Prepare - Uncover - Outwit - Find - WIN!
So you think you're good with riddles? Are you a master of Crypto-puzzles?
Find the answer... the correct solution... there are hints everywhere, sometimes in plain sight
Can you follow your intuition? The first to reveal a hint will win a prize. The first to attain understanding with the right answer will receive their just rewards... a bigger prize.
Here is the first hint for you:
Rules, Terms, and Conditions
You will need to employ all of your skills to solve this crypto-puzzle. This isn't for the weak-hearted.
You will need to employ all of your skills to solve this crypto-puzzle.
Don't limit your creativity, sky is the limit!
Take advantage of:
- Image (and reverse) searches
- Wikis or Encyclopedias
- Filesharing Sites
- Sound, video, and image recording manipulation
Don't be limited to the list above, get creative!
Think you got in the bag? How hard could it be? Surely, your Code Solvers and Image Manipulation Translators are up to date, piece of cake!
All submissions are due by Monday August, 22 @ 6pm (UTC -4)
The First Prize reward is 100 Steem (Which will be rolled over if no one is able to solve crypto-puzzles).
Additional Prize: 10SBD per new hint uncovered.
(This challenge is not impossible, but you'll feel like it is)
P.s.: Teamwork is what Steemit is all about, don't be afraid to work together and SPLIT the rewards, or donate them
Guys, I guess I solved it!
"Throw all your trust of paper/fiat-money into the trash-can and go Crypto!" :D
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This comment is priceless lol
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You're welcome. Just tell me there was a secret jackpot within the secret riddle for exactly that answer... :D :D
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Unfortunately no. But I really hope your comment gets some love as a jackpot
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Damn it! I felt SO close! ;)
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Alright I am writing this to give a full list of the progress thus far,
1 All leads inside the trashbin have been dead ends except that one of the links was a pastebin
2 the first clue was discovered burried in the banner img it was a title text here: http://pastebin.com/B6Pm52ts
3 the text inside that pastebin:
well done cryptofriend.
you came one step closer
kRS3Slu6TZw
4 Since youtube encodes with the correct number of characters that leads to here:
5 This is as far as I know as far as anyone has gotten.
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The creator of the video (is it timsaid himself?) just commented on the video saying:
"The Russian say Nh5LTQ2x"
This is probably the next hint.
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Good spot man, however this vid was not posted by timsaid and as such neither was the hint, but it may be a lead nonetheless
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You are on the right way. Confirming
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and that leads to http://pastebin.com/Nh5LTQ2x did you see that already ? anyone worked on it already ?
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I solved it...posted another comment....
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You got it man keep it going dig into it.
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First i will eat something :D
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UPDATE: I see some great comments. Some serious skills here. I wanted to give you another hint.
Concentrate on the cover picture.
Let's go
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Well I found Hint!
After changing the exposure
Oh shit....it s too late((
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I found the next clue the pastebin addy from the last clue gives this message well done cryptofriend.
you came one step closer
kRS3Slu6TZw
http://pastebin.com/B6Pm52ts
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It's really fascinating to see that @gonzo suggested pastebin but in a different linking. Well done my crypto friend. You found the code and how to use it. But what's next?
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Google searching with the image, provided the keywords mesh bin. And, @timsaid has already given a second hint that we should concentrate on the cover photo. And to me, it seems like the striked-through
skyhas something to do with the cover photo. The post saysskyis the limit. May be, it means Don't look at the sky, the next hint is limited to parts other than sky of the photo that should link with the mesh bin photo. Does the words mesh bin ring any bell for anyone out here?Prepare - Uncover - Outwit - Find - WIN!
This line looks like it's pointing towards the cover photo too.
Edit : The dish antennae in the cover photo, the mesh, could there be something about the mesh patterns covering the dish and the mesh bin?
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Hint #2 (100 votes):
"Talk to me"
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Well what could it be:
Coincidence:
More ideas?
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I've been talking to you for a while now, it hasn't helped ;)
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Do you give new hint when there will be 150 ?
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I doubt we see 150, but yes I will
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May be this film?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_to_Me_(1996_film)
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I decoded the thing from pastebin with a caesar decoder...
