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[ariock]

Re: ...

[wonkothesane]

...

[ariock]

Ruby Rebel

[wonkothesane]

..im sorry i cant host a ruby file i really dont understand how to run it on the web - as i say the program i mentioned ScitE will run it offline. i host php/cgi/mysql if you come up with something in one of those.

the 'beale' cipher creates its numbers from the text that you give it. ive chosen this method as ive tried umpteen other methods. roughly i was reading around various forms of encryption and ciphers and i came across a one called lacida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacida - this is as i was looking for a cryptography answer that might have something to do with the wheels of the bike on the image. that also lead me onto thinking about information entropy further and fonts/typesetting of the card (along with the dubious U in FUVMR). Lacida looks intrigueing as its name is formed from letters of its authors. i was looking at the letterspacing of the message as well and thinking about how to reduce the information on the card so it would be easier to find a meaningfull answer. this lead me onto the Lucida font type - look at the 'g' in game in the second paragraph and look at the 'g' in signs in the third paragraph. in the second paragraph it is close to lucida and is a different type face in the third. i did some reading around the lucida font and found it is unusual in that it does not have kerning information in it - so firstly i was trying to examine the EODMF message in this font in word -thinking about 'hot' and 'cold' information - certainly some letters are faded in this font and some are in bold. however i havent yet got anything meaningfull from that. incidentally 'lucida' is also a cold blue dwarf star. ive previously thought the answer to this card might be a combination of a number of different 'ciphers' that are shuffled - so thought i would give the beale cipher a go.

PLUG GONE SOMETHING GAME SIGNS FIGURE TRYING MESSAGE ?? Kerplunk lol - a playing card will look the same both ways up - im back off to photoshop aGain...

[Gauntlet]

As I watched the titles of the new Bond movie this afternoon I found myself thinking about this card. The movie was good enough to drive Shuffled from my mind for its duration but now the obsession returns. I share this only to reassure those who may be concerned about the cooling of this thread that some brains still burn with it.

[wonkothesane]

...

[jaikaiman]

I expect this has been done before so trout me if you like.
Drawing a line through the compass needle on the card exactly cuts the card in two from corner to corner...could this be off any relevance?

[James Siegesmund]

[Infernux]

Im starting to think that this card is going to be nearly impossible to solve with our current information. Brute forcing is nearly impossible, which means we need to find either the Secret Key, or the Coding of the deck.

Trying to brute force the initial encoding of the deck seems possible, albeit there are many different encodings of the deck (permutations of 54?). Trying to brute force the keystream would just give us every combination of letters you can get, so we would have multiple possible answeres. My questions is, depending on the initial Keying of the deck, are there certain outputs that would NEVER be outputed by solitaire? If we can find these and remove them that would limit the possible keystream brute force...

Also we can try to find the passphrase. This seems more likely to me. Schneier said that we would have to find the key inside the card somewhere and that longer keys make for more security. Im pretty sure that the key is hidden right infront of our noses. That being said, has anyone tried annagraming the cipher-text???

[wonkothesane]

silly mood

[RedZed333]

[Boomanda]

The ciphertext probably is the string of characters at the bottom of the card. Whether the heat-sensitive characters are part of it, the key, or something else... beats me. What we do know is that Garnet was able to solve the puzzle with only the deck of cards and the sentence some person said to him. Personally, I don't think the deck in the picture really serves any purpose but decoration, but nevermind that.

One theory I've been playing with lately is that "Outward looks should leave you cold" could mean that, literally, outward looks will leave "you cold". Problem is, of course, that "you cold" equals to seven letters (Or, alternatively, you could count the space as an eight), and my interpretation of the outward looks, the vanishing characters, are twenty. You could, I guess, find some weird way to make them fit in, such as adding nulls, but... meh, suit yourself.

[codeseeker]

Fresh eyes... or fresh fish.. :0/

[James Siegesmund]

Long and speculative, but what else is there at this point?

I've been working on trying to parse up "If entropy increases..." into manageable parts and working with the if-statement. By parts, I mean the sub-phrases that make up the whole (I've underlined them below).

For example, consider "if entropy increases". I see several possible meanings. The first is that this is talking about the entropy of the universe. That always increases, and this is an if-then statement, so the "then" part must also be true. Therefore, the first meaning reduces to a simple statement: outward looks are going to leave you cold. Always. No matter what. Kind of bleak for my taste. Plus, why use an if-then statement if the "if" part is always true? Nobody says "If two and two make four, I like ice cream."

