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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: MetaCortechs » MetaCortechs: Puzzles
[SOLVED] November 8 posts on paintover
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BrianEnigma
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Joined: 05 Oct 2003
Posts: 1199
Location: Pacific Northwest
Moatie wrote:
Can someone just basically explain, what unicode is, and more importantly
give an example...

like what does

#1054#1562 mean?

or how does one translate 1 line or several charaters into some type of unicode as an example.

I would like to work on this problem too


When mass-market computers were first designed, they were designed in the US with 8-bit processors. That meant that they could display more-or-less 255 different kinds of "letters" on the screen. Because of the US-centric nature of these machines, it was decided pretty early on that the understood letters would be uppercase A-Z, lowercase a-z, a few western accented letters (vowels with umlauts, accents, etc) 0-9, punctuation, a number of mathematic symbols, and some drawing characters (lines, boxes, shading).

This was great for awhile, but kind of screwed the rest of the world. When computers became more powerful and could easily handle numbers bigger than 8-bits and could do graphics efficiently, Unicode was invented. This basically took the existing pool of 8-bit characters, and expanded on it by several orders of magnitude. Now, instead of limiting the machine to 256 western-biased letters, they can now do up to 65,000 different letters. A great many of these potential letters are unused, but the space of 65,000 letters is divided into groups based on language (Western, Cyrillic, various middle-eastern languages, various asian languages, mathematic symbols, music symbols, etc).

So basically, each of these "& #1054;& #1562;" entities refers to a slot in the Unicode character set. Typically you convert it to hex (0x041E 0x061A), then look up and print the character (in this case, a Cyrillic capital letter O followed by an undefined slot reserved in the Arabic language space).

I do not know if this helps at all, but it is what you asked for. Smile
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 4:48 pm
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ParityBit
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Joined: 17 Oct 2003
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Location: London Above

 		Further update to Paintover -

Quote:
November 10, 2003
hm. consider me another hand, k? i'm on it, see what i can find ...
Posted by bounce at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)


and

Quote:
November 08, 2003
putting my thinking ^ on

(I kept this in Draft mode because I thought I could do this on my own. I don't think I can get all of it.)

Wherever texel is, there's interference. I was able to get the first one, but there's blips at the beginning of each transmission, and so I can't be sure about the rest. texel, if I ever get to see you again, I hope you'll forgive me for cracking your machine - I had a feeling you'd cc: yourself on these.

Random, you're good at translation, wanna give me a hand?

#1:


testing (loading cryptoscript for secure transmission)

Posted by caesar at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)


Along with a link:

http://www.paintover.net/_cpy/archives/texel.zip

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 4:49 pm
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Wishi
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Joined: 20 Oct 2003
Posts: 22

 		2 new posts. One by caesar including this zip and the other by bounce. Cryptoscript apparently.

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 4:49 pm
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BrianEnigma
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 		Hmmm...looking at the zip file, I am beginning to think that maybe ALL of the messages were meant to be the ASCII+control characters, and perhaps Movable Type accidentally converted things to Unicode.
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 4:53 pm
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AnthraX101
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 		I'm not sure if we should give up on the unicode or not, but if you take all the unicode characters, and mod 256 them, you get all numbers under 128. In fact, the 4th message (the only one I did more then just check) has a large number of 0x20 (space) characters.

AnthraX101

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 4:58 pm
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Azathoth666
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Joined: 09 Oct 2003
Posts: 321
Location: OZ-tralia

 		So does this mean we are potentially thinking that Texels posts are encrypted?
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:06 pm
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Wishi
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 		I wonder if the ^ in the title putting my thinking ^ on means that the powers idea is the way to go since 2^4 means 2 to the power of 4 etc.

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:09 pm
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AnthraX101
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 		Figured out the decoding mechanism. It's a feedback cipher. Take the second character in the file, XOR it with the first character in the file. Then, take the third character and XOR it with the second character (as it was decoded). That will give you the message. Here's what I got so far on the 11/8/03 10:44:54 file.

Code:
caesar, i'm here outside elmview ga.


Working on finishing it now. I'm at work and don't have access to my compilers, anyone want to write something to do it automaticly?

AnthraX101

EDIT: And I guess ^ was a hint. That's the XOR symbol in C++ Wink

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:09 pm
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Azathoth666
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 		Top shelf work Anthrax! Hanging on your every word here! Very Happy
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:12 pm
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ParityBit
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AnthraX101 wrote:
Figured out the decoding mechanism. It's a feedback cipher. Take the second character in the file, XOR it with the first character in the file. Then, take the third character and XOR it with the second character (as it was decoded). That will give you the message.


Bloody brilliant. Good work AnthraX, good work all!

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:12 pm
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Dark_Niles
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 		You make me feel stupid Razz
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:14 pm
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XtRaVa
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Location: Portsmouth, England

 		im guessing its elmview gardens? lol

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:17 pm
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BrianEnigma
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 		testing (loading cryptoscript for secure transmission)

caesar, i'm here outside elmview ga. definitely a whomp, but somehow skewed. circumference is not as wide as expected, epicenter seems extremely unstable at outset. also seems two hours early.

things are repeating. feeling of inertia. saw an echo shadow of self approaching the site. i can see myself sending the test post to paintover. so weird! i am calm despite this. whoah, that building is no longer a single-story brick - it's glass and steel and at least 20 stories. i can't believe my eyes.

something's not right here. duration and execution of whomp is not happening as a chaotic outward ripple from epicenter - there is a systematic and organized ... rebooting of the area around me. some things are changing, others remain untouched. it is currently quite easy to side step the changes. wish had more data-collecting ability than currently. to the naked eye whomp is less anomaly, more automated.

crapola. things are escalating. cannot find way out. my echo is gone, and I am fine, or maybe the other way round. running, but whatever is effecting the area is moving faster. feeling caged, harder to dodge.

wind, rain, bright sun. hard to see. caesar, can't do much now. never should have come. will try to upload addtl data if can

sweep no more SOS hurt in g_

Edit: P.S. Anthrax, you rock!
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:25 pm
Last edited by BrianEnigma on Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
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XtRaVa
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 		"The deja-vu is a glitch in the matrix, it means they changed something"

or something like that Razz

PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:30 pm
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Azathoth666
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 		WOW.

Good job Bri.... Now is there anyone left who belives this isn't matrix related?

What the HELL is going on there?????
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2003 5:31 pm
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