f13.net

I was sifting through my normal link spam today, and someone ended up sending me to:
http://www.thew0rld.com/ - I figured it was some lame hell.com ripoff, and on a hunch I viewed the source. Here's what I found:



I've been playing with it a bit, but I don't have the brain to really crack it by hand. Any ex-military geeks want to give it a shot with me?

I don't think it's a straight cipher.  Maybe a cipher plus every word is backwards...?  That looks a little more promising.

The DD is what sticks out to me the most.  Assuming this coded word isn't some initial, you'd have to wonder what it could be.  

Possiblities that come to mind:
1) DD stands for it's own word, in which case the code becomes very hard to crack
2) We're only meant to evaluate one of the D's.  Maybe the first or last letter in a group is supposed to be dropped.

AH
CI
DD
SB
SF
SX
TF

All the two-letter 'words'.

the presence of 'DD' would indicate it's not a simple substitution.  I can't think of any two letter english words with the same letter.  It's either a progressive substitution, or something more complex.

--
Alkiera

The 0s are also interesting.  I suspect that they translate into punctuation, which for one wildly exciting instant made me think that the code involved "one place to the right on the keyboard", but that seems like a dead end.

dont think each of those groups of letters translates into an English word.  You see a lot of 3 letter words in a row, that seems weird, and of all the 3 letter words, none are repeated, which is also a little unusual, you would expect to see either 2 of 'and', 'you' or 'the' most likely in a sentence that size.

It would be too easy anyway if that were the case.

It can be English, sort of.  Remember that the message is about following the instructions, and as such may contain things like a web or email address.  www has 3 of the same letter in a row, for example.

Also, the thew0rld.jpg picture contains leet speak, and so does the teaser above the cryptography, so it's possible that he used pwn, u, r, and other combinations like that in the message.

Counting spaces, there are 28 symbols used.  I'm inclined to add a space at the end of every line, and count that as part of the cypher (which seems to be written in the normal left-aligned paragraph format), but I didn't yet.

There are 2 0's.  Least often used character.  Most often used is the space (no reason why "space" can't be a letter, and have A for example be a space).

could be numbers to.

Thinking of l33t speak and the "DD", the only thing that comes to mind is "GG".

Donno if that helps.

KK?

I don't think its a direct translation from letter to letter.

Too many letters are doubled immediately, but never repeatedly.
UU
QQ
CC
AA
RR
BB
FF
JJ
DD

Those are all in the code, some at the beginning of the word if the blanks mark word beginnings and endings. To my knowledge, common english words don't begin with two like letters. There are exceptions like eerie or Aaron, but not many, and they are all vowels. So if that's the case, QQ is definetly a vowel if its direct, but I doubt it is.

Hello. i've lurked alot but stuff like this just rules.

I think we might need to entertain the possiblity that we're lookinga t something that's doubly encrypted. The bulk of double letters causes me to think the encryption has been run through at least two ciphers. That makes this incredibly tough, but I don't think it's impossible. Afterall someone wrote it.

You might be on to something with the "KK" double letter, though. Perhaps we could try to isolate a "KK THX" and work from there.

It could be a couple of different ciphers and still have double letters like that.  Viginere ciphers, permutation ciphers and block ciphers come immediately to mind.  I'll bust out my codes and ciphers book (read as Modern Applied Algebra) over the weekend and take a crack at some statisical analysis of it but chances are I will need to get access to MAPLE and some serious study and review if its any sort of serious cypher and not just some dingbat messing around.

Fortunately it doesn't resemble RSA, DES or AES (or ElGamal) otherwise you could forget ever breaking it in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of effort.

Yes, I fooled around with it for a while thinking it might be an Enigma code.  But without a key I had no luck just guessing.

The fact that each line has 26 or less letters might be relevant.

