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Sin Vraal · Decorated Joined: 28 Nov 2002 Posts: 219 Location: NJ

SOLVED: First Contact - Caretaker Email

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 6:53 am

sauceykat

Got the same email...but the subject said: you've come this far
and in the email above the cypher it said: can you be trusted?

D-

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 10:07 am

LazarusLong

In this message, the first string is 625 characters long, which lends itself quite nicely to a 25 x 25 grid, so:

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 12:03 pm

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MageSteff

Re: First Contact

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jamesi

I broke up the string. For the record, it is supposed to be one continuous string, but it looks better here if broken up.

Vraal, you may hit me in the arm if you object to what I did. Razz

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 1:15 pm

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sauceykat

just a thought...maybe since the attachment is titled earn.txt, perhaps earn is the key? Probably not but worth a shot...I'm at work now so I can't try it out

D-

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 2:48 pm

Nyght_Shyft

I've been playing around with the vigenere decoder.. not a whole lot of luck. The only way I could even get any words that made sense was with "ZLHO", which made "IHAV" in the beginning. I tried going through different key lengths with ZLHO to see if I could get any other words and I didn't have any luck, so I'm sure it's nothing.

Are there any other decoding programs to try?

I'm not sure that the Acheron folk would give us the same kind of code anyways. The previous message was a vigenere cypher, so do you guys think this one works the same way? I'm not so sure.

I think the key is in the bottom of the message..

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 2:55 pm

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**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 2:58 pm

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Nyght_Shyft - Happy Hunting
"Victory? Defeat? Irrelevant. What's important is the battle, and nothing else."

Duluoz

I doubt that they'd throw another vigenere cipher at us so soon. I like the 25x25 grid theory. The last two lines are standard ASCII, which are easily converted into decimal and other formats. The only problem is how to translate these values into coordinates on the grid. Hmm...

Heh. I'm never going to get any real work done.

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 3:06 pm

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dashcat

Has anyone else noticed that the last segment of the last two lines is a live email address? In my letter it shows up a different color and when I click on it it takes me to outlook (email program).

._%g*@:"/c -

I guess it's possible that outlook is reading this as an address because of the @ blah blah blah but it doesn't read the other @ sections as addresses.

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 3:16 pm

teeman11 · Kl00 Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 42

One thing I've noticed is that the the foward and the back slash are in the same location on both lines.

y"&,@l%\v;>!f)q$}i*t+#^/b
a?=s^-_\@d#&,o(._%g*@:"/c

the are 7 symbols then the back slash then 15 symbols then the forward slash followed by 1 symbol.

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 3:26 pm

EricL1st · Boot Joined: 29 Aug 2003 Posts: 43

I haven't tried it, but perhaps the grid is a table like a Vigenere table that we use somehow to decrypt the symbol code.

Just a thought.

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 3:35 pm

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Caterpillar

The slash "b" on the first line and the slash "c" on the second may be an indicator of some sort....of what I dunno, but it looks sort of sequential...

y"&,@l%\v;>!f)q$}i*t+#^/b
a?=s^-_\@d#&,o(._%g*@:"/c

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 3:44 pm

dishboy

I haven't done much of anything with this today because I'm at work, but this morning the first thing I tried doing was a ROT-13 decryption on the string, and the interesting thing was that it decrypted to mostly garbage, but interspersed in the garbage were certain words, like "HELP", "NET", "PIPE" (or "PIPER"). I was thinking that might not be coincidence, but who knows. Maybe we're supposed to organize like a grid, decrypt (using some simple decryption like rot-13) and then use the "key" at the bottom to find keywords, kind of like a word search puzzle?

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 4:12 pm

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Ehsan · Entrenched Joined: 09 May 2003 Posts: 992

Converting to ASCII codes gives you:

**Posted:** Wed Sep 10, 2003 4:14 pm