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The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

montrealgazette.com

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#111

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…

Sounds like someone got confused between 'dark matter' and 'dark net'.

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#112
post #9
post #6

> Tor [... is] estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web Am I missing something? That obviously isn't correct.

You are not missing something the author has obviously mixed up the "dark web" and tor.

Darkweb includes intranets.

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#113
post #107

Is that going again? I did most of it a couple of years ago, got to the personalized e-mail stage before I decided to work on other things. It was strange how the pictures got put up all around the world at the same time, though.

Easy to organize with craigslist.

true; some of the stuff wasn't though.

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#114
post #33

"Nerd sniping", http://xkcd.com/356/

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.

His xkcd talk at Google is we worth googling :)

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#115
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mysterious. Rarely does one say this about js, or ruby.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat You did say "rarely".

now that's interesting.

and didn't have to fly anywhere to scan a qr code.

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#116
post #23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not missing something the author has obviously mixed up the "dark web" and tor.

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…

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.

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#117
post #30

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.

Ha, totally. Especially coming across a "clue" like that on 4chan, I would expect the end result to be goatse or something similar.

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#118

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…

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/. :)

Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

#119
post #43

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. 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 Goo…

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.

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