Are we absolutely sure we’ve searched every nook and cranny of Stormseeker’s chapters? And has anyone ever brought up the fact that Stormseeker could have had someone put part of the ARG in one of their chapters instead of every clue being in his chapters? Just a thought, I’m not much help with this ARG at all because I know nothing about hex codes and encoding and whatnot.
Well, to be fair, we don’t even know if it is encrypted, it seems encrypted, but maybe we can’t decode it because it’s not meant to be decoded.
All the chapters have been searched for clues. At the start of the ARG people started searching like crazy for clues and hidden stuff. It seems that the ARG has become web based. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use things from the game, but if it does, it is going above our heads.
We now there are tons of clocks and that the time seems to advance from chapter to chapter. We also know that some signs in QE are mistaken regarding the names of the labs. There are pizzas, biodome signs and “the pizza is a lie” scribbles everywhere or nearly everywhere, you need to use noclip to see them, I think there’s a list on the ARG wiki, I’m not sure.
The problem with the ARG is, if the 752 is not encrypted, we don’t know what it is, if it is encrypted, we don’t have a clue about the password. If we can’t come up with something new, either new passwords or and idea about what the 752code is if it is not encrypted, then we will never solve it. But everything that made sense to the people trying to solve it has been tried, even things that didn’t make a lot of sense were tried. I’m completely out of ideas.
On stormseeker’s profile I asked if he could talk to Dr. Horn about eating lunch with me sometime. He said “I’m sure he’ll be around soon.” Could this mean hints, new clue, or me overanalyzing?
Ooh, maybe some progress?
BTW, Stormseeker is in a rather interesting group called SSARG
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/ssarg - I wonder who are those other people in this group and could they stand behind the “pizza is a lie” arg along with StormSeeker.
And seems like Stormseeker is beta-testing End Of The Line update for TF2, so I might suspect this is not the last ARG we see from him.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/EOTLTesting
Meanwhile the beta testing of the Black Mesa is running full speed after a few months of rest
SSARG. Yeah, StormSeeker ARG. I think we’re getting close, if he made a dedicated ARG group.
Oh god, I don’t know if you were serious or joking, but I really laughed at the “we’re getting close” 
But that group… that group is probably a clue or a redherring. I only recognise stormseeker and gruntfuttock, but two of the members, IVDennis and Monster, are steam lvl 0 and have private profiles, that could mean that the accounts were created by stormseeker himself.
IVDennis=Initialization Vector Dennis?
I don’t know anymore, I mean, maybe they are stormseeker’s friends, and they are messing around, so they created an account that starts with IV to see if we would notice and loose time with it. Or maybe it’s a coincidence and that name does not mean anything. Is anything anywhere on the ARG that points that the IV is “Dennis”? I don’t recall everything but I think that there isn’t.
Yeah, it was a joke, lol.
The correct route in this case will also probably be the simplest. Since we have been grasping at straws for the past year and more, all we have is a collage of loose ends that is probably way more complicated than it needs to be. I can’t claim to know how Storm’s mind works, but I would expect that there is a very deliberate set of clues that we should be able to discover if we start in the right spot and stay in the same ballpark.
Just my $.02, for the time being.
Besides the code itself, it seems there is no place to stand being sure that you’re on the right track. We could stick to block ciphers, but we still need to figure out the password, and there’s no way to narrow down the candidates, which is basicaly any word that exist. “The password will probably be hinted at, perhaps in a less than obvious way.” Yeah, any word that can be related to any of the clues/red herrings… :[
On the thread about BM on facepunch, somebody said about a year ago ‘When your ARG gets nowhere after about a week, they generally push it up in some way. Not months, that means they’ve clearly done something to obfuscate the next step that only makes sense to themselves.’ I don’t know if this is the case, but certainly, the only ‘help’ we did get was Tempus Omnia Revelant page, and it has not been very useful. On the other puzzle that took some time to solve, Code D, he spelled out the algorithm, literally.
Another point that I do not understand, we’re supossed to write the story, because it might help, but how? The information that we use on the story it’s either something that we already know, or something that we make up and therefore cannot hold the key to the puzzle, in any of the two scenarios I can’t see how it would help.
