Interesting. Remember the “seek Code out” hint? Perhaps it wasn’t in relation to Storm’s alias on the forums (why would he want to give himself away?) but rather that whiteboard. Hmmm . . . .
EDIT: Storm probably doesn’t visit this thread at all, anymore–too depressing || . For 2 years and some change we have consistently let him down. WE ARE NOT WORTHY!
Very interesting. That’s also one of the two whiteboards I mentioned above (“Steals it”).
Additionally, it’s literally the only whiteboard that does not contain either formulas or drawings of (parts of) alien lifeforms. If you don’t count a single, very simple equation (V = ƒλ), there’s one more: the only whiteboard we know to contain ARG hints. There is literally no use to it other than story building. [edit:] Okay, maybe there is one: decoration. But unlike all the others, it seems out of place in a research environment. It’s more at home in a management office. So it doesn’t seem to have an in-game purpose, or at least one that makes sense in the location it’s in. [/edit] We know (from the steam release stream) that looking closely at the details in level design is one of the goals of the ARG, so this fits quite well in that pattern.
Oh and I don’t think it’s actually relevant, but if you add up the three numbers in the filename (“C2a4x_labboard15”) into one number… you know the drill.
There’s some things on that board that I don’t get.
Basically I’d like to see a word by word transcription of the text on the board, and an explanation per section. Anyone? xD
Some thoughts for keys based on this board:
"TEN PERCENT OF [THE] BUDGET’ (90% - 80% = 10% being spent on pizzas)
“HOLD THE ANCHOV[Y][IE]S” / “CANCEL THE ANCHOV[Y][IE]S”
Remember, the LOL cannon key for the SECOM cipher was written very tiny on the whiteboard, so I would expect something similar here.
EDIT: Storm noted in his PM that hyper-encryption is probably out of the picture, but I did stumble across something interesting whilst researching it. Probabilistic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (PCMOS) technology was developed by a Krishna Palem; the PCMOS was used to demonstrate a “highly energy-efficient implementation of a hyper-encryption chip.” Considering that niobium can be used as a superconductor, is it possible that our HALOS is not an operating system, but instead a type of something-oxide superconductor? Perhaps discovering what HALOS actually stands for is how we might determine our key, or give us further clues as to what the encryption method actually is.
EDIT 2: Tried a bunch of other keys derived from that specific whiteboard, to no avail. Seems that I am running into the same problems as before: a) I have no idea what method the code is encrypted, or whether or not an IV exists; and b) much like the SECOM cipher required a specific tool to crack (because the one we were previously using was busted), it’s hard for me to tell if my CrypTool setup is even beneficial to cracking the code. There are so many options that covering all the bases is tough–I could have stumbled upon the key and not even known. Frustrating, to say the least.
Try ‘thepizza’ , that’s 8 bytes and has come up more than once
So, this is on multiple boards (I think), but it is also on the board in the Taco Shack:
[attach=4013,none,377][/attach]
[attach=4014,none,441][/attach]
Maybe it’s just for fun, but could that “DES-MART” be a hint that we need to use DES? At this point, I’m willing to see anything as a clue. I’m still about 99.99% sure that our answer lies with DES or DES-X.
hello guys! i just registered to the forum (im following you a bit long) to post this link that redirect to a false error page, but if you click on the image, it reloads to another image… my point is that the name of some of the images may be part of an encripted code or something… pd: sorry for my english, its not my principal language.
I think thats been proven irrelevant before, I’m afraid. Sorry Mxbar
That is just an Error 404 page, it will give different picture every time (since there are hundreds of em). Pretty sure that there is nothing hidden in them.
I’ve never participated in or posted about the ARG before, but I’m posting now because I’m curious whether this might be significant.
Has anyone seen this? I ask because it doesn’t seem to have gotten any attention, I haven’t seen anyone at all mention it anywhere, and it only has four followers (and one of them is me).
The most recent post in particular is interesting; it seems to be G-Man’s “Endgame” speech in another language (whether constructed or real I don’t know).
That seems to be Uzbek, according to Google Translate.
Of course, Google doesn’t do a great job with the translation, but the intention is clear.
If you try to save the image that was posted it’s file name comes up as “B_hZ441UcAApIz_” is this not similar to the ones found on the KXBM website?
also this is the full translated bit
ORIGINAL - Gordon Freeman tanada - juda , xavf kostyumda yoki. Men sizning qurol sizni tahoratxonadan erkinlik oldi. Ularning aksariyati hukumat mulki bo’lgan.
Kostyumi kelsak, men siz uni kasb ayting, deb o’ylayman. Borderworld, Xen, … vaqti bo’lgani uchun, bizning nazorat sizga rahmat hisoblanadi. Ish juda xavfli bir parcha siz erda muvaffaq ; Men ta’sirlandim.
Men, bu erda janob Freeman emasman uchun harakat qilamiz. Men … Ish beruvchilar uchun xizmat tavsiya, ular sizga ish taklif menga vakolatli quilgan. ularsiz cheksiz imkoniyatlarga ega ekanligini men bilan qo’shilaman. Men sizga nima quilshni qaror gabul har qanday muammo bor olaman kutmang shunday Siz o’zingizni bir hal qiluvchi odam isbotladi ayting. agar qiziqarli bo’lsa faqat portali qadam va men ha deb o’tadi. Aks holda, shuningdek, men sizga faqat omon ayting nima so’ng siz g’olib hech quanday imkoniyat … juda bir kuchsizlanish bor jang taqdim etishi mumkin tanlash uchun vaqt.
TRANSLATED
Gordon Freeman body suit or risk . Weapons of relieving you of your freedom .
Most of them are owned by the government .
As for the suit , I tell you , I think .
