The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/internet/Cicada+3301+online+mystery+enthralls+codebreakers/9211024/story.html

by chriswoodford • 13 years ago

239 114 13 years ago

montrealgazette.com

gavanwoolery• 13 years ago

Drink your Ovaltine? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU

featherdev• 13 years ago

ITS: 4chan goes mainstream...again

hnha• 13 years ago

click bait headline, this should have been edited.

subtitle is "Cicada 3301 online mystery enthralls codebreakers around the world"

salgernon• 13 years ago

Whenever this comes up, I'm reminded of this series:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/

Very popular with the teens in my family with fantasies of being whisked away 'cause they're just so damn smart.

presidentender• 13 years ago

I used to harbor similar fantasies (witness my username and the television series 'Pretender'). But you can't just put some supergenius 8-year-old in a special school and have 'em pop out with the diligence required to achieve great things early in adolescence.

textminer• 13 years ago

That's sort of the basis of Plato's Republic, no?

pyrocat• 13 years ago

For the darker side of that fantasy, see: Firefly

tootie• 13 years ago

Oh yeah, a Chosen One fantasy: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChosenOne

d232• 13 years ago

Tor [... is] estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web

Am I missing something? That obviously isn't correct.

callesgg• 13 years ago

You are not missing something the author has obviously mixed up the "dark web" and tor.

jere2• 13 years ago

I think the author got it right and d23 hid that in the ellipsis.

TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines.
Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks.

[edit: To be perfectly clear, I was only highlighting what was actually said. I don't know anything about the dark webs.]

Nano2rad• 13 years ago

Darkweb includes intranets.

pdx• 13 years ago

I've visited HN every day for years. How the hell is this the 1st time I've ever heard of this?

dublinben• 13 years ago

I only just stumbled upon a different article [1] recently, but I'm not surprised why it's not a well-known phenomenon. This puzzle seems to be deliberately exclusive, and most people don't have the time to 'play' whatever game is going on. There hasn't been any kind of fulfilling conclusion that would make for a compelling story.

1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10468112/The-...

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

It's the same article, just got reprinted.

JackFr2• 13 years ago

Cause it's fake. AFAICT Google doesn't show anything earlier than 11/26/2013.

cortesoft• 13 years ago

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31932/chasing-cicada-explorin...

From a year ago.

L4mppu• 13 years ago

Go ask someone on related irc channels, that's what people playing 3301 used to communicate.

exarch• 13 years ago

Complicated puzzles full of red herrings, medieval European literature references, music... this sounds like the work of 1057.

cantfindmypass• 13 years ago

For those confused, he means 1o57 - he created the DEFCON mystery challenge and usually is involved in the badge contest.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

This is actually what I was thinking since a lot of the same motifs are used. Obscure literature quotes, cryptography, mythology and red herrings.

wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed he was working on cahoots with whatever person or organization is running this. With stuff happening all around the world, you'd expect some intern or low level employee would spill the beans sooner or later. I'm surprised nothing has really be released yet on who or what is running this.

moxic2• 13 years ago

Didn't see you post and posted the same thing! Yea, this fits pretty solidly...

http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest

zoom3• 13 years ago

Alright. Game on.

sp332• 13 years ago

Parts of this sound like Valve's crazy Potato Fools Day. http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title... It involved slow-scan TV images encoded in sound files, and Mayan calendar decoding etc.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

Perhaps they're related. Gabe Newell is really taking great lengths to obscure the coming of Half-Life (2: Episode) 3.

Kapura• 13 years ago

I remember back, maybe ten or 12 years ago, there was another difficult online game/puzzle called, if memory serves, notpr0n.com. It was pretty difficult, requiring lateral thinking, some amount of technical skill, and some strange trivia knowledge. I feel like this is just another version of that: hard internet puzzle. I'm also not discounting that this is some sort of ARG for something or another.

moya• 13 years ago

Yes!

I think I made is to minus 15 with a friend. I might start again...

mhb• 13 years ago

By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime...

Huh?

Macuyiko• 13 years ago

It's like a complex Sudoku puzzle, you probably wouldn't understand...

elohesra• 13 years ago

Genuinely made me laugh. I always crack a smile when I see someone use the "you probably wouldn't get it" cop-out (yes, I realise you're making a mockery of the concept) to avoid explaining something that they evidently don't understand either. I seem to see this fairly often in large, complex fields like mathematics or complex systems programming from people who either have an agenda or are trying to bullshit their way through a job for which they're under-qualified.