Bruce

Yeah, I was thinking enigma also, just because thats the kind of thing people who post stuff like that tend to think is neat.  Maybe after dinner I'll spend an hour or so fooling with it instead of playing video games.

even if you have an enigma machine you can't even crack it without a key... although I guess there might be a clue as to what the key is

Still no luck here. A few other friends have been playing with it as well but to no avail. One of them has been writing some code trying to brute force the thing, but I'm too much of a purist to want to go digital on something that's probably a lot more simple than I think it is.

There are 3 rotors with inputs that are permutations of 0 - 25 and a reflector with a set of disjoint 2-cycles in an Enigma machine.  The rotors need merely be set to the proper initial setting, checking every possible initial rotor setting is easy with modern computing power, the difficult part is determining the set of disjoint 2-cycles on the rotor but a good algorithm and some CPU cycles can solve that problem too.  Don't give the enigma too much credit its hardly "can't even crack it without a key".

The algorithm used to create codes for an enigma is very well understood, infact I have a copy of one, but I'm sure you could google it up in a few minutes.  The kicker about the enigma is that you decode it exactly as you encode it, so if you wanted to write a quick algorithm to create random permutations 0-25 and sets of values for the reflector you could start your computer chugging away at it tonight.

Anyway, I passed this little bit of ciphertext on to a professor I know who teaches classes at the local U on ciphers and codebreaking to see what he has to say on it.

So cool what happens when you present a challenge to a bunch of computer nerds ;-)

(Oh, and I have no idea.)

Well, I tried some internet-based Enigma programs but didn't have any success.  Couldn't find any that would actually do a brute-force decode.

Bruce

I'm just guessing but I don't think it's an enigma code. That's too easy, because so many people would know to look for it. Whatever this guy is hiding, I hope it's worth the work.

Call me cynical, but I'd wager a sack of donuts it's just a hash of gibberish to screw with people's heads :)

I tend to agree. "It's signed by Cypher Griefer".

Someone I sent this link to said he found another page with more source to look at but he won't tell me how to find it because I'm 'not l33t enough' and he 'wants teh pr1z3s' for himself.

This thing succeeds in turning everyone into riddle toting script kiddies.

Ph33r!

http://www.thew0rld.com/clue/

MAYBE THIS WILL BE EASIER...

-------------------------------------------------------
F M C M   O K E M A   X F M   J M M Q M V S
Z W X   T   X F T V Q   D K W C M   L R R   R L E M
A K   D K W   G M X   L   O R W M
X F M   V L E M   K I   X F M   G L E M

T X A   Z M M V   A F T I X M S   L V S   X J T A X M S
R T Q M   L   B T G M V M C M
L V S   X C L I I T O   T A   G C K J T V G   A T V O M
T X A   F T S T V G   X F M C M

H W A X   K V M   A F T Z Z K R M X F
Z W X   E K C M   X F L V   K V M   Q M D
X K   E L Q M   T X   F L C S M C
A X T R R   R M A A   F L C S   X F L V   X F C M M
--------------------------------------------------------

10.15.04.CYPHER

--------------------------------------------------------
HERE COMES THE WEEKEND
BUT I THINK YOURE ALL LAME
SO YOU GET A CLUE
THE NAME OF THE GAME

ITS BEEN SHIFTED AND TWISTED
LIKE A VIGENERE
AND TRAFFIC IS GROWING SINCE
ITS HIDING THERE

JUST ONE SHIBBOLETH
BUT MORE THAN ONE KEY
TO MAKE IT HARDER
STILL LESS HARD THAN THREE
--------------------------------------------------------

"Shibboleth" is Judges 12:5.  It's a "codeword" in the Bible.

Bruce

I'm gonna work on this over the weekend, but I'm pretty sure the first step is removing all the vowels and using VLY = THE as a base to work from. There seems to be enough of the V, L, and Y through the piece that this may seem correct.

This is just cursory. By noon tomorrow I may have gone a completely different direction.

Edit: VLY can't be the. Unless VPG = TWO or a possible h4x0r word. Though, I don't know which it could be.

