Yes, I was reckless, Welsh has one more character than W###. The message would be:
Work has been progressing well on the Lepton Optronic Linearity Cannon, otherwise known as the Tau Cannon. My toying to the magnetic induction coil have reduced the likelyhood of overcharge by 200%! I still cannot fathom why the fuse we introduced continues to fail however, perhapts the leptons have a…
Edit: Toying doesn’t seem right, it would be “has” instead of “have” if it was toying. t##### has to be a plural word.
Well, my mistake, it seems that they do not match,accelerated lepton optronic linearity cannon is the name that appears in one of the whiteboards for the tau cannon, and the message says L####, one character less than lepton. Unless it’s meant to be Laser, but it would be weird since the whiteboard says lepton.
Edit:Ok, I think the first part is:
Work has been progressing well on the Lepton Optronic Linearity Cannon, otherwise known as the Tau Cannon. My tweaks to the magnetic induction coil have reduced the likelyhood of overcharge by 200%! I still cannot fathom why the fuse we introduced continues to fail however, perhaps the leptons have a…
On the Lepton Optronic Linearity Cannon whiteboard, the diagram of the Tau cannon contains a magnetic induction coil and a fuse between other components. There is also a string of numbers with the electronic configuration of an atom under it. But the superindex for d is imposible to read.
About the second part, no idea, the numbers and letters seem to be repeated, but apart from that… nothing.
There are a lot of repeated letters and numbers here, and I imagine we are getting a clue in regards to our hex code, seeing as how some of this may be representative of hex code. It may also represent some sort of progression into a different encoding method.
EDIT: Furthermore, if we delete the letters, we get:
Definitely some repeats here–perhaps they are Windows “Alt + Keys”? For example: “Alt + 0192” = À
Probably not something as simple as that, but I’ll attribute the codes here in a bit and see if I get anything (in class at the moment). It may also simply be a hint to delete the letters in the resulting hex code, although that seems a bit too easy.
EDIT 2: It’s not Alt + codes–I got a bunch of gibberish.
I could be looking at the code for ages, I’m spanish and the spanish keyboard has a completly different layout. Is the US layout the same as the English layout?
Edit: Maybe the S represents a 5, the only letters that are not characters in hexadecimal are the 2 first “mi”, that could just be the start of the plaintext, and then the S. There are spaces, so looking at the first word and try to make sense of it could be an option.
Edit 2: If Stormseeker keyboard has the English layout chances are that the " are 2. Is stormseeker English, isn’t him? At least the ip is an english one.
Edit 3: The second word “90A6SF0” has 7 characters, so either the spacing is just there to confuse, or the characters cannot be taken in regular groups inside the words, like pairs. If the Ss are supressed, then the third word has 11 characters, still a prime, if all the letters are supressed, then the first word would be left with 13 characters, again, still a prime. It would be safe to assume that the spaces don’t mean anything, unless there is way to turn the letters into numbers and some of the leters gave two digits. I tried the position on the alphabet and the first word still gives a prime number of characters, 23, unless the “mi” are not taken into account, then it’s a 20 digits string.
Edit 4: Nevermind, that doesn’t work either. Yeah, your idea of eliminating the letters seems to be the more logical. So the code would be
Without the ellipses at the end (if that’s what they are in order to show trailing of the message), and with the numbers all grouped together (underscores included):
Keep in mind, however, that the groupings of four just made sense to me due to the multitude of repeats when the numbers are grouped in four. I have no idea if this is beneficial at all; it may, in fact, be detrimental if it skews the actual way we’re supposed to be looking at the numbers. Those underscores bother me . . .
In fact I was thinking the same, there are 64 digits if we exclude the “_”. It will probably be some kind of pen and paper cipher. I thought about turning everynumber in a 1 but the 0s, or pairs 0 odds 1, and turn it as binary code to text, nothing… The frequency of the numbers is:
No 3s,4s or 5s and the 0s 6s 7s 9s make up 78% of the code. When a plaintext is converted to hex or dec, there are some numbers that make up that kind of %. If we were looking at hex conversion, we’ll be probably seeing a lot of 6s and 7s (or 4s and 5s for capital letters) than 0s. For Dec numbers I guess the only option is capital letters, since lower case uses three digits for most of it’s letters. Hex could be saffely discarded since common letters like “o” and “n” use letters in the hex code, and we just have numbers. The problem with this is that after the conversion, the first three pair of letters would be repeated, like “eseses”, since the numbers are repeated, so they would need to be rearranged, and after rearranging the numbers and substituing them, we could come up with practically anything. Also tried doing modulo 26 to every pair and substituing by the letter in that position of the alphabet, but nothing comes up, since the 6 first letters are “xixixi” I stopped there. I should have realized that any direct conversion would lead to repeated letters everywhere if nothing else is done. At least a lot of things are discarded
Edit: Just in case somebody finds a cipher for this, the password will probably be Accelerated, since it’s not present in the text while present in the whiteboard.