LogicalBorg2• 13 years ago

According to http://www.onlineconversion.com/prime.htm, the number 845145127 is not prime since it has the factor 503. So the sentence should read "By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new number...".

cheald• 13 years ago

The "huh" is that if you multiply any two non-one numbers together, the result can not be prime since the two input numbers are factors of the resultant number.

leephillips2• 13 years ago

"To create encryption keys, RSA uses two huge prime numbers and multiplies them together to produce an even bigger prime."

-- Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com August 9, 2002

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

facepalm

ddebernardy• 13 years ago

This must be some kind of journalist meme... :-)

matthiasl• 13 years ago

A simple explanation is that the journalist is over-simplifying a source which said "...found a semiprime".

jd_free• 13 years ago

The hilarious part is that all of these "geniuses" are being tricked into spending tons of time on a puzzle that has no solution or end.

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

Why does it matter if a puzzle has an 'end'?

And each stage clearly has solutions.

stormcrowsx• 13 years ago

Its not wasted time if you enjoy doing it.

leephillips2• 13 years ago

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

-- Bertrand Russell

nagrandom• 13 years ago

I created an account just to say how much I agree with this statement. There's also an interesting cultural difference here.. in many cultures, there's no such thing as "wasted" time. Nautil.us had an interesting article on this. http://nautil.us/blog/for-billions-of-people-wasting-time-ma...

mariusz79• 13 years ago

Well, they may find the smartest 4chan users this way, but in reality how many really smart people have time to visit that website?

nickthemagicman2• 13 years ago

You would be surprised. The amount of creative and intelligent expression that anonymity allows makes it a magnet for smart people trying to get a break from the culture of 'satisfiers'.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

gesman• 13 years ago

Mostly it amuzes [and targets] people who feel a never ending desire to prove their own worth by taking tests, and going through ladders, games and rules imposed by others, presumably "smarter and more powerful".

Someone has to say loudly "who gives a shit about this crap" and just move on.

zoom3• 13 years ago

It's mysterious. Rarely does one say this about js, or ruby.

saraid2163• 13 years ago

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

You did say "rarely".

barbs• 13 years ago

Or, maybe, it amuses and targets people who love an intellectual challenge? Or who love discovery and mystery?

Think about it - you have an anonymous entity posting on an internet forum, leaving an elaborate string of clues involving multiple technologies and real world locations, solved collaboratively by a bunch of people all around the world. How is that not in the slightest bit intriguing? Evidently there are a lot of people "who give a shit about this crap".

Hacker News is known for its intelligent reader-base, but also for its critical tone. Whilst comments can often appear cycnical or pessimistic, they are usually also insightful and truthful. But I think people assume that its overall negative tone is the norm, and make negative comments without much thought or rationale behind them, and feel like they're "contributing". Your comment is a completely baseless claim, and contributes nothing but vitriol.

badman_ting• 13 years ago

Ha, totally. Especially coming across a "clue" like that on 4chan, I would expect the end result to be goatse or something similar.

TrainedMonkey4• 13 years ago

So, what are chances that TOR website was made from the start to announce that "talented" individuals had been found? And rumors about emails were just circulated by organizers.

mburns• 13 years ago

Non-zero.

memracom• 13 years ago

We think of cryptography as the best way of information hiding. But it is not the only way. This sounds like some group is testing the limits of non-cryptographic information hiding. In particular, multiple possible messages encoded. How do you craft a message so that everyone is led to the decoy except those who know the secret key? And the size of the plaintext is completely hidden. Most likely this is a group associated with an intelligence agency, although they are likely not running an official project. They have an idea and are exploring it for now.

Interestingly, the NSA has access to enough Internet traffic to be able to identify people who are playing this game, even if they don't get to the final round.

downer91• 13 years ago

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS!

ableal• 13 years ago

"Nerd sniping", http://xkcd.com/356/

willvarfar• 13 years ago

Aha I remember him talking about that problem in a talk at Google! He got that question in a screening interview for Google itself, and be got nerd-sniped :)

Apparently he now this ks about it every time he uses public rest rooms.

His xkcd talk at Google is we worth googling :)

rohall• 13 years ago

This looks really fun.

TrainedMonkey4• 13 years ago

Here is full story of 2013 hunt and all the puzzles: http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_1...

jere2• 13 years ago

For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive — proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organization of talented people. But who? Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately, and disappointingly, promote a new movie or car...Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed I Love Bees ARG campaign.

Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization."

I didn't do much detective work on I Love Bees, but somehow one of my friends was paying attention when dozens of GPS coordinates were released. One of them was clearly pointing to the student center at NCSU. We were freshman living on campus (2004-2005) and we simply walked there at the prescribed time. There were two other guys standing there next to the payphones:

"Watcha doing?"