Look up vigenere in google. I found a decent page explaining how the cipher was broken in the olden days.

http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/java/EARLYCIPHERS/Vigenere.html

There's an applet. Unfortunately there's a first layer of encryption that needs breaking, then running it through that applet should make it easy.

Also found one at http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/vigenere.php that would be handy if when we find the first and second key.

Also another note, the graphic for the website has a faded logo behind the phrase "who will pwn it?" which says "Pocket Kingdom" in bold letter above, and below "Own the World."

Plugged the original text (removed all the spaces) into the applet right above, with the keyword pocketkingdom and clicked decode.  Then copied the text from the result and pasted it into the input field at the top again, with keyword owntheworld, and hit decode again.  Got:

begincongratzstopmaybeyouarenottehsuckafterallstop
ifyouthinkyouaretrulyleetorabsolutelygosusendanemailtoawinnerisme
atthewiudzkyeznpcpmafdrbdumzdbuqkhfzgawcnnzddflzelhgeacx
beoffkfjlqnscqcktsxdadfvreqmfubuarsknzzustndwglaj

Bottom half seems to be garbled, so maybe I made a slight mistake.  Or it's encoded again.  Likely, awinnerisme at thew0rlddotcom followed by more text.   Possibly the applet got screwed up by the presence of the 0.

Oh yeah I just noticed that the letters in the original message are grouped according to the length of the words in the deciphered message:

Begin congratz stop maybe
you are not teh suck after
all stop if you think you
are truly leet or absolutely
gosu send an email to
awinnerisme at thew0rld dot
com TF SRRUD KXOL OGLJT VELV

etc.  

Apparently he couldn't encode the 0 so he left it as 0.  Both WMRJ0JAA and EJXR0YSJ are probably thew0rld, and knowing the cypher AND the decrypted version should let us find the key(s).

Will play more with it.

Got it.  Deleted the 0's from the original message and plugged it again through the decoder applet twice, first time with pocketkingdom and second time with owntheworld:

begin congratz stop maybe you are not teh suck after all stop if you think you are truly leet or absolutely gosu send an email to awinnerisme at thewrld dot com to claim your prize stop only the first will get the loot stop in thewrld second place doesnt mean squat end

Then just add 0 back into wrld to get w0rld.

Go ahead and send the mail, let us know what you win.

FUCK.  If this is even remotely what i think it is, then go for: Greatest Marketing Ploy Evar.

I recently read a blurb on IGN about an NGuage Game called Pocket Kingdom, Own The World (http://ngage.ign.com/articles/548/548672p1.html).

In the "lore" of the game, a bunch of "leet haxors" had cheated their way to the top spot in the ladder rankings, and been banned, resulting in a freeforall, as people competed for the right to fill the vacume and claim the new slot as king of the hill.

This may very well be nothing more then a big marketing scheme gearing up for the release of the game.

You mean like I l0ve Bees? Of course it is. Jesus did you think it was just some clever internet guy? I mean I didn't know it was pocket kingdom, but it was definately a marketing thing.

If I had thought it was a marketing ploy I would have attacked it differently.  I would have assumed it was a code meant to be broken and then started with the easy peasy ciphers.

I never actually looked at the parent page because I thought it was an actual, you know, challenge.  You can crack a Vigenere cipher in about 10 minutes with MAPLE without having to even guess at the key.

The unfortunate thing is - who the hell wants Pocket Kingdom? Or an NGage for that matter. It's a damn shame it wasn't for a cooler game. I would've enjoyed 0wning the world in something else.

Didn't Vanguard:SOH pull the same "great marketing ploy" with an encoded message on their website when they announced the game?

Kinda reminds me of that scene in A Christmas Carol where Ralphie gets his Little Orphan Annie decoder pin.

It's not necessarily bad for me but now I'm starting to wonder if the guy who sent me the link already figured it out, since he has seen my N-gage possession first hand. Thanks for the help, guys. Still makes me wonder what the giveaway is.

