! So it's like Little Orphan Annie's decoder ring!

Ah-Ha! So it's a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring then?!?

Re: recruiting

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.

Re: Try solving the meta-puzzle

The only plausible explanation I can think of off-hand is that everyone got the 'you're too late' message.

Or "You're clearly too clever for us to have you wandering around in the wild!" message.

Re: It's certainly very clever.

"It's a very effective way of temporarily getting intelligent people off of 4chan"

I thought browsing 4chan already did that.

Re: It's certainly very clever.

if you browse /s you can get yourself off on 4chan very effectively....

Re: Useless as a "job interview"

Who says they aren't looking for people clever enough to let other people do the work for them?

Re: Useless as a "job interview"

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.

Re: Useless as a "job interview"

@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.

Re: Desmond Bagley "Running Blind"

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.