unforum

[Wishi-san]

The page has gone and vanished again from dreadhouse.com

I've got mirrors up for as many of the sites as possible (including pages which have been removed, that I could find). Some of it I've had to build manually.

Managed to get the UrbanHunt flash menu working with a little filename guesswork. Some of the Flash redirects to the actual sites, can't do much about that but well, it's ok.

[Nogwater]

For future reference, I did a frequency analysis of the run length of the the same symbol (dot or dash) in morse code. I started with about one page of text, and used a CGI converter to create the equivalent morse code. I stripped out everything that wasn't a dot or a dash, and then wrote a program do do some counting for me. Here's what I cam up with:

number of characters: 15623
number of changes: 7626
Frequencies of the following string lengths:
1: 0.53
2: 0.22
3: 0.10
4: 0.05
5: 0.04
6: 0.01
7: 0.01
(there are more, but they get very small).

Here's the same analysis done with similar text, but checking ASCII binary:

number of characters: 48456
changes of changes: 24840
1: 0.46
2: 0.30
3: 0.11
4: 0.06
5: 0.00
6: 0.03
7: 0.00
(no runs were longer than 7).

It's a slightly different curve. This should give us a hint in the future (but not tell us for sure) if something was encoded as ASCII binary or morse code.

[dishboy]

[PaleFigure]

[dishboy]

Yes, and in fact that's most likely the correct interpretation - I emailed that address immediately after the solve. But I didn't want to leave any stone unturned, especially since we hadn't heard back from jc yet, so I assumed it was a possibility that we hadn't taken the correct action...

[Nogwater]

For future use, I created an even better morse code decoder!
You can find it here: http://www.apejet.org/sites/uh/morse2.php

I'm pretty sure that if we'd had this tool, the puzzle would have been solved in less than an hour. Oh well... live and learn.

Please test it out, and let me know if you find any problems.