I searched for ciphers, but most of them only perform some kind of substitution. The only one that might work is SECOM, the one used for code D.
I tried and nothing came out of it, and trying passwords I misstyped what I was trying to write and this came out of the code:
EII7ATTII7TTTTE0TIYTNATI9IEXT1IZNTEY81T0AI505ETA?
It ends in ?, and the text before the code seems to be the start of a question “…continues to fail however, perhaps the leptons have a…”
The password I used was ACCELERATELASERLINEAROPTRONICCANNON (sic)
and also got this:
SEGNENIQISCSBTEISTESPSNTSIINSIEESKIEIECIISINIESSISCTQI?
with LEPTOOPTRONICLINEARITYCANNONN (sic) I changed the N in lepton because in the text with the hashes the “L” word has 4 hashes while the “Can” word has 4 too, when they should be 5 and 3 respectively. But since I don’t know the inner working of SECOM I don’t know if this is just a coincidence, or if the text actually should end in “?”.
Edit: Maybe the repetitions are there because this decodes to the cherokee talk code? The reuse of the codes could be wierd, but this is supossed to be a clue, so it should be expected to be easier than the hex code. Or maybe the clue is the text, who knows…
I know it doesn’t fit in with what it says on the white-board, but try hashing it with “LASEROPTRONICLINEARITYCANNONS”. That accounts for the extra ####'s everywhere.
Good idea, but it didn’t work neither, this is the decoded message
5NO5ZN66ZNEOZNEN14Z1NNPIO AONX4O NRANQANOZYN
I’m starting to think that the encoding is not SECOM. The “?” that appeared in previous attemps was just an error.
There are other ciphers that do something similar. The problem is, they are not implemented in software, or at least, I didn’t find any.
Some of them produce results similar to the code we have. The thing is, if every password had to be checked by hand, unless we’re lucky, this could take hours to solve. Then again, VIC cipher needs a date and we apparently have one, 9 august, the year will be probably 2012, after that Dr Horn was not working anymore on the TAU cannon, the other thing needed for VIC are a song, but any text with at least 20 characters can be used instead of the lyrics, and a personal number, that can go from 1 to 15, so they all can by tried fairly easily.
I’m pretty sure this is coincidence. I’ve been trying to bruteforce it with a ton of passwords, and I’ve been getting a couple that end in “?” as well. For example:
SECOM is a great idea, but every time I look at that number I feel like there’s something more there than just a simple cipher. I mean, for example, depending on how you look at the numbers, you can get a bunch of number combos that repeat:
Storm, if I ever meet you, I’m buying you a beer. Then I’m going to demand you teach me all you know. Then I’ll cry because my brain hurts. Then I’ll buy you another beer.
EDIT:
So, I tried “SEEKOUTCODEHEISWATCHING” and got an interesting result: “TQRATKAEHXTSGKCQOOAJOUKAUTSOOSUPVPGOSJOOUXO”
There are no numbers or spaces or odd symbols. Could be a fluke, especially since the original message was: “Seek code out he is watching.” Trying it that way nets nothing interesting, however.
Hmm . . . a quick check of that result doesn’t turn up many ciphers that match it, and even then it’s a loose connection. Probably just a fluke.
Yes, I think the same, but if it is not a code then what is it? A red herring maybe? Or the code itself is the clue, how it was obtained, maybe we have to remove the characters that are not numbers, I have already tried about a week ago, but maybe the password or the mode was wrong… There are just so many things to try and so many combinations that just calculating the exact figure wouldn’t be a trivial task. I think that the best idea is the one that you just had, bribe stormseeker with beer, with me it would work, maybe with him too
Edit: I tried the VIC with a couple passwords and nothing.That result is propably nothing,SECOM just decodes to words spaces and numbers if i recall correctly, so chances are that even some words appear randomly once you try enough passwords.
Haha, I meant it more as a nod to his superior intelligence, but now that you say that . . . perhaps a bribe would work? Maybe we could all start a pot and see how much it takes to get him to spill the beans . . . .
All codes and no solutions makes Angel a dull boy.
I kept trying with VIC and nothing. I don’t know what else to try, there are not a lot ciphers or codes that use numbers. Somebody posted over the wiki pointing to a monitor that had not been found till now. https://thepizzaisalie.wikia.com/wiki/Monitors#comm-2295
The ip is finnish, unless stormseeker is traveling it’s probably not him.
Hey man, I feel your pain on that VIC thing. Back when I was convinced that Code D was a VIC cipher, I ran about ten thousand different passwords. I was a very, very dull boy.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