"Oh, just waiting on a phone call."

We all laughed. My friend answered one of the phones and had to answer some trivia question about the ILB backstory. It was quite surreal. Again, my pattern matching indicates a PR stunt more than a recruiting tool (there seems way too much fluff for that), but who knows.

JackFr2• 13 years ago

Color me skeptical, but it seems like bullshit to me.

The newspaper article has basically one source. The Wikipedia article dates from the day the newspaper article was published, and only has the article (and a reprint) as its sources.

http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com doesn't seem to have any activity from more than 6 days ago.

I'm really not a cyber-sleuth like the guy in the story, but the first two pages of Google didn't show anything from before 11/26/2013.

I'm sure the puzzles are engaging, but this looks like fake buzz.

JoblessWonder• 13 years ago

Here[0] is a reference from 2 years ago. I found a few more from the past.

[0] https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cicada-3301-wiki

krazydad3• 13 years ago

The "original image" linked to on this site also does not contain the plain-text "TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR" etc. described, according to my hex editor.

TrainedMonkey4• 13 years ago

There are claims of few reddit messages from 2012 on that wikia site. Can anyone confirm that?

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

Offtopic - do you have an account on abclinuxu.cz or is it just a coincidence of usernames?

hkolek• 13 years ago

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. The wikia stuff seems to have been created in August 2013. The subreddit /r/cicada appears to be 11 month old, but the article implies that Eriksson discovered it in the beginning of 2012. And it's virtually empty. Hmmm...

Edit: oh well, nevermind. A google search between 1/1/2010 and 1/1/2012 returns plenty of stuff, for example a discussion [1] on the xkcd forums from January 2012.

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=79579

krazydad3• 13 years ago

This mental floss article is a year old.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31932/chasing-cicada-explorin...

krazydad3• 13 years ago

However, the "original" PNG image linked in the article does not contain the plain-text described in the article (at least, not visible in my hex editor). The pixels do contain some artifacts in the lower bits, though.

Zimahl• 13 years ago

BESU RETO DRIN KYOU ROVA LTIN E

laxatives• 13 years ago

Finally, a confirmed release date for Half Life 3.

owarida2• 13 years ago

It doesn't take much digging to find sources older than that, really. ;) For instance, you can check out my own post about it at http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/, originally written mid-January 2012. The oldest comment on the post is from 2012-01-14. There were articles written about this back in 2012 as well btw.

PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that was interviewed for the article in question.

fchollet• 13 years ago

Fascinating story, but that article reads like the journalist took troll stories from 4c as sources. Seriously, whoever wrote this appears to be clueless.

"a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"

Excuse me?

"TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"

Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.

clarry• 13 years ago

> "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"
Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.

They seem to have confused some concepts. But the deep web isn't something mythical made up by 4chan trolls or science fiction writers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web

tedunangst2• 13 years ago

Your wikipedia link would include my bank account as part of the deep web, since it's hidden behind a password login. Good to know I'm keeping company with human trafficking rings and terrorist networks.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

Excuse me?

Is a Daily Telegraph writer, don't expect scientific literacy.

I remember reading an article about Fred Hoyle, in a copy of the Telegraph that I found on a train, where they described him as a 'famous astrologer', so them not understanding what a prime number is doesn't really surprise me.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

Is a Daily Telegraph writer, don't expect scientific literacy.

This is high-school math.

keithpeter2• 13 years ago

"There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"

That made my eyes bleed, but OA has given me a superb Maths revision lesson for some bored teenagers. I'd already planned to get them decoding a ROT13 text by reference to letter frequencies, and now this 'quest' as well. Nice.

egocodedinsol• 13 years ago

But how do you feel about the story itself? Lots of journalism has inaccuracies, but I'd rather know what you think about such a weird and intriguing phenomenon.

Most people here understand quite well that primes are not closed under multiplication, by definition, and it wasn't really central to the story. Neither was their weird understanding of Tor.

archgoon• 13 years ago

> "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"

   #include <stdio.h>
   int main() {
       printf("%d\n",2147483629*2147483647);
   }
   $ gcc test.c -o test 2> /dev/null
   $ ./test
   19

cynwoody• 13 years ago

    $ python -c "print '0x%x' % (2147483629*2147483647)"
    0x3ffffff600000013

amirmc• 13 years ago

Sounds like someone got confused between 'dark matter' and 'dark net'.

owarida2• 13 years ago

The primes in question = 509, 503 and 3301. 509 and 503 was the width and height of the image. Obviously, you don't get a new prime after multiplying these numbers together though. ;) For those who don't find this immediately obvious, keep in mind the definition of a prime ...