You solved it man. You might as well see what the guy has to offer, even if it's lame swag, it's good laundry day clothes.

A Christmas Story.  Carol is the other one, with Scrooge.

Out of interest, does anybody else remember Pimania (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/hardware/piman.html)?

Wow.  I can't believe I didn't catch myself on that.

I never played Pimania (or My Name is Uncle Groucho, for that matter), but I for sure remember the ads on the back on PCW every week. (Who was the PiMan, daddy?)

I don't know, I was looking at Pocket Kingdoms and it looked kinda fun. I'm personally tired of all the L33t dude playing all the MMOs and ruining half the game for me, so some game that makes fun of all that is pretty worth it to me.

I will have to get an N-Gage, but I'm not too worried about it since I need a new phone anyway (don't play racketball with your cell phone on).

Drink more Ovaltine

?

If you've never seen A Christmas Story, or read In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash....

.... I can only assume you're a Martian.

Go watch A Christmas Story NOW.  It is a universal classic, that even ad nauseam repeated Chrismas viewings cannot diminish.

I've actually watched that multiple times in a row when some station (TNT?) did a marathon.  It was still better then all the other crap they had on.

And it will also show you how nice downtown Cleveland used to look...

You guys were definitely right. It's an N-Gage related site for Pocket Kingdoms, an MMORPG built for the N-Gage Arena. I'm going to kill my friend for sending me the link, but at least it gives me something to look forward to on the system.

The NGage isn't a system. It's a phone with gaming capabilities.

It's a phone? :p

hey guys.....im a big big fan of n-gage and study d thing inside out...


this pocket kingdom game was announced months ago.....its on all d games sites..


pwn, noob, l33t speak all that stuff was announced....

you were kinda slow!!
but it was interesting to watch you guys try to decipher it...

cya round!

Amazingly, I am not sure that is in the top 10 as far as douchebaggiest first posts. Nice try though.

It's not in the top 10 because it's a gimmick account. An IP Ban sounds good.

edit: omfg, he's d n3w35t b@n, exc1t1ng.

No you won't.

Allow me to help you find a new home (http://vnboards.ign.com/)

Enjoy

Ok, this is weird, I'm seeing genuine interest for Pocket Kingdoms on other forums, and then I see crap like this too.

Are they like giving away free pizza for people to hype the game?

Actually. we'll be doing a bit on PK in a week or so. The game, now that I've seen information (that you haven't seen), actually looks pretty fucking cool. We'll see how it works. Unfortunately it doesn't use sprint. That's a -1 for the N-Gage (or for Sprint depending on if you hate the player or the game).

Dish. Exclusives make things interesting by their very existence!

So you're saying I might have to change my signature soon?

No. I will always stand by the N-Gage being ridiculous in it's design and it's existance. But it is the only thing that can support what the game does. Like I said - more information will be coming soon. Hopefully, very soon.

Presumably Nokia are giving you a free device because all the overstock in their warehouse has been deemed a fire hazard?

Come on, they could send everyone in the industry 10 and still be at risk of a towering inferno of orange plastic.

ok, I feel a little bit dirty about this, but I took the liberty of sending in the cracked message, just to see what might actually happen (since no one here seemed interested in running with it.)

This is the message i got back from them a few days ago:



So, now I have an interesting delema.  Sure, I didnt actually DO anything, really, to earn the prize, but do you guys think it would actually be safe to send them my mailing address?

Send it in.

The QD is a pretty decent phone (as opposed to the original N-Gage) and has a few fine games allready (Tiger Woods is fun on the train).
I'd never buy one, but with the chance to ry out Pocket Kingdoms I'd jump on it.

If you don't wanna send your mailing address, you can definetly send mine instead :P

I half expected the winner to get an email just saying "you R teh win!" and nothing else. That's freakin awesome if you actually got something.