Borderworld , Xen … Thank you for our time .
Managed a very dangerous piece of your business ;
I was impressed .
I am here , Mr. Freeman will try to help .
I recommend the service to employers , they authorized me to offer you the job Quill .
They are limited opportunities I agree with that .
I Quill decision Gabon have any problem with what you can expect so you tell yourself proved to be a decisive man .
If you are interesting only portal step , and I will say yes .
Otherwise , well , what I tell you to not only survive then you have no chance Quan won the fight … so there is a weakness may provide time to choose .
EDIT : It is indeed the speech Gman gives at the end of HL, the translation does not do it justice.
This is obviously the end speech from Half Life 1. I’m not sure this is official though, we may as well look into though whilst other people are trying the crack the 752 with DES-X
Dont think there is much to it, but with it being a image it seemed rather strange, but when you take the twitter word count in to consideration it makes more sense to post a image.
Wow, so it is a real language! How interesting… With it being simply a foreign-language translation of an in-game speech, and containing no new information, I imagine it’s probably a mere Easter egg, but my mind is now at ease knowing I’ve put it out there. And knowing what language it is. XD Thanks for the responses, guys! And…good luck. 
The filename is entirely irrelevant. It’s just random characters with which Twitter stores images. I can’t imagine this tweet being very important unless there’s something hidden in the translation, or maybe it’s pointing out something should be translated to or from Uzbek?
If it ends up being relevant to the ARG at all, I figure that would probably be case.
A similar board can be found in office complex. Another thing that i noticed was TVs with static in various places throughout office complex.
I’m still new to the forums and don’t know much about programming and codes so maybe someone here can help me learn more about codes and programming and other programs that we might use here.
For a short summary of what we’ve used before, I suggest looking at the first post in this topic (it’s outdated, but mostly correct for the beginning), and the wiki (even though it’s a bit of a mess right now).
Other than that: not much real programming has been done, as in, so far we have not written any programs by hand (as far as I know), except implementations of encryption algorithms that did not seem to be the answer.
What we have done is use pre-made tools. Some of these tools (for windows at least) include:
[list][*]ASCII85 decoder (used to decode the HALOS.txt file, resulting in the 752 hex code)
As for codes / ciphers / encodings used: several so far, actually. These include:
One more thing: Stormseeker, the guy behind the ARG, has dropped various hints regarding the code / cipher / encryption progression. In particular, he wrote this in a PM to @Gunsrequiem a long time ago. Now, clearly, as it was not yet known at the time he was actually stormseeker, he was pretending to not know exactly what was going on. As such, he may have intentionally given some misinformation to keep us from suspecting anything, or keep us busy. As he said, “[the HALOS.txt file] is a holding puzzle, designed to allow time to construct further aspects of the ARG or work on whatever is behind their NDA”. Still, it’s unlikely he intentionally set us on a trail of red herrings with no valid information somewhere in there, and it’s pretty much the only thing we’ve got to hold on to right now… except his recent remarks on the steam release stream. (For a transcript and some analysis, check out this post I made a while back.)
And so, we’ve come to where we are now: still no clue on how to decrypt HALOS.txt, storm’s suggestion we look in the game for more clues (but nobody has any idea where), plus not one but two confusing websites (actually… three). Although only kxbm.net currently seems to be ARG related, as localdesertsingles.com simply points to the BM website, and bmrf.us only displays the BM:Steam release video. The previously existing terminal.bmrf.us is also dead (terminal.blackmesasource.com isn’t, though!). Stormseeker recently updated his own website, and I’m not counting that as “confusing” because it seems like we have a relatively solid grasp on that, but perhaps we’re missing stuff on there as well.
“Good luck!”
Wow, I had no idea that brief interview existed. First and foremost, listening to Storm on there gave me shivers–we are clearly dealing with a genius (the entire development team is packed with them, to be quite frank), and doing anything less than giving the ARG the intense due diligence it deserves is going to continue to land us right where we are today. The fact that Storm specifically mentioned those gents from Cambridge is actually very welcoming–it means we are dealing with a cipher that can ONLY be cracked by key-forcing, which suggests we are on the right track with the ciphers we have previously mentioned.
Remember how Storm was constantly reminding us to go over the story? He mentioned in that video that bits of Dr. Horn’s story are strewn throughout Black Mesa, which suggests to me that we need to go through this Steam release version of the game and build the story from scratch. I am currently in another playthrough, so I am keeping a notepad by my computer to make note of anything I come across.
EDIT: The bottom of this page briefly covers the “Superbus Via Inscientiae” double-helix images we have been finding next to the “The Pizza is a LIE” messages. It notes that “proud by way of ignorance” is what it roughly translates to, which would give us a 21-character key (“21 into 1”). I’m starting to wonder if there are two encryption methods, and we therefore need two keys–that “21 into 1” may simply mean that 21 characters go into 1 of the keys. This will be extremely difficult to crack, however, as we will have to take each result of decryption and re-run it through the same types of decryption methods–and without knowing the order of the keys, nor what the keys may actually be.
I feel like there must be some kind of “AHA!” moment in terms of discovering the key/method, as it doesn’t seem in the vein of the ARG to simply churn out endless reiterations of the same thing until we hit on something. If the answer truly lies within the game, then I would really hope there is some “lightbulb moment” that accompanies the solution, otherwise it’s just senseless attacks trying every key possible.
Ive just listened to the interview he did and something got me thinking. He mentions QE and Surface Tension which are levels he has worked on. He also mentions he’s added more in to the game. So there probably is more to find.
EDIT: He also mentions how QE is deffinatly cut down. I wonder if they are going to release that at some stage, maybe when we have figured all of this out?
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.