This is the result:
YOU WILL ALWAYS FIND ME IN THE PAST I CAN BE CREATED IN THE PRESENT BUT THE FUTURE CAN NEVER TAINT ME WHAT AM I
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Awesome RZnag the answer is History, I have messaged Timsaid
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There is one single part missing!
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i'm sure we still need do decrypt the email address: ²×+\¯*m¡ÈZW§æ éWhµÊ&
it's the last part of the last pastebin. I tried every single decryption algorithm I could think of and I messed with all encodings that are supplied with microsoft word (which means a lot...) I wish this would be just as easy as the rot-2 encryption from the first part of the pastebin. :D what do you guys think?
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Correct
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I think that unless there's "another" place where the encryption is stated, testing all the possibilities is a gigantic task.
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Because of the keywords "Russian" and "history", I'm all the time thinking of Russian encryption methods that were used in the past. My Google searches always lead me back to GOST. But that requires me to use a key and I think GOST doesn't even work with the full unicode charset.
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Also the second set of cypher double decripts to Genius without education is like silver in the mine. - Benjamin Franklin
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History
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shit i was too late :D
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Shift to the right 24 letters
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It's history
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Whete you found another pastebin?
http://pastebin.com/Nh5LTQ2x%EF%BB%BF
This has been removed, write a link please
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I think I have the next clue the name of one of the layers digging through the hex of the banner is : B6Pm52ts I dont know what this leads to but the reason I think it is is because the previous text was " Crypto ChallEnge"
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Bingo! This is right! This is the first correct hint
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Flippin sweet.
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awesome idea. im useless at this stuff but good luck to everyone else
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Everybody is useful. I am sure you have skills that other don't have. Together, United, you can do it
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Very cool. Working on something similar if you want to check my blog
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Feel free to contact me if you want to be part of the second challenge. I am looking for someone to join as a member for the next challenges :) We could create a great challenge
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I also have a few ideas I will be glad to join
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You can probably solve it by just using windows. the picture was created yesterday in photoshop for windows and i don't see any traces of other operating systems in the picture
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As I said, you can see in the file that the picture was created yesterday in Photoshop. I couldn't really find out what he did, but I tried to reverse image search the file. There are two images on Google that are almost the same, but both have a different size. The sizes on Google are 227x227 and 1000x1000. The Picture in this post is 300x300... I am pretty sure that he took one of both Google pictures and downscaled or upscaled it. Why would he do that?
I went in to photoshop and put the picture of this post and the 1000x1000, which I downscaled to 300x300 on top of each other and looked at the difference of both layers:
Except from some noise that randomly occurs when saving jpeg due to compression, there's not much to see here.
When you divide both layers, it might get a bit more interesting.
Zoomed in, it looks like this:
I think it's also very conspicuous that the dots are only colored in the upper band, but not in the lower band of pixels. The lower band is the reflection of the upper band and should also have the same colored pixels as the upper band has.
I don't really know if it could be something and what it could be. Perhaps someone of you guys has a better idea of what it could mean? I can also share the uncompressed tiff images if someone wants to look in to that.
Update:
I tried doing some manipulation with the video, but there's nothing to see. I tried changing exposure, contrast, whites and blacks, as well as white balance on red because the complementary color is green which is the color that our eyes are most sensitive to. I didn't see anything unusual. Audiopatterns look ok as well.
The creator of the video (is it timsaid himself?) just commented on the video saying:
"The Russian say Nh5LTQ2x"
This is probably the next hint.
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Hats off! I just changed the size of the image to make it look better and fit in here. Would have been to large. But the way you think and work is really good
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So then this is the first or second hint?
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QR?
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Nope no qr in there
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Great thoughts for steemit, this competition will help to people for win steemit dollars that is good chance to win SBD.
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Ok this is nice. But that code to find the email is something interesting :P
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Anyone know why sky is crossed out? Did he do that himself?
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Been wondering that too. There's also the post banner image. I've been ruling that out because it's above the "first hint here" text.
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FINAL HINT: "talk to me" said the guy with the tube
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Steve Jobs
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or Steve Сhen
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Or Buddy Guy - Talk To Me baby
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GOD GAVE US STEEM
:D
OMFG
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I found another HINT!:
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First letters
G U S T I O T G D A D T N N T A J
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Like Steve Job s)
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For those that are smarter than me, I think you need to check the EXIF there are a lot of codes in there and a big endian, which makes me think it is referring to the converter for the hex
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The image has a thumbnail which can be extracted with
exiftool -b > thumb. The thumbnail itself has EXIF information, but doesn't appear to be a valid JPEG image.Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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Did you take a look at it with the hex edit?