OMG i envy you so much, i'm Dmack from the N-gage forums and i've been watching this thew0rld.com site alot over the past weeks waiting for the new challenges because it has updated since it had that puzzle in the source. The source now says :

<!--

  THERE USED TO BE A PUZZLE HERE, BUT IT GOT OWNED

                                    DING! CONGRATZ

                                                     -->

:(. It was great to see you guys decifer it though well done. I'm trying my hardest to get this pre release, i sent the email hoping that i would win and i left a link to this thread so they could see who actually worked it out. Send your mailing address SurfD they are completely ligit, but if you don't want the game just the qd and 50 $ you can always send the game to me :). lol anyway nice one again guys. If you consider this please contact me dmack4142@ntlworld.com.

Die.

Seems they have a new contest up now. You're supposed to submit a battle cry, and the "best" one receives a prize. Mine's already in, but I don't think it can be beaten, given that all but one word is vulgar.

Sp00n!

Spork > spoon

And I win.

Let us know how it is Surf =)

Will do.  Got the confirmation that they had recieved my shipping info about 3 days ago.  Now, i just have to wait for the package to arrive.

It looks like some of the locals are participating in Pocket Kingdoms (http://www.thew0rld.com/).  I see some familiar names on the leader board.  Of course, good old T'berog is at the top representing for the Shadowclan.  Hoowah Shadowclan!

This is not boding well for the office pool. I have $50 on Haemish and Schild.

We will pwnz0r, bitches.

What's scary is that this game is in essence, a stripped down ProgressQuest with FF type graphics. And it's decent, kind of addictive fun.

Help me, I'm playing an N-Gage QD.

I have yet to sidetalk, though.

Your nerdery just increased at least two levels. I'm proud of both of you.

I am three PDA's, a pocket protector and a Klingon costume away from Uber Geek.

It is very much progress quest. One of two things will happen if we win thew0rld.com from the contest:

1. We make an MMOG comic there. Mostly to make fun of Tycho and Gabe.
2. We make an anti-NGage site.

..kidding kidding..




or am I?

You've slipped to three and five respectively. Something tells me we won't have to worry about Tycho and Gabe's wounded pride any time soon.

I have 7 games worth playing right now. Pocket Kingdom isn't one of them. I'm playing it just for you. Don't worry, I still have 27 days left to win. A weekend of catassing around thanksgiving will get me the gold.

Speaking of Pocket kingdom, I got my Package from Fedex a few days ago.

Played around a bit with the game, but my skillz are not l33t enough.  Those fucking Rogues in the second castle keep totally raping me, and i cant figure out how to rank up my units to beat them down (assuming you CAN rank up your units that early).

It lets me buy the moulds for the Rank up item, but i cant for the life of me find anything to combine to produce an end product.

And regardless of what combo of wizards and fighters i send, those fucking rogues just rape them.  Instadeath backstab special is not nice.

Joe gave me this link and I suddenly was able to go online and rank myself.

pk.warcry.com

One clue I learned last night. Ranking is not the be-all end-all of uberness. Your rank units start over at level 0, which means they are wet noodles compared to other ranked and leveled units. After ranking them, put them through a few easy NPC battles before sending them up against other players, or you will get your ass handed to you. I got drilled last night.

I must also announce that I am hopelessly addicted to this fucking game. I pulled it out in the line at Wal-Mart last night because I had 5 minutes and wanted to rank up some units.

Fuck. Joe, you will pay for this.

Will have to play around with this a bit more, but I still cant get past those fucking rogues.

I had two parties who were all rank 15 or so, with decent equipment, and they both got their asses handed to them by those bastards.  Am I missing something?

And i thought the numeric rank (number of battles they have won) was different from the rank that the Rank up items did (i thought that the rank up items changed your units class, ie - basic fighter class improves to a better fighter class, not just basic fighter class rank++)

Rank up changes your class. When you say your guys were rank 15, you mean LEVEL 15. That helps. But those Rogues are nasty. That fucking backstab is just brutal.

Get armor. A decent priest sitting in the back row helps (he heals your guys). I managed to make it through with a nicely-leveled Orc/Lycanthrope as my heavy hitter.

that seems to be my problem tho.  I cant figure out how to rank up my characters....

