unforum

[kenbo]

http://www.geocities.com/tolmhbe/helpme


dls a zip file (I had to add the .zip extension after dl) iside are more .png's in a folder "nine" named 1E,1F,1M,2E,2e,2R

FREE Me?

[Cyfre]

Just a quick and probably irrelevent update as to my communication with Lucrezia. I responded to her reaction to my "what's not to trust?" e-mail with the following:

Oh, sorry about that e-mail. I barely remember
> (so long ago!), but i
> think i could have sent you an e-mail meant for
> someone else. Because it is sent
> across the internet, i couldn't unsend the message.
> Sorry!

The response i received is as follows:

don't worry. i am still receiveing some emails from
people asking me about people using my account but..
just happens, right? argentina was hot and wet and i
liked it a lot. i really hate the mountains and pine
trees and chalets we have here in the mountains.
luckily i'll be back there for work in 20-30 days from
now and that would be great.

ciao,
lucrezia

------

It doesn't seem to contain any important information, but i guess the reference to chalets, mountains, and pine trees would be directly in line with the images on her orkut site that were recently posted here.

It seems to me that Unknown killed his or her parents, possibly by arson. The rain washed Unknown's clothes clean. I get the feeling Ame is a personality, but it throws me off when Ame is suddenly in paris. The cell phone throws me off that scent as well. After a little thought i do get the feeling Ame is a seperate person from Unknown.

Lucrezia has done a good job of remaining innocent through all of this, save the odd capitalization that leads to mbox. That could either deliver the idea that Lucrezia is in cahoots (consciously or not), but it could also mean the e-mails are being changed after she sends. It could also be a PM dropping a hint, and probably most likely is. I personally think Lucrezia was just a medium for the rabbit hole, playing the part of a random person.

It's clear to me that we should be getting more communication from Lucrezia's e-mail address, in any event.

My response to her last e-mail is as follows:

You hate the mountains? I live in Florida, where there are no mountains. We are surrounded by water. I think the mountains are absolutely beautiful. It sounds like you have a pretty good job, where you can travel around the world like that. I would love to have the opportunity to go anywhere outside of America.

-nathan

----

I guess i'll wait for another spike, if there is one to come!

[kenbo]

It sounds like you've made a friend Cyfre!


Seems a little weird tho. "Don't email me! BTW my trip was great let me tell you all about it."

[Cyfre]

Yeah, with every passing e-mail i feel more and more that Lucrezia doesn't mind if we keep talkin'. As long as i don't bring up the idea of this game or strange e-mails. I'm happy to do that.

[qrunchmonkey]

The help me/save me photos are not all of the same house. Some of them look similar, but not identical.

[Blacklight]

The new pictures spell out FREEMe and I havn't found it yet on her geocities site.. but I bet it's there somewhere... I have to go to bed.. I bet one of you find it before I wake up in the morning !

Shora has been PROVEN to be NOT A LEAD btw.

[fog]

My guess at the story

[LGarrett]

Although it's a good premise, I'm not convinced that Lucrezia and whomever the other person included in the uppercase/lowercase writing are the same physical person. The e-mail headers indicate at least two different origins for the e-mails; although it's feasibly possible that they could both be Lucrezia/Unknown writing from connections on two different networks, I doubt that is the case simply because all the headers should show the e-mails coming from yahoo.it if Lucrezia is writing all the e-mails, because, as she has stated, she has a laptop and uses the yahoo.it e-mail address for work. From there, I think it is a fair assumption that she would be using yahoo.it for all her e-mail service, making this secondary e-mail origin (the e-mail from which her address is spoofed) that of someone else who has access to Lucrezia's e-mail. It would also explain why she does not understand what's going on.

(For that matter, I'm not 100% sure that Lucrezia and Unknown are the same person, although that seems much more likely at this time and seems to be the direction in which we are being pointed by this shadow figure.)

[fog]

[arcanadei]

If anyone is still messing with the 0822162710052 number string, please post what methods you have tried or are working on. Of all the standard 13 digit ID numbers, I found UPC, library cards, ISBN, phone # with country prefix, and Visa's to be the most prominent. All of which are illogical or invalid. Looking at it as a cipher, I tried analyzing the first four digit possibilities which would be:
0 8 2 2
a i c c

0 8 22 1
a i v b

0 8 2 21
a i c u
I tried ROT'ing these combos but got no recognizable words or word fragments out of them. Just glancing at the end of the string, the 2 0's near the end throw out the possibility of a html, zip, or most other known filetypes for this to be another page to find. Of course, I am assuming that the leading zero is significant, but if it wasn't then why is it there? I am going to bang my head againest a wall now.