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Running
exiftoolon the thumbnail actually prints so info, but also the following warning:Viewed it with
xxd. Not sure what I need to look for. I suppose that 290 byte header might be something.Anyone else afraid of red herrings right now? lol
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Not sure what you mean by red herrings? But yea Id look at that 290byte header remember it may even be something that points back here to steem maybe even an account hash or anything.
Anything odd :P
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A red herring is an expression where you find something that looks like it might be a clue, but it turns out not to be. Often these are intentional.
Given that he mentions sound recording manipulation, I'm half expecting an mp3.
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Here is the original link location.
https://i.imgsafe.org/223d108249
.jpg
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Dead link Gonzo
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I had to put a space between the https://i.imgsafe.org/223d108249 and the .jpg or it would have added the picture like this
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lolz ic
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First, you photoshop out the words then search the picture. My intuition is it is easy that it seems. Next the RI searchs give you sky.
article summary.Remove sky and add the word cake. Google. http://domtesta.com/blog/ pops up.
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My guess is we are all addicted to Steemit and we dare not to disconnect for fear of missing out.
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and people post trash to try and be part of it all.
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csimt are the in caps in the middle of a sentence.
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Nice nice, Do you guys want the hex dump of the file here or can everyone deal with that?
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@raymonjohnstone
Nice to see a smart person :)
Sure, I think that is what @timsaid wants you to do, to help solve it.
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Blah I cant do that it exceeds the max 16kb comments size plus the encoding gets messed up, I just dug through the exif data and there is nothing obvious there, if anyone else wants to look if you are on ubuntu open terminal sudo apt-get install bless and open the file with it.
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Use pastebin and link it
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roger the encoding still gets screwed to hell but here it is http://pastebin.com/NUueLzgt
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Calbel
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The answer is: blockchain?
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May for the luck of my bad internet, I have this code XXgadCQuTZqTKK7m
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Has anyone thought of the crazy aliasing that's going on in the picture? It is probably the most aliasing you can get for a picture that size. I've tried looking into the aliasing patterns.. I would like to solve it mathematically but I don't really know how.
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I'm sure we have a lot of skilled people here who could help. I struggle to tell you if this might help or not
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Ok, maybe and I say maybe, the bad song is related t another songw with the same cadence or like rhytmics.
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Well, having a hard time understanding the guy, I found the lyrics at another steem post.
https://steemit.com/voluntaryism/@fabio/god-gave-us-steem-sex-pistol-cover-video-contest
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I might get it, all we found so far is a code, that leads to a basic security password, which involves letters and numbers mixed.
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Excuse me Alex Trebek but I would like to solve the puzzle in the form of a question
What is "Twin Towers"
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I don't know this related , I work on every hint you give and I end up here .
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Maybe Space Trash.
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it's a wastebasket
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Well a google search for "Sky Trash" gives this
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I'm in, nice initiative.
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Crypto-basket
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Timsaid give me steem
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I promised will have a look. Not solved...yet
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After playing with the Gamma of the bin image I ended up with this result
If you look closer, there-s a deformed grid at the right side of it.
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Stick to hint number 2
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LOL
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I have no clue what the answer is, but I just wanted to leave a comment to say that this is such an innovative initiative. I really hope this does well. It promotes teamwork, communication and interaction. All the pieces that could make Steemit great. Upvote earned!
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Thank you much for the kind words. I just think of a right way to promote this, so more people can participate and have the chance
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Sunny & The Sunliners - Talk To Me ?
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Taxi Driver Robert De Niro ?
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Has everyone tried google reverse searches? Does everyone know how? if not comment here.
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I did, two things looked weird.
http://www.doc-ent.com/trash/
http://wishbone.io/c/bin%20cute%20hairstyle%20different
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interesting Which Bone also see references in both links to Bin Laden but Im super doubtful.
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And the final clue feeds a youtube vid! Here we go :
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Steem survivors?
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it leads to a private youtube video, but, that russian hat makes me scared.
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