Fascinating story, but that article reads like the journalist took troll stories from 4c as sources. Seriously, whoever wrote this appears to be clueless.<p>> "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"<p><i>Excuse</i> me?<p>> "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"<p>Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.
Color me skeptical, but it seems like bullshit to me.<p>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.<p><a href="http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com" rel="nofollow">http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com</a> doesn't seem to have any activity from more than 6 days ago.<p>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.<p>I'm sure the puzzles are engaging, but this looks like fake buzz.
>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.<p>Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization."<p>I didn't do much detective work on <i>I Love Bees</i>, 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:<p>"Watcha doing?"<p>"Oh, just waiting on a phone call."<p>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.
<a href="http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_2_(2013)" rel="nofollow">http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_2...</a><p><pre><code> "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.'"
</code></pre>
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...
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.<p>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.
Whenever this comes up, I'm reminded of this series:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus</a><p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/</a><p>Very popular with the teens in my family with fantasies of being whisked away 'cause they're just so damn smart.
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.<p>Why even use a clever dommainname? An IP address would work just as well.
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.
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".<p>Someone has to say loudly "who gives a shit about this crap" and just move on.
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).<p><a href="http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest" rel="nofollow">http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest</a>
<i>"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."</i><p>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.
I am apparently using TOR wrong.<p>> "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"
Here is full story of 2013 hunt and all the puzzles: <a href="http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_1_%282013%29" rel="nofollow">http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_1...</a>
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)?<p>That said, this does seem like it's a bit, erm, <i>big</i>, 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?
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.
Parts of this sound like Valve's crazy Potato Fools Day. <a href="http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title=Valve_ARG_Wiki" rel="nofollow">http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title...</a> It involved slow-scan TV images encoded in sound files, and Mayan calendar decoding etc.
I saw this years ago on 4chan.<p>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.)<p>Who cares, basically.
Is that going again?<p>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.<p>It was strange how the pictures got put up all around the world at the same time, though.