I’m trying not to rant, but this might in fact be taken as a rant, I understand that if the puzzle was too easy or stormseeker gave us the solution it would not be fun, but at this point I think that everybody will agree that we need a clue of some sort.
I’m posting the story I’ve written long time ago, just in case its really something that would help, but English is not my native language, so it’s probably a very low quality literature piece, and there’s no way it is complete since there’s not enough information on Halos Project, I personally like more the story that Guns wrote on the wiki.
To lighten the mood:
As to the ARG at hand, I don’t believe we have tried this line of reasoning:
Dante’s Inferno has historically been extremely popular amongst artists. For instance, Botticelli’s Chart of Hell is a pretty grim rendition of Dante’s work. This site provides a bit more information about Dante and his work: https://www.worldofdante.org/botticelli_detail.html
Anyway, the reason that I bring this up is that there is an obvious and direct link to Dante’s Inferno; we are given a sense of this through the three Latin phrases on the Tempus page:
Tempus omnia revela[n]t
Vox populi vox Dei
Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi
That last is extremely crucial, not only because it includes Latin nuances but also because it is a direct link to Inferno. The Wikipedia article has some good info on this.
All of this said, I have two hypotheses:
- We are meant to devise something from an image by combining it with the hex code; perhaps a famous work like the Chart of Hell. I say this because the image that was posted on the Tempus page has writing and scribbles on it–perhaps this is Storm’s subtle way of saying that we need to make markings on a picture?
- The second theory, and one that perhaps we have already attempted (and I think may have been suggested at one point), is to take the decimal output of the hex code and do something with it; possibly it corresponds to some text or could be read like a map?
179 43 0 58 53 186 221 102 87 124 36 193 79 201 25 6 67 70 209 49 167 197 75 184 47 254 3 224 34 97 87 119 36 121 35 220 33 246 44 212 24 46 145 195 178 103 181 69 171 202 237 175 2 97 81 13 78 234 30 135 205 51 199 199 113 49 48 156 196 40 14 180 36 61 17 84 240 68 249 207 98 150 217 191 247 57 126 67 144 152 127 230 50 3 218 13 228 2 120 179 165 79 93 220 105 117 250 4 247 73 132 158 26 98 89 90 159 99 11 7 149 145 61 224 21 62 58 172 56 140 69 251 157 133 12 254 145 53 65 214 192 131 152 242 200 131 50 168 47 223 0 40 29 98 252 220 79 231 228 106 233 12 81 197 200 6 180 17 100 227 58 185 44 150 134 46 6 139 12 22 192 153 144 184 56 26 0 218 121 21 182 127 228 162 15 89 155 15 27 109 72 25 19 199 185 83 140 238 99 145 68 244 21 97 186 146 228 254 117 29 30 36 44 216 143 81 214 149 81 152 135 19 106 124 21 170 189 123 64 4 73 34 1 65 48 169 31 23 15 102 204 179 193 57 70 58 126 144 154 55 170 134 63 178 120 5 252 151 49 192 156 140 121 6 126 121 147 10 64 101 70 178 76 154 98 155 38 194 206 42 75 228 143 88 154 55 95 235 115 31 196 171 34 92 17 132 140 248 158 41 31 148 113 51 151 12 6 54 24 71 74 137 40 1 237 214 143 84 105 140 94 91 80 103 70 246 118 90 111 127 18 37 222 164 218 17 64 254 182 15 101 7 69 36 28 105 54 149 136 61 203 33 230 251 254 251 184 90 41 145 148 128 54 165 43 93
Something like this, perhaps: Book cipher
Anyway, just trying to keep the mojo flowing. :freeman:
nice post!
i was thiking after we have tryed to decyber it so many times maybe its the wrong way, maybe the hex code itzelf if the key and one of those 3 latin scentenses is the source that needs tobe decryped, if its used in stream for example only the first or last 32 bytes of the hexcode is a key, the rest could just be real random bytes to increase the antropy
Hm.
Yeah, this is about where I become absolutely useless, lol.
