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anaerin

SPDR ~~is returning~~ [edit]has completed to 5 levels, producing nothing new.[/edit]
HTTrack copying the site and Grepping the source for 16 capital characters also turns up nothing.

**Posted:** Wed Dec 02, 2009 9:09 pm

danteIL · Unfictologist Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 1990

Following catherwood's suggestion in the other thread to pick up here the hunt for the 48 'nuggets'...

In the April 2010 newsletter was this message:

**Posted:** Wed Apr 14, 2010 9:24 am

catherwood

danteIL · Unfictologist Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 1990

Bingo... Nicely analyzed catherwood..

I've only had time to extract the binary from http://thewaytheirworldended.com/SFTACOMM/QABG-H2.gif

Like you noticed.. if you play with the contrast levels, it consists of 8 rows of 16*8=128 pixels.

I grouped the columns of pixels into sets of 8 and then translated them into binary. If people want to check my work, here it is:

catherwood

super! I'll finish up the first one, seeing as how i'm halfway thru -- i've been editing my last post, but i'll move it down here when i'm done. That leaves the hardest one for someone else to jump on.

Remember to hang out in chat today in #inimation for further sqweeee!

First gif binary:

danteIL · Unfictologist Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 1990

Here is my attempt to create a suitably-contrasting image of the 3rd mysterious image. My initial stab with this suggests that it is another binary-encoded message, with the black and white bits reversed... I suggest viewing at 500%

**Posted:** Wed Apr 14, 2010 7:52 pm

danteIL · Unfictologist Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 1990

Okay I managed to get the binary --> ASCII out of that .png file:

**Posted:** Wed Apr 14, 2010 11:37 pm

catherwood

**Posted:** Thu Apr 15, 2010 2:15 pm

Rogi Ocnorb

**Posted:** Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:39 pm

_________________
I'm telling you now, so you can't say, "Oh, I didn't know...Nobody told me!"

danteIL · Unfictologist Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 1990

That's definitely new. Looks like there are 2 navpaths in there.. hard to read, though.

**Posted:** Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:46 pm

catherwood

Rogi, excellent work there, but how did you do it? I've played with Photoshop for hours and I just cannot duplicate your results. I was hoping to clean it up and zoom in, to get enough letters to even begin to brute-force the ambiguous ones in each string.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:01 am

Rogi Ocnorb

I used an image difference comparison tool.
(Imagediff, specifically).
But I see on the web that if you have Photoshop, you can import the two pictures into separate layers and set the top one to "Difference" in the layers palette.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 16, 2010 8:52 pm

_________________
I'm telling you now, so you can't say, "Oh, I didn't know...Nobody told me!"

catherwood

**Posted:** Sat Apr 17, 2010 10:44 am

Rogi Ocnorb

In searching further, I see that there are add-ins for a lot of products that say they do this but not a lot of standalone products. Imagediff was made by ionforge which seems defunct. It's still available as a 1.8 meg freeware on CNet Download and the only ads it's ever had are for the manufacturer (but the html part of that pops up error messages periodically because their site is offline.).
I just did the install on my netbook and there was one issue: The file, "msvcr71.dll" was missing. I found 4 other copies on my drive so I just copied one of those into the "Imagefiff" program folder and it works.

**Posted:** Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:45 pm

_________________
I'm telling you now, so you can't say, "Oh, I didn't know...Nobody told me!"

danteIL · Unfictologist Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 1990

I've been trying this image difference thing every which way I can think of with no luck. I did produce a pretty pink logo though Smile

**Posted:** Sat Apr 17, 2010 4:58 pm