I used to harbor similar fantasies (witness my username and the television series 'Pretender'). But you can't just put some supergenius 8-year-old in a special school and have 'em pop out with the diligence required to achieve great things early in adolescence.
I think the author got it right and d23 hid that in the ellipsis.
>TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines.
>Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks.
[edit: To be perfectly clear, I was only highlighting what was actually said. I don't know anything about the dark webs.]
Tor is a tiny wart on the Internet's nose. Even the darkweb of which it is a part probably isn't that large. The statement is just an attempt by the author to add color and drama to his story.
It's quite obvious from your very own quote that it's the author of the article who's confused about the three (!) different notions of unindexable contents larger that the indexable one (deep web) vs. anonymous p2p file sharing networks (darknets) vs. Tor hidden services. I'm tempted to call this "a confusion hat-trick". ;-)
However, the deep web (non indexable content) is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web. The source I found [0] is from 2001 (sry!) and talks of 400-550 times the surface web.
[0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=tex...
The darknet is a tiny subset of the "deep web," which includes anything that isn't publicly accessible. Examples would include bank accounts, settings pages on Facebook, etc. I'm fully ready to believe that the latter is much, much larger than everything else, but the author clearly has the two conflated.
I guess the way it's written it's technically true - if you count the darknet as part of the deepweb, then it is indeed in the deepweb that you find the nasty bits. But that's extremely disingenuous, and it seems more likely that the author doesn't understand it.
I only just stumbled upon a different article [1] recently, but I'm not surprised why it's not a well-known phenomenon. This puzzle seems to be deliberately exclusive, and most people don't have the time to 'play' whatever game is going on. There hasn't been any kind of fulfilling conclusion that would make for a compelling story.
This is actually what I was thinking since a lot of the same motifs are used. Obscure literature quotes, cryptography, mythology and red herrings.
wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed he was working on cahoots with whatever person or organization is running this. With stuff happening all around the world, you'd expect some intern or low level employee would spill the beans sooner or later. I'm surprised nothing has really be released yet on who or what is running this.
I remember back, maybe ten or 12 years ago, there was another difficult online game/puzzle called, if memory serves, notpr0n.com. It was pretty difficult, requiring lateral thinking, some amount of technical skill, and some strange trivia knowledge. I feel like this is just another version of that: hard internet puzzle. I'm also not discounting that this is some sort of ARG for something or another.
Genuinely made me laugh. I always crack a smile when I see someone use the "you probably wouldn't get it" cop-out (yes, I realise you're making a mockery of the concept) to avoid explaining something that they evidently don't understand either. I seem to see this fairly often in large, complex fields like mathematics or complex systems programming from people who either have an agenda or are trying to bullshit their way through a job for which they're under-qualified.
According to http://www.onlineconversion.com/prime.htm, the number 845145127 is not prime since it has the factor 503. So the sentence should read "By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new number...".
The "huh" is that if you multiply any two non-one numbers together, the result can not be prime since the two input numbers are factors of the resultant number.
I created an account just to say how much I agree with this statement. There's also an interesting cultural difference here.. in many cultures, there's no such thing as "wasted" time. Nautil.us had an interesting article on this.
http://nautil.us/blog/for-billions-of-people-wasting-time-ma...
You would be surprised. The amount of creative and intelligent expression that anonymity allows makes it a magnet for smart people trying to get a break from the culture of 'satisfiers'.
Mostly it amuzes [and targets] people who feel a never ending desire to prove their own worth by taking tests, and going through ladders, games and rules imposed by others, presumably "smarter and more powerful".
Someone has to say loudly "who gives a shit about this crap" and just move on.
Or, maybe, it amuses and targets people who love an intellectual challenge? Or who love discovery and mystery?
Think about it - you have an anonymous entity posting on an internet forum, leaving an elaborate string of clues involving multiple technologies and real world locations, solved collaboratively by a bunch of people all around the world. How is that not in the slightest bit intriguing? Evidently there are a lot of people "who give a shit about this crap".
Hacker News is known for its intelligent reader-base, but also for its critical tone. Whilst comments can often appear cycnical or pessimistic, they are usually also insightful and truthful. But I think people assume that its overall negative tone is the norm, and make negative comments without much thought or rationale behind them, and feel like they're "contributing". Your comment is a completely baseless claim, and contributes nothing but vitriol.
So, what are chances that TOR website was made from the start to announce that "talented" individuals had been found? And rumors about emails were just circulated by organizers.
We think of cryptography as the best way of information hiding. But it is not the only way. This sounds like some group is testing the limits of non-cryptographic information hiding. In particular, multiple possible messages encoded. How do you craft a message so that everyone is led to the decoy except those who know the secret key? And the size of the plaintext is completely hidden. Most likely this is a group associated with an intelligence agency, although they are likely not running an official project. They have an idea and are exploring it for now.