I don’t really know how to do this, we would need to have an image given to us, if not, it’s impossible, since we would need the exact same image file or the binary data that makes the image would be different. Or do you mean to superimpose an image to the code, something like drawing the grilled pizza on top of the code and only take the portion of the code that is under the white triangles? Maybe the pizza model, and just take the code that is over the pepperoni. We would need to know the size at which we must represent the code, or the relation size to the image, but it would be theoretically doable. Now, with the information that we have, I have no idea how to proceed.
Read text like map? Do you mean a regular codebook? For 144 47 12 we either take page 144, line 47, word 12, or the word number 144, then the number 47, then the 12, or we count 144, then we count 47, then we count 12 more…
I’ve tried this last method, since taking pages or lines would be impossible for the zeroes, I’ve tried in one of the english translations of Inferno, but there are at least three of them, and then the original in italian. I only got gibberish, but there are many ways to use a regular book as a codebook, so we cannot say it is not the way to decode it. Nevertheless, I would expect something pointing to this even if it was not aparent till we looked specifically for it. Everything but the “How do you know this has anything to do with encryption?” points towards a block cipher, the code frequency distribution, the fact that it is Hexadecimal and the size of the code.
By the way, Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi is not latin, is just gibberish, not meant to be translated or to make sense. Those words are spoken by Nimrod, a giant doomed to not be able to speak intelligibly due to his involvement in the construction of the Babel Tower.
By the way, there’s a puzzle that we never got to solve without a bruteforce attack, the giordano brunno quote. How was it supossed to be solved? I did not find any reference whatsoever to Giordano Bruno or the quote. Was it meant to be bruteforced? Maybe if we knew how it was supossed to be solved we would find the way to solve this one.
Welcome to the team, you’re going to fit seamlessly 
I am currently working on compiling a timeline of most of the clues and messages we have received and drawing a type of concept map/flow chart to highlight key points and potentially show how the multitude of hints and topics are interrelated.
I did have a quick thought–we might need to add the “1001085139140914” from Codes A-D to the end of the decimal form of the 752 Hex Code to create a 768-character code. It seems silly that it would only be used for the password and nothing else. We’d end up with this (added characters in bold):
179 43 0 58 53 186 221 102 87 124 36 193 79 201 25 6 67 70 209 49 167 197 75 184 47 254 3 224 34 97 87 119 36 121 35 220 33 246 44 212 24 46 145 195 178 103 181 69 171 202 237 175 2 97 81 13 78 234 30 135 205 51 199 199 113 49 48 156 196 40 14 180 36 61 17 84 240 68 249 207 98 150 217 191 247 57 126 67 144 152 127 230 50 3 218 13 228 2 120 179 165 79 93 220 105 117 250 4 247 73 132 158 26 98 89 90 159 99 11 7 149 145 61 224 21 62 58 172 56 140 69 251 157 133 12 254 145 53 65 214 192 131 152 242 200 131 50 168 47 223 0 40 29 98 252 220 79 231 228 106 233 12 81 197 200 6 180 17 100 227 58 185 44 150 134 46 6 139 12 22 192 153 144 184 56 26 0 218 121 21 182 127 228 162 15 89 155 15 27 109 72 25 19 199 185 83 140 238 99 145 68 244 21 97 186 146 228 254 117 29 30 36 44 216 143 81 214 149 81 152 135 19 106 124 21 170 189 123 64 4 73 34 1 65 48 169 31 23 15 102 204 179 193 57 70 58 126 144 154 55 170 134 63 178 120 5 252 151 49 192 156 140 121 6 126 121 147 10 64 101 70 178 76 154 98 155 38 194 206 42 75 228 143 88 154 55 95 235 115 31 196 171 34 92 17 132 140 248 158 41 31 148 113 51 151 12 6 54 24 71 74 137 40 1 237 214 143 84 105 140 94 91 80 103 70 246 118 90 111 127 18 37 222 164 218 17 64 254 182 15 101 7 69 36 28 105 54 149 136 61 203 33 230 251 254 251 184 90 41 145 148 128 54 165 43 93 1001085139140914
I should have the entire timeline and chart up by late tonight.