The second possible meaning is that it's talking about the entropy of the card (or, for Garnet originally, the deck's box). That entropy can increase or decrease as the card's temperature goes up or down. So, with this meaning, we get "If you heat this card up, then outward looks will leave you cold."

Finally, it could be talking about the deck order itself: Solitare shuffles a deck, increasing the deck's entropy by taking it further and further from its starting order. So with this meaning, we get "if you keep working Solitare foreward, outward looks will leave you cold"

Now on to "outward looks will leave you cold." I see multiple possible meanings of "leave you cold" too. The first is that it means "unsuccessful in solving the card." Under the first meaning, you don't want to be left cold. The second is that it relates to the solved card: you're made cold (scared? shocked?) by the decoded message." Here, being left cold is good. Finally, as discussed above, it could be more cryptic: i.e. parts of the cyphertext decode to "UCOLD" or something. Here again, being left cold is a good thing.

Outward looks: again more than one meaning. Does this phrase mean breaking the code? Appearences? Looking at the letters at the ends of the message?

With that in mind, let's go on to the clue ("If you're feeling cold, you're too sensative.") Finally, some clairity! Being too sensative just can't be good. That's what "too" means: excessively. Since we're going to be too sensative if we feel cold, we'd better avoid feeling cold.

If "leaving you cold" has its third, cryptic meaning, that doesn't help any. But if we use the other two, the clue actually helps. We can work back, since we now know we don't want to be left [feeling] cold. There are several ways to avoid this: the first uses meaning two of "if entropy increases": don't heat up the card. Since entropy hasn't increased, you can take all the outward looks you want and not be left cold. Using the third meaning of "if entropy increases", we can avoid outward looks leaving us cold by decreasing the deck's entropy (working backwards) The final way to avoid being left (and thereby feeling) cold (regardless of which meaning of "if entropy increases" is used) is to avoid outward looks entirely, but I'm not sure how we'd do that (meditate for the answer?). Of these three, I'm leaning toward the first way.

Based on this, my current take on the message: If you heat the card up (increasing empathy and making some cyphertext dissapear), the card's appearance (outward looks) will keep you from breaking the code (leave you cold). My big problem with this: it assigns meaning to the whole phrase, leaving nothing to get a codeword from.

Hopefully, with time, I'll have a table of possible meanings of each sub-phrase. As an example of how this might help here's another possible phrase meaning cobbled from above: If you keep working Solitaire foreward (increasing entropy of the deck through shuffling, perhaps by treating the cyphertext we have as plaintext and "encoding" it for a second time), when you look at the dissapearing parts at the ends of the message (outward looks), they should read "UCOLD UCOLD UCOLD UCOLD" (leave yuo cold)

If anybody sees other meanings to any of the sub-phrases above (entropy, outward looks, leave you cold, too sensative, etc) please add them. Obviously, this whole thread is packed with interpretations of the phrase as a whole, but at the moment I'm more interested in trying to assign pssible meanings to each sub-part, just to narrow the possible interpretations of the whole statement.

[codeseeker]

Regarding my last post... (^^ 2 up depending on how fast I type this)

I don't have this card, but what if someone can try this with it...

The anagram text once again is: Look closer, and you will see the password, voyeur

Two Ideas:

1)

When I think voyeur, the first thing that comes to mind is peeping through a window or through blinds.

We've already made the Joker/Star connection with Bruce Schneier for the book 'The Cryptonomicon'.

What if you cut the dissappearing letters out of the text and placed the card over either a page of that book or his website and took the letters that show through as the keyphrase for the remaining letters?

Those dissappearing letters again are:
EODMF XRUTH FHURG IFULP

The part about this that bothers me is that letters are repeated, so maybe instead of cutting all the letters out, just take the first instance of each you come to in the text of the card.

Also, if this is a good lead, I feel the book will be better suited to this since the website will display differently in different browsers, etc.
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2)

Maybe just looking at the box with a microscope ("look closer") through where those dissappearing letters appear in the text will reveal something.

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The PXC Cust. Svc. said that no other cards are needed to solve this, but they didn't say NOTHING else was needed to solve it. Just not PXC cards.

I hope this helps.

~CS