I can buy the Rank Up mould, but I cant for the life of me combine it with anything to produce an end product.  It just tells me that my choice was uncombinable.  Am i missing something?

Mould: rank up
Ore: Copper
Other: ????
Other: ????

pk.warcry.com - all of the recipes are there.

For example:
Mold - Rankup
Ore - Copper
Jewel - Azulite
Other - Black Leaf
=
Hero Badge

This may be wrong, it's from memory.

I know Tiger's Eye + Black Leaf at the end is the Jackal badge to get monks.

Anyway, good luck :)

ahhhhh, thanks

Rooting for you guys. SurfD, what's your name on theworld?

Oh nice, they have a ranking for the contestants.

Somebody should post a link to slashdot, with the story "F13 pwns /." and watch thew0rld.com melt down from hits. Duck is winning, but hondaman is dragging [H] down.

This game still looks too horrible for words.

The game is WILDLY addictive. Perhaps it is just the smell of competition that is fueling my ardor for the game, but holy shit, I just can't put it down sometimes. And it's not that it's a fantastic game, it's just horribly addictive. Were it not for the fact that I know the competition is a short-term thing, I might not be nearly so heavy into the game.

I think the mobile format both helps and hurts this game. There are many activities in the offline mode you can do to "advance" your game in short spurts of time, such as waiting in line at the grocery store or on 30-minute commuter trains. Online is a bit of a different story, because you don't want to be PKing someone's kingdom in the middle of a meeting and have to shut the thing off.

I would have to say that after using it, the N-Gage QD is not nearly so ridiculous a device as the original N-Gage (thanks to no sidetalking). I still hate fucking cell phones with the white-hot passion of the sun, however.

Duck is still #1 on the rankings, kick some booty for us, HaemishM!

I'm trying! I did get #1 briefly on Monday night, but had lost it by Tuesday morning. I may have to engage Ludicrous Catass Drive.

Hey now, dropped to #3 :(

Don't make me leave and catass in another forum. Nm, you probably would prefer that. :O

Go team! I want to see thew0rld in Haemish's evil clutches.

I have been slacking. World of Warcraft has captured my attention.

Bah, what do you get for winning World of Warcraft? Huh?

A glass case for a sock that says "Break in case of a Raid".  If this Pocket Kingdoms is as cool as you make it sound, the fact that it can be cat-assed on the go is a plus.  Still not sure about a QD, but what's another cell phone piled in a drawer if I don't like it?

Direct quote from [H]ardgaming's forums talking about PK, and some guy from here that I've never seen talking about haemish.

Link:
http://www.hardgaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2333

Oh he owned me HARD. His stuff was ranked at least one rank higher than all of my stuff, including troops I've never seen. The ranks you can get your troops to is linked to the resources you can find. Currently, I do not have an easy (or any) source for platinum, so I can't rank my troops any higher than they are now without some more serious catassing.

Ouch, so he's pretty much untouchable then I assume? How bout Arnie?

I haven't come up against Arnie. It's a bit difficult finding anyone online, with only a possible pool of 100 players.

He's not unbeatable, but if I was in danger of being attacked by him again, I'd attempt to get away, because I don't think I can beat his armies.

What about if you went on the aggressive? Or is his defensive army too strong, too? Is it possible to team up with other people to try to take down one big guy?

Oh I attacked him. His defending unit was just as strong as the one that attacked me. Me = bitchslapped.

Are you entering into the PK Warcry contest now that the sneak peek is over? I don't know if that's exactly fair, since you have more experience than anyone else... :)

Nah, I really don't have the mean in me to be a griefer. The shit I could think of is kindgergarden compared to some of the people out there who have actually griefed in games.

The way I read it, it appears it's more along the lines of another tournament after the initial "how much of a griefer" are you test. I think the griefer thing is a facade to find people willing to put funny things in the essay porition of the test.