EDIT: I noticed that when I convert the 752-character Hex code to ASCII, I get an ellipse in there. I doubt this means anything, but perhaps some of you code experts can make some sense of this (if there’s any sense to be made):
³ :5ºÝfW|$ÁOÉCFÑ1§ÅK¸/þà"aWw$y#Ü!ö,Ô.‘ògµE«Êí¯aQ Nê‡Í3ÇÇq10œÄ(´$=TðDùÏb–Ù¿÷9~C˜æ2Ú äx³¥O]Üiuú÷I„žbYZŸc •‘=à>:¬8ŒEû[COLOR=‘Lime’]… þ‘5AÖÀƒ˜òȃ2¨/ß(büÜOçäjé QÅÈ´dã:¹,–†.‹ À™¸8Úy¶ä¢Y›mHǹSŒîc‘Dôaº’äþu$,ØQÖ•Q˜‡j|ª½{@I"A0©f̳Á9F:~š7ª†?²xü—1ÀœŒy~y“ @eF²Lšb›&ÂÎ*KäXš7_ësÄ«"„Œøž)²q3— 6GJ‰(íÖTiŒ^[PgFövZo%Þ¤Ú@þ¶eE$i6•ˆ=Ë!æûþû¸Z)‘”€6¥ ]
I’m no expert, but that’s 85 in hex, 133 in dec, … in ascii. It’s no more special that the dollar symbol, unless I’m missing something and it has a meaning within the ARG.
Primadog suggested the book cipher idea a while back. I looked into it back then and found an article here with working source code. I tried it, but as I suspected, the cipher text it produced was a string of integers, where many of the numbers were larger than 255. In the test I did, I believe the largest number was a four digit number. I tried interpreting these numbers as 16-bit numbers so that each number was represented by two bytes. But the problem I ran into then was that I got an overrepresentation of byte values in the lower end of the frequency distribution (in the range of 0-50). The 752 hex code, on the other hand, has a relatively uniform frequency distribution.
It is possible that the range of numbers will depend on the book used, but I think it would be difficult to find a book that results in numbers that form a uniform frequency distribution. I would be much easier to combine this cipher with some kind of compression scheme in order to increase the resulting entropy.
It think it was just meant to be solved the way it was solved: by using a crib, which is a presumed piece of the original plaintext. It is probably why the word “PIZZAS” was included in the message, and purposefully placed exactly where it was placed in the message. By applying the crib at the right position, you reveal a piece of the running key. The word “PIZZAS” matched the word “PEOPLE” in the key. From there, you just use trial and error to figure out more words/letters, until you have enough of the key so that it can be googled in order to discover the full key. There is a running key solver here that simplifies this crib solving process.
However, if the key had been something obscure or unknown that couldn’t be found by googling parts of it, it would have been much more difficult to solve it, if not impossible.
It would make more sense (to me anyway) to convert the 1001085139140914 number to hex, resulting in the following 8 bytes represented in hex:
00 03 8E 7B 4C 1B C1 32
Or just interpret the number as if it already is a string of hex digits:
10 01 08 51 39 14 09 14
If we add either of these 8 byte strings to the beginning or to the end of the code, we then have a code consisting of 384 bytes, which could fit a block size of 128 bits (16 bytes). Or, maybe the bytes were used as an IV or a salt.
Yep, I’m lost.
I get the feeling that this step will be important. I think it makes a lot of sense to have those 16 numbers/characters in there, seeing as how they were entirely “random”. This is probably a second “gate” puzzle that Storm had thought up as a holding segment (much like the SECOM puzzle) and the other IRC puzzles were simply thrown in to add to the ARG. You’ll notice in the timeline I’m going to post in a couple of hours here that IRC puzzles 5 and 6 were solved within a matter of 3 days after I posted the solution to the SECOM cipher and the link to the Grilled Pizza puzzle.
EDIT: Discovered another Latin reference whilst composing the chart that I had previously overlooked: Giordano Bruno from IRC Clue #5
But that would mean that Stormseeker had already prepared the 752 hex code before he put the four codes in the game (which of course is entirely possible).
I think creating a timeline of everything is a great idea. Maybe it will help us see a bigger picture.
When documenting ARG-related events, I think it is important to make a record of the dates/timestamps when things happened, so that things can be put into the proper context later on, when some time has passed. That is why I made an effort to put dates wherever I could on the wiki pages.