Well, he obviously has misunderstood both TOR and the definition of a darknet. The surface web _is_ just the tip of the iceberg though, but that's because it's defined as the part of the web being indexed by public search engines.

Your private Facebook posts, your Gmail inbox, private Dropbox files, and so on, are all parts of the so called deep web according to this definition. Due to this, it's not a very meaningful concept, and says absolutely nothing about the size of any "human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks".

PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that Chris interviewed for the article in question, and for anyone who would like more detailed and less sensationalist information about the Cicada 3301 stuff, feel free to read my writeup at http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/. :)

Tycho• 13 years ago

There was an episode of Numbers i saw recently about an augmented reality game where people were tracking down QR codes and such. Reminds me of this.

parktheredcar• 13 years ago

Did anybody ever figure out what the twitter user googuns_prod was?

toddsiegel• 13 years ago

I am apparently using TOR wrong.

"TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"

ameister142• 13 years ago

Is that going again?

I did most of it a couple of years ago, got to the personalized e-mail stage before I decided to work on other things.

It was strange how the pictures got put up all around the world at the same time, though.

canvia• 13 years ago

Easy to organize with craigslist.

ameister142• 13 years ago

true; some of the stuff wasn't though.

smartician• 13 years ago

http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_2...

    "After completing the test each solver was sent the following email 
    to the address they had inputted. [...]

    'In the programming language of your choice build a TCP server 
    that implements the protocol below.  
    The server code must be written by you and you alone, 
    although you are free to use any modules or libraries publicly available 
    for the selected programming language.'"

Sounds like a very elaborate hiring process for a global organization. After solving all those sophisticated puzzles, being told to implement a TCP server is rather anticlimactic...

bsamuels• 13 years ago

Sounds like a very elaborate hiring process for a global organization.

I agree. In addition, the amount of chance involved in actually solving one of the puzzles in the OP article reminds me of those stupid brain teasers big companies used to ask in interviews years ago.

nickthemagicman2• 13 years ago

Extremely curious how this turns out.

keithpeter2• 13 years ago

"Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately, and disappointingly, promote a new movie or car."

How about a shadow-crowdsourced game? You know, just a forum of people hacking stuff up and suggesting new twists. Like the submarine captains and destroyers in the 2nd world war. They almost felt they 'knew' each other.

derleth• 13 years ago

How about a shadow-crowdsourced game? You know, just a forum of people hacking stuff up and suggesting new twists.

There are probably multiple extant communities where such a thing could be started. SCP comes to mind for already having a mostly-coherent fictional universe in which such a game could take place:

http://www.scp-wiki.net/

girvo• 13 years ago

I only came across SCP last year. So awesome, though it's more fun if you don't read the comments.

runn1ng• 13 years ago

I saw this years ago on 4chan.

I stopped at about 2nd riddle. (Basically because I googled the solution and found all the results posted on some pastebin, deducing that somebody surely found the results first, plus, I am not THAT smart and good with riddles.)

Who cares, basically.

mathnetic• 13 years ago

Frank Shoemaker would call this noise.

moxic2• 13 years ago

This bares a striking resemblance to the DefCon Mystery Box and badge puzzles that Ryan Clarke (aka LosT/1o57) designed. Lots of crypto, hidden messages, esoteric references, ancient languages and symbols, quasi-mystical, etc. I don't know if he's behind it, but I wouldn't be surprised if he designed the puzzle(s).

http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest

Siecje• 13 years ago

Seems silly that is was a first come first serve basis for recruiting.

arjie• 13 years ago

It wasn't. Seems to me that it's a way to keep things going. No one was recruited.

gwu78• 13 years ago

I would think someone would have been able to figure out who is behind this by ascertaining who registered the domainname mentioned in the article. It is, practically speaking, impossible to have an anonymously registered .com domainnname. Identities of .com registrar customers, as well as those who are authorized to process .com registrations, can be "hidden" from the public, but they do exist in at least one database, or several. And even the mere threat of litigation is usually enough to get the requested information released.

Why even use a clever dommainname? An IP address would work just as well.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

For some reason I keep thinking "Google" when I read about this. It seems very Google like somehow... didn't they do something similar to this before (albeit at a smaller scale)?

That said, this does seem like it's a bit, erm, big, to be a simple recruiting initiative, even if it is recruiting for the NSA or something. I'm leaning towards some movie / game promotion angle. There was at least one TRON reference in there, so maybe all of this is leading up to a TR3N announcement?

The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

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