[Robert]

Hi Guys,

Arcanadei:

I have been messing around with that number since I found it. I have tried to treat it as a substitution cipher (like what you were trying) and got nowhere. I tried a number of ROT and got nowhere. I have tried keywords such as ame, rain, spider, ... and got nowhere.

Noticing that, when split into groups of 2, the block '27' appears, I tried treating it as a modulo cipher for bases 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31 for all intervals). I ran these results through offsets and through ROT. Nothing.

I decided to study it further and see what i could come up with. Since it was an odd number beginning with a zero, I assumed the zero was signifcant. Since a del vayo cipher uses a leading 0 as valid, i tried a few of those. However, the existence of the lone 2 at the end suggest that it is not a del vayo cipher.

I have tried pretty much everything i can think of. I mean it clearly doesn't split easily into blocks of 2 or it wouldn't be odd. And if it is a straightforward substitution cipher, it only uses like 7 characters.

At the moment I am stuck. I attempted to make contact with Lucrezia, but she is ... unresponsive. I have one other, very unusual technique I will try, but given its similarity to brute force encryption, I don't imagine it will be useful in the long run. Presumably, if we were meant to know this number, if would have been translatable by an individual. It may yet be, but I am starting to doubt that _I_ will be the one to translate it.

Robert

[arcanadei]

Yeah, I was pretty much ruling out simple substitution too. Unfortunately, my home comp has exploded and I can't get too in depth at work so I am frustrated. I can't imagine that it would be an obscure 13 digit code ID or a bizarre transposition code. I mean, they want us to solve it don't they? Sounds like we came to alot of the same conclusons with number pairing and what it could mean. The only other thing I can think of is that the leading zero is bogus or a "start" character, meaning we have 2 distinct words with the other zero being a 10, but I can't go much farther with that right now. So, unless we can crack that, we are stuck with waiting on Lucrezia to email someone or an update to Orkut. Anyone examine the house photos for steg yet? On png files, the comment header is at the end, instead of the beginning like jpg. I am wondering what the significance, if any, of the folder name nine is and where the freeme fits in. Too many questions...

[Blacklight]

I have an idea for that barcode number. In the picture, the barcode was split in half. What if we split the number in half treating it as two separate words ? If we could determine which half corresponds with which half of the barcode, maybe then this thing will decode. Maybe because we're looking at the number as one big number is the reason we're failing ?

I've tried modular , ROT, and substitution on that number and likewise got nothing.

We really should check all those pictures we have for stegged messages too. I plan to search for FREEMe later today.

I think the word "nine" has some significance to finding FREEMe but I don't know how. I can't think of any reason that the folder that the pictures were in were nammed "nine" I don't think it's random. I've tried adding nine in various combinations with FREEMe on the Geocities site and come up empty handed so far. I also tried de-stegging all the pics we got and there doesn't seem to be anything in any of them unless they are password protected and I don't have the password..

[joknatson]

There's definitely something in those pics (some of them anyway). Notice that, of the duplicate pictures, one pic is a larger file size than the other. For instance, 2R.png is larger than 1F.png by 2.4KB. 2e.png is larger than 2E.png by 6.2KB.

So now we need the password...We have FREEMe, or FREeME or FReEME. The directory that the files came in is "nine". Notice that if you add up the numbers that preceed the filenames (i.e. 1F, 2E, 1M...), you get 9. I have no idea what that means...

I'm looking up translation stuff right now based on re-organizing the letters we have. So far "Fer" means "Iron" in french....I thought maybe since Ame is in Paris, and Unknown's bed is made of iron....I don't know. I'm losing it.

EDIT
On further review, if you take both picture groups, each pic has a "1" form and a "2" form. The "1" form, preceeded by "1" in the filename, is always smaller than the "2" form of the same pic (filesize).

Also, if you put matching pictures together in this pattern "12-12-12-12-12-12", it spells out HELP ME - FREe ME like before, but you're placing the pictures in a different order (you're actually combining pics from the first group and the second group, and it still spells out the same). Notice though that the lowercase "e" is in a different location when done this way.

Is this relevant at all?

[LGarrett]