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.
The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
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Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#32We 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.
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#33"Nerd sniping", http://xkcd.com/356/
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#34Parts of this sound like Valve's crazy Potato Fools Day. http://valvearg.com/wiki/Valve_PotatoFoolsDay_ARG_Wiki?title... It involved slow-scan TV images encoded in sound files, and Mayan calendar decoding etc.
Perhaps they're related. Gabe Newell is really taking great lengths to obscure the coming of Half-Life (2: Episode) 3.
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#35Earlier 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…
Even so, there's no way in hell the "darknet" is 5000x larger than the "surface" web.
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#36Earlier 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…
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". ;-)
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#37This looks really fun.
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#38Here is full story of 2013 hunt and all the puzzles: http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com/wiki/What_Happened_Part_1...
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#39Earlier 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…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
These are three completely different things.
Re: The Internet mystery that has the world baffled
#40>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.