Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

[jjarmoc]

Just curious if there's a walkthrough for this event. I spent about an hour with the puzzle in the program, and after trying a bunch of things (various ROTs, Caesar cipher, etc..) I ended up substituting vowels for 1 and consonants for 0. This left me a binary string that when converted to decimal yielded a backwards 10.x.x.x IP address. I don't have my notes with me right now, or I'd post the actual address. Anyhow, from there I got stuck. I put a laptop on the lan and trying hitting a few well known ports but couldn't get anywhere. I didn't have a machine with any decent tools, so I didn't take it much further..

I'm just dying to know if my answer was right.

Also, was the binary at the bottom of the pages in any way related? I played around with it for a while, but didn't end up with anything that seemed interesting.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

is it just me or do contest like this fizzle out every year? folks at defcon aren't typically capable of, in the short alcohol-blurred weekend, following all the crazy and meticulous steps that people lay out in the games like "Where's Leeto" etc.

i think Lost has it right on the money in terms of number of steps, degree of difficulty, etc. these sorts of contests should be about solving the the problems, not spending all of your time seeking them out.

just my $0.02

[nous]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

The reason this contest didn't come off had nothing to do with a lack of interest. Rather, we had people hitting the (correct) IP address within a couple of hours of registration opening. The complete fizzle had everything to do with problems we had getting infrastructure in place in order for gameplay to proceed beyond the puzzle in the program. We kept trying until Saturday evening (when we had originally intended to end the game) to make it happen, but in the end we failed.

I cannot tell you how upset we were. My boyfriend, nkryptr, and I spent several months developing the game. We had numerous people contribute time and energy. I'm not quite ready to talk about it, but I knew that questions would come...

I had intended to post here with an acknowledgement of what happened, some thank you's for special people, and a promise that we're not giving up. We worked hard to come up with a balanced game that had difficulty and easier puzzles. We invoked a lot of old school stuff along with skills we think are important going forward. We aren't going to reveal all because we intend to reuse much of it. I only hope that this year's failure doesn't put folks off trying again next year.

I'm so, so sorry,

nous.

PS The solution for the program puzzle: after you solve the "Jumble-style" game you had four numbers in a sequence seperated by dots. Those were page numbers. You convert the octets on those pages and get a non-RFC1918 address. We had a bunch of stuff set up on that address that I'm not going into because they'll be appearing next year.

[theprez98]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

We aren't going to reveal all because we intend to reuse much of it. I only hope that this year's failure doesn't put folks off trying again next year.

Great idea. I started to participate this year, but didn't get very far.

[theprez98]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

is it just me or do contest like this fizzle out every year? folks at defcon aren't typically capable of, in the short alcohol-blurred weekend, following all the crazy and meticulous steps that people lay out in the games like "Where's Leeto" etc.

Its difficult to say. In the sense that the Shmooganography contest at Shmoocon was somewhat similar, I had a blast doing that.

The biggest problem with those sorts of contests (and like LosT's) is that a team of a few people adds people through friends, shoulder-surfing, cooperation, etc., and ends up into a 'Team Everyone' of half the con. Not that this is by default a bad idea, but in the end, you get very small amount of satisfaction for having contributed one small idea to the entire contest.

[TheCotMan]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

The reason this contest didn't come off had nothing to do with a lack of interest. Rather, we had people hitting the (correct) IP address within a couple of hours of registration opening. The complete fizzle had everything to do with problems we had getting infrastructure in place in order for gameplay to proceed beyond the puzzle in the program. We kept trying until Saturday evening (when we had originally intended to end the game) to make it happen, but in the end we failed.

:-)

With Leeto Burrito, it was lack of knowledge about there being a contest.
With this, it was a time crunch with planning.

They say the 3rd time is a charm.

I'd like to encourage you all to try again next year. If you know for sure this contest will take place, we can add a forum for it as a contest so you can generate discussion about this. Based on the timeline for last year, we'll probably roll out new forums in November or December.

[nous]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

With this, it was a time crunch with planning.

That's not exactly the case - at least, not on our end.

They say the 3rd time is a charm.

We've already discussed using this as a minor theme in next year's game.

I'd like to encourage you all to try again next year. If you know for sure this contest will take place, we can add a forum for it as a contest so you can generate discussion about this. Based on the timeline for last year, we'll probably roll out new forums in November or December.

One of the reasons we didn't have a forum created earlier was that we were still debating whether or not to make this an immersive (or alternate-reality) game vs. breaking the fourth wall. Once DT (through our liaison) made requests for us to use certain DC resources, we adjusted things and determined we had to acknowlege that the game was a game. We had intended to plant some clues in posts on the forums on Thursday before con, but at that point we were dealing with certain difficulties with infrastructure (which eventually caused the collapse of the whole bloody thing).

[TheCotMan]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

ABout time crunch with planning...

That's not exactly the case - at least, not on our end.

Sorry. My mistake. I re-read your post and "time to plan" wasn't mentioned at all in the statement in availability of resources and infrastructure.

[Voltage Spike]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

The solution for the program puzzle: after you solve the "Jumble-style" game you had four numbers in a sequence seperated by dots. Those were page numbers.

Damn, I completely missed that. I solved the puzzle and assumed it was just a straight IP address (which was ping-able at various points throughout the con, but there were odd responses and who knows where they came from). Due to the presence of STX/ETX in the message, I assumed that the "header" (first few page codes) yielded the proper IP address.

I'm still curious what was meant by DT's mention of clues being in the WiFi traffic. I tried sniffing for a while, but nothing really jumped out at me, and it would seem that any contest traffic would be overwhelmed by the torrent of general network traffic. Unless, of course, there was a special AP setup somewhere...

[nous]

Re: Is there a solve/walkthru anywhere?

&

I'm still curious what was meant by DT's mention of clues being in the WiFi traffic. I tried sniffing for a while, but nothing really jumped out at me, and it would seem that any contest traffic would be overwhelmed by the torrent of general network traffic. Unless, of course, there was a special AP setup somewhere...

We didn't turn anything on because of the aforementioned infrastructure issues. We were unable to make our scoring system available. Again, I'm so very sorry... We're working on different ways of doing certain things next year to obviate some of the points of failure.