Challenge 1:

Spoiler

Contained within the Challenge 1 JPEG was a black and white “dotted” border which was actually a binary encoded ascii string, subsequently encoded again with ROT13 (ROT13 is a substitution cipher that substitutes a character of the alphabet with one 13 positions further on). This 2 pixel border contained a message and URL, instructing them where to go next to continue playing.

Fuck that, unless someone knows of a way to grab the border without having to blow the picture up to fuzzy size and try to write it down manually?

Originally Posted by fulltilt

Fuck that, unless someone knows of a way to grab the border without having to blow the picture up to fuzzy size and try to write it down manually?

Copy pic, paste in MSPaint, view - large size, you'll see the border quite clearly

Originally Posted by Jack

Copy pic, paste in MSPaint, view - large size, you'll see the border quite clearly

Not well enough to easily distinguish three 1s from four.

Google has some people programmatically opening the jpg and examining the border, others have strung the four edges together into a bitmap and opened that in a hex editor. Pity the fool who had to copy it down manually. The resultant URL leads to another encrypted string which, while I could decode it given the information on how it was created, I wouldn't have a clue what to do with if approached blind.

Anyone who actually beat this challenge deserves serious props, and that's just the 'fun' one. Cryptology isn't for me it seems

Originally Posted by fulltilt

Not well enough to easily distinguish three 1s from four.

So switch on the grid though you would have to copy it out manually I suppose

Originally Posted by fulltilt

.... Cryptology isn't for me it seems

Know what you mean, don't venture there often myself now, there are PC programs that can do it loades better than me

Originally Posted by Jack

So switch on the grid though you would have to copy it out manually I suppose

Had I known there was a grid option I'd certainly have bothered, so although I'm glad I didn't I thank you for enlightening me!

Know what you mean, don't venture there often myself now, there are PC programs that can do it loades better than me

I don't mind writing the code but counting pixels just leaves me cold. Coverting text to an image is easy (CAPTCHA codes for example), but the reciprocal is beyond my limited understanding and that was only stage 2

Originally Posted by fulltilt

Had I known there was a grid option I'd certainly have bothered, so although I'm glad I didn't I thank you for enlightening me!


I don't mind writing the code but counting pixels just leaves me cold. Coverting text to an image is easy (CAPTCHA codes for example), but the reciprocal is beyond my limited understanding and that was only stage 2

Some photo packages (GIMP ferinstance) can convert jpegs et al to an .xpm format, which consists of only " " and "." and can be opened as a text file. With a bit of search/replace that becomes 0/1. It'd be trivial to write a bit of code that converted 8 bit chunks back to ascii.

You'd have to actually give a shit though, and have nothing better to do with your time.

More tea vicar?