Yeah, we’re so surprised.
I knew there was a reason I got thatfeeling.
Let’s remember, however, my previous point–there are red herrings, and then there are watchdogs. Question is, which one are we dealing with this time? JohnNotJohn disappeared as soon as we called him out, and there were lots of good things in his posts. Now we have error404 who may either be involved or someone playing a joke. I’m starting to get the feeling that the true nature of the ARG is taking shape. We truly are caught up in a war between at least two sides, and it may be a long time (if ever) before we truly figure out who is on what side.
I suspect we will have more information about all these goings-on very, very soon :whistling: 8)
Let’s say we play along and assume 404 isn’t a red herring or such like that, and take everything he’s said for granted. I’d like to mention 404 specifically congratulated @Nonimportantuser when he mentioned he got all the achievements, and went on to tell to take note if any changes occured. Should we all focus at the time on achievements and if they make any changes? Can we check any coding to see if anything checks for all achievements achieved, or even for visiting a certain area?
(Sorry I can’t link to their posts, on mobile right now, but it’s only a few pages back at most.)
EDIT: Forgot to mention, last night I got a weird message from 404:
The title is base64 and translates to “No regrets Mr. Freeman.”
Anybody else get one of these from 404?
There’s only one real person left here, everyone else is @stormseeker.
But seriously, I’m sure 404 is just bored and looking for attention. Have we forgotten @JohnNotJohn already?
He is the Matrix. We are all just pawns.
EDIT: In before the change, but error404 has a QR code for his image that links to a Google Drive folder called “LIES.” It’s currently empty.
Wondering what the deal is here. If it’s just a user messing with us, I’m hoping Storm will tackle it.
I just realized something, the letter U is the 21st letter in the English alphabet.
Update: The QR image in error404’s avatar now links to a full folder: Folder Full of Lies
Can we trust it? All we need right now is another fucking rabbit hole; this better be legit.
I hope it is, as we definitely need it.
That grilledpizza image looks like a visual representation of a sorting algorithm before the sorting.
That part has actually already been solved. It’s binary, and translates to:
tfexirklcrkzfejpflnfekyvGZQQR
Which, when shifted, translates into:
congratulationsyouwonthePIZZA
It’s just a copy of some of the files from Stormseeker’s website.
Unless 404 can provide something of substance, rather than cryptic posts with novice ARG-like puzzles, then there’s not even anything to trust.
110% agreed.
What about Number Sequence.txt?
What about it? They’re easy to make, here’s one of mine:
878308822004840026535455326501433289367
I think he meant what does it decode to?
I’m curious as well since I don’t really recall it, or was that something a long time ago and not on the wiki?
It doesn’t decode to anything, unless you think )X(SI)(DC2)(S0)[(US)(TAB)(S0)L(SI)(DC2)(EM)(SI)(NAK) means something.
Well, I slapped a google search on it and got this ASCII Codes page back. Take that if it’s worth anything, as I feel it would be better someone else trying to read it than me, who has little idea of what that’s all about.
I’d like to turn the attention of this thread back to the “21 into 1” theories…
@CPU recently hypothesized 21 is “EP-0021”, so I looked through the Whiteboards again for EP-0021 references.
This board mentions EP-0021, and has some red text in the corner: “Contact Dr Forman about the phased optronic lenses. ext 384 Biodome”.
Notice that the extension is 384, or what would be 8 bytes larger than our 376 byte Halos file. If the Halos file was 384 bytes long, it would be a proper length for an AES encrypted file.
Also remember that the Halos.txt decode was followed by “[End Transmission]|¬[ABORTIVE.]”, suggesting the end of the file is in fact truncated.
So what are phased optronic lenses? A Google search has only a single result, a post on this forum from @stormseeker.
I know several of us are using different decryption techniques, so does anyone want to test “phased optronic lenses” (and variants) as a passphrase?
Tried it to no avail, but of course that’s only using the encryption methods we’re suspicious of, plus no additional 8 bytes.
The missing 8 bytes shouldn’t matter in most cases. It will likely throw an error but give you a partial decryption.
If your software doesn’t give you a partial decryption on bad length, try using this version with 8 null bytes added on the end.