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[emato]

Fezzik, I did the same thing. I tried it all kinds of ways including the easiest - saving the binary and changing the type (.exe, jpg, gif, etc..). Nothing.

Don't know what else to do with it. The only other thing I can think of is a short end of a community URL. But with that you'd have to know the first part.

I would like to see this develop --- I do think we need some sort of hint or nudge.

Out of ideas here.

[fezzik]

I think the idea of it being the tag to a community URL is a really good one. Unfortunately the logical target is YouTube, but their URLs - while they are in this format - are 11 characters long, which doesn't line up well with what we're given. I tried simple things like just taking the first 11 or making a grid out of them, but nothing worked. I also tried relating the URL for the video itself - or the other video - to one of the strings found, but still, couldn't get anything.

I feel like we've tried most of the reasonable things; it's kind of up to the PMs at this point to give us a hint or a nudge. I like hard problems, but I just don't have the time to put into this one right now.

[jalava]

Joining in..

Did you guys notice that the eye blinks only during certain numbers?

Blinked numbers seem to be:
3.1415926535 8979323846 26433

49558264?

Also, looking how eye blinks, it is almost clear that blinking is done on purpose on certain numbers, you can see the anticipation on muscles waiting for certain numbers and slight anxiousness when some numbers come out but eye blinks bit late.

Also, make note that eye is kept from voluntarily blinking on few occasions on that video (eye twitches but doesn't blink) making it more prominent that blinks must have some meaning.

[Ofiuco]

Okay, I'll bite.

Usually things encoded in base64 have that = at the end. Not seeing it here, but that doesn't mean anything. But it got me thinking about what else looks like base64 but isn't.

As it turns out, images are often encoded/decoded in/from base64 for embedding or transfer. So, theoretically, this could translate back to an image. However, I haven't yet found a web-based re-encoder, only decoders. I did find a Java script that does it, but my last Java class was a year ago and I am staring at bash blankly right now.

EDIT: Scratch that. Played around doing it with HTML as an embedded image; an embedded image of significant size = a huge amount of base64. Also, when I tried to embed it, it didn't show up. ALAS.

It may or may not also bear mentioning that we have 16 rows of 8 character sequences, and the number of times blinked is 8. Spooky! This brings us to a total of 128 characters, which is suspiciously important for various things, including cryptography, but I can't think of a way that I could use this that wouldn't involve having a key or otherwise rendering plaintext.

[Scryer]

The 96 bytes of random-looking stuff starting f7 77 5d... comes out to 768 bits. That's one of the standard RSA key sizes, and one that was cracked for the first time earlier this year, so it's probably way beyond what would be expected in a game. We could check that by converting it to a 768-bit number and looking for small factors -- if there are any small ones, it's not RSA. It ends in 47, so it's odd, so there's no factor of 2 in it. I doubt that this is the right direction, though, so probably not worth the trouble. Maybe we could also check whether it comes out to the factored RSA number represented in binary; it's listed in decimal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers#RSA-768 .

I poked at the binary file for a while, and haven't found anything useful -- no interesting repeated strings or high-frequency bytes.

Perhaps we need to find another binary file to XOR with it, or perhaps represent pi in binary somehow and XOR that string with it.

We might also fold it on itself in some direction or other and XOR half of it with itself. There are 44 bytes with the high bit turned on, and to get to ASCII by folding each would need to be folded onto another with the high bit on, because ASCII is only 0-127. So far I haven't seen an obvious way to do that.

Sigh.

[Ofiuco]

Hold on, let me hook up my supercomputer. I'M SURE I'LL HAVE THIS CRACKED IN A JIFFY. :lol: