Forums

John Casasanta made a reference to the R.E.M. song 'What's the frequency Kenneth'. The resemblance of the album's logo with the mechanism on the front page got me thinking (and trying).

Any luck?

“Excuse me, I need to soak my brain in acid now.”
“I took Craft Disturbing Mental Image as my feat last level.”
“Maybe my ears, too.”
—Order of the Stick

My thoughts:

The fact that the 'maze' image on the home page rotates suggests use of a rotation cipher.  There may be other treatments either before or after using the rotation cipher, so if you try all 25 and nothing, see if doing another transformation before or after does anything.  For example...

The fact that the Tweetie image with the hand-drawn icons that also appear in the lights on the home page after twisting on iOS are Reversed (mirror-image) suggests that the letters/numbers need to be reversed.  This might involve conversion to binary and doing a logical not of all bits, then converting back to ASCII/UTF-8 (or, as they are in pairs, perhaps UTF-16).  Or maybe converting to binary and then reversing the order before converting back to one of the mentioned character encodings.  Or maybe reversing each pair.  Dunno.

Also, does anyone know of a code that involves both numbers and letters, but is case-insensitive?  A simple caesar cipher usually just operates on the alphabet and not numbers.  Maybe the rotation is still the way to go, but the numbers mixed in are either red herrings or, extracted, provide a separate clue from the letters themselves.

Just some thoughts.

Eschew obfuscation

Caesar cyphers can be easily expanded to alphanumeric alphabets, since it acts as a standard Mono-alphabetic Substitution Cipher (MASC). Other MASCs work similarly, allowing for any initial subset. The two-unit grouping suggests a Code, rather than a Cipher. This would involve a 2-1, 2-2, or similar MASC. I have not yet run it through any of these, but a standard MASC for this is rot13/48, the latter of which is not case-insensitive, but does include numbers. A base64 translation works too, but provides no useful information here.

“Excuse me, I need to soak my brain in acid now.”
“I took Craft Disturbing Mental Image as my feat last level.”
“Maybe my ears, too.”
—Order of the Stick