Interestingly, the NSA has access to enough Internet traffic to be able to identify people who are playing this game, even if they don't get to the final round.
Aha I remember him talking about that problem in a talk at Google! He got that question in a screening interview for Google itself, and be got nerd-sniped :)
Apparently he now this ks about it every time he uses public rest rooms.
>For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive — proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organization of talented people. But who? Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately, and disappointingly, promote a new movie or car...Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed I Love Bees ARG campaign.
Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization."
I didn't do much detective work on I Love Bees, but somehow one of my friends was paying attention when dozens of GPS coordinates were released. One of them was clearly pointing to the student center at NCSU. We were freshman living on campus (2004-2005) and we simply walked there at the prescribed time. There were two other guys standing there next to the payphones:
"Watcha doing?"
"Oh, just waiting on a phone call."
We all laughed. My friend answered one of the phones and had to answer some trivia question about the ILB backstory. It was quite surreal. Again, my pattern matching indicates a PR stunt more than a recruiting tool (there seems way too much fluff for that), but who knows.
Color me skeptical, but it seems like bullshit to me.
The newspaper article has basically one source. The Wikipedia article dates from the day the newspaper article was published, and only has the article (and a reprint) as its sources.
The "original image" linked to on this site also does not contain the plain-text "TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR" etc. described, according to my hex editor.
Interesting. I think you're on to something here. The wikia stuff seems to have been created in August 2013. The subreddit /r/cicada appears to be 11 month old, but the article implies that Eriksson discovered it in the beginning of 2012. And it's virtually empty. Hmmm...
Edit: oh well, nevermind. A google search between 1/1/2010 and 1/1/2012 returns plenty of stuff, for example a discussion [1] on the xkcd forums from January 2012.
However, the "original" PNG image linked in the article does not contain the plain-text described in the article (at least, not visible in my hex editor). The pixels do contain some artifacts in the lower bits, though.
It doesn't take much digging to find sources older than that, really. ;) For instance, you can check out my own post about it at http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/, originally written mid-January 2012. The oldest comment on the post is from 2012-01-14. There were articles written about this back in 2012 as well btw.
PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that was interviewed for the article in question.
Fascinating story, but that article reads like the journalist took troll stories from 4c as sources. Seriously, whoever wrote this appears to be clueless.
> "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"
Excuse me?
> "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"
Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.
> > "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"
> Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.
They seem to have confused some concepts. But the deep web isn't something mythical made up by 4chan trolls or science fiction writers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web
Your wikipedia link would include my bank account as part of the deep web, since it's hidden behind a password login. Good to know I'm keeping company with human trafficking rings and terrorist networks.
Is a Daily Telegraph writer, don't expect scientific literacy.
I remember reading an article about Fred Hoyle, in a copy of the Telegraph that I found on a train, where they described him as a 'famous astrologer', so them not understanding what a prime number is doesn't really surprise me.
This is a little tangential, but this thread made me think of this:
> Well, Professors Kimball and Smith, welcome to journalism, where “bad at math” isn’t just a destructive idea — it’s a badge of honor. It’s your admission to the club. It’s woven into the very fabric of identity as a journalist.
"There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"
That made my eyes bleed, but OA has given me a superb Maths revision lesson for some bored teenagers. I'd already planned to get them decoding a ROT13 text by reference to letter frequencies, and now this 'quest' as well. Nice.
But how do you feel about the story itself? Lots of journalism has inaccuracies, but I'd rather know what you think about such a weird and intriguing phenomenon.
Most people here understand quite well that primes are not closed under multiplication, by definition, and it wasn't really central to the story. Neither was their weird understanding of Tor.
The primes in question = 509, 503 and 3301. 509 and 503 was the width and height of the image. Obviously, you don't get a new prime after multiplying these numbers together though. ;) For those who don't find this immediately obvious, keep in mind the definition of a prime ...
Well, he obviously has misunderstood both TOR and the definition of a darknet. The surface web _is_ just the tip of the iceberg though, but that's because it's defined as the part of the web being indexed by public search engines.
Your private Facebook posts, your Gmail inbox, private Dropbox files, and so on, are all parts of the so called deep web according to this definition. Due to this, it's not a very meaningful concept, and says absolutely nothing about the size of any "human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks".
PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that Chris interviewed for the article in question, and for anyone who would like more detailed and less sensationalist information about the Cicada 3301 stuff, feel free to read my writeup at http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/. :)
118 comments
[ 109 ms ] story [ 6932 ms ] threadsubtitle is "Cicada 3301 online mystery enthralls codebreakers around the world"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/
Very popular with the teens in my family with fantasies of being whisked away 'cause they're just so damn smart.
Am I missing something? That obviously isn't correct.
>TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines.
>Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks.
[edit: To be perfectly clear, I was only highlighting what was actually said. I don't know anything about the dark webs.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
These are three completely different things.
I guess the way it's written it's technically true - if you count the darknet as part of the deepweb, then it is indeed in the deepweb that you find the nasty bits. But that's extremely disingenuous, and it seems more likely that the author doesn't understand it.
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10468112/The-...
From a year ago.
wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed he was working on cahoots with whatever person or organization is running this. With stuff happening all around the world, you'd expect some intern or low level employee would spill the beans sooner or later. I'm surprised nothing has really be released yet on who or what is running this.
http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest
I think I made is to minus 15 with a friend. I might start again...
Huh?
-- Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com August 9, 2002
And each stage clearly has solutions.
-- Bertrand Russell
-- Asher Roth
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
Someone has to say loudly "who gives a shit about this crap" and just move on.
You did say "rarely".
and didn't have to fly anywhere to scan a qr code.
Think about it - you have an anonymous entity posting on an internet forum, leaving an elaborate string of clues involving multiple technologies and real world locations, solved collaboratively by a bunch of people all around the world. How is that not in the slightest bit intriguing? Evidently there are a lot of people "who give a shit about this crap".
Hacker News is known for its intelligent reader-base, but also for its critical tone. Whilst comments can often appear cycnical or pessimistic, they are usually also insightful and truthful. But I think people assume that its overall negative tone is the norm, and make negative comments without much thought or rationale behind them, and feel like they're "contributing". Your comment is a completely baseless claim, and contributes nothing but vitriol.
Interestingly, the NSA has access to enough Internet traffic to be able to identify people who are playing this game, even if they don't get to the final round.
Apparently he now this ks about it every time he uses public rest rooms.
His xkcd talk at Google is we worth googling :)
Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization."
I didn't do much detective work on I Love Bees, but somehow one of my friends was paying attention when dozens of GPS coordinates were released. One of them was clearly pointing to the student center at NCSU. We were freshman living on campus (2004-2005) and we simply walked there at the prescribed time. There were two other guys standing there next to the payphones:
"Watcha doing?"
"Oh, just waiting on a phone call."
We all laughed. My friend answered one of the phones and had to answer some trivia question about the ILB backstory. It was quite surreal. Again, my pattern matching indicates a PR stunt more than a recruiting tool (there seems way too much fluff for that), but who knows.
The newspaper article has basically one source. The Wikipedia article dates from the day the newspaper article was published, and only has the article (and a reprint) as its sources.
http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com doesn't seem to have any activity from more than 6 days ago.
I'm really not a cyber-sleuth like the guy in the story, but the first two pages of Google didn't show anything from before 11/26/2013.
I'm sure the puzzles are engaging, but this looks like fake buzz.
[0] https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cicada-3301-wiki
Edit: oh well, nevermind. A google search between 1/1/2010 and 1/1/2012 returns plenty of stuff, for example a discussion [1] on the xkcd forums from January 2012.
[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=79579
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31932/chasing-cicada-explorin...
PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that was interviewed for the article in question.
> "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"
Excuse me?
> "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"
Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.
> Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.
They seem to have confused some concepts. But the deep web isn't something mythical made up by 4chan trolls or science fiction writers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web
>> Private Web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).
so, yeah.
Is a Daily Telegraph writer, don't expect scientific literacy.
I remember reading an article about Fred Hoyle, in a copy of the Telegraph that I found on a train, where they described him as a 'famous astrologer', so them not understanding what a prime number is doesn't really surprise me.
This is high-school math.
> Well, Professors Kimball and Smith, welcome to journalism, where “bad at math” isn’t just a destructive idea — it’s a badge of honor. It’s your admission to the club. It’s woven into the very fabric of identity as a journalist.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/matt-waite-how-i-faced-my-f...
That made my eyes bleed, but OA has given me a superb Maths revision lesson for some bored teenagers. I'd already planned to get them decoding a ROT13 text by reference to letter frequencies, and now this 'quest' as well. Nice.
Most people here understand quite well that primes are not closed under multiplication, by definition, and it wasn't really central to the story. Neither was their weird understanding of Tor.
> 2147483629*2147483647
[1] 4.611686e+18
Well, he obviously has misunderstood both TOR and the definition of a darknet. The surface web _is_ just the tip of the iceberg though, but that's because it's defined as the part of the web being indexed by public search engines.
Your private Facebook posts, your Gmail inbox, private Dropbox files, and so on, are all parts of the so called deep web according to this definition. Due to this, it's not a very meaningful concept, and says absolutely nothing about the size of any "human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks".
PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that Chris interviewed for the article in question, and for anyone who would like more detailed and less sensationalist information about the Cicada 3301 stuff, feel free to read my writeup at http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/. :)