Hack.net

[Structural Integrity]

This "puzzle" has kept The GameDev Lounge busy for over two months. No one seems to be able to solve step 3.

The first step is the page with the image, where a link is hidden in the HTML source (oh, that's old) and leads to www.ninebows.com .

ninebows holds a binary sequence when converted to ASCII says "pls get /two". People at GameDev were smart enough to go to the folder /two on the same server.

Now, this comes up with a number sequence no one has been able to solve in two months.
27 26 30+3 11+1 15 22+1 23-1 23-1 22-2

They tried everything from taking the weirdest numerical bases, converting it to text to converting it to assembly bytecode. They even asked the author doing a WHOIS on the domain name and e-mailing the admin. He said it should be obvious as an average middle school student should be able to solve it.
Does any of you recognise this sequence? See a pattern? Or is this somesort of hoax?

[Dace]

hack the planet

[queball]

Originally Posted by Structural Integrity

The first step is the page with the image, where a link is hidden in the HTML source (oh, that's old) and leads to www.ninebows.com .

Or click on the dot.

[Deepflow]

itd be hilarious if there WAS no answer

[god113]

Eugh. I've spent hours looking at this.

I guess that either:

It's something overly complex and the numbers give a word or IP address that take you to the next website.

It's simple and just something people havn't thought of.

Or a hoax. An evil evil hoax.

[Leshy]

< clickable

[Marilyn Manson]

Tried ****ing it up the ass?

[Bravestarr]

Originally Posted by Structural Integrity

Now, this comes up with a number sequence no one has been able to solve in two months.
27 26 30+3 11+1 15 22+1 23-1 23-1 22-2

They look quite like archery scores, with the +/- 1-3 after some of the numbers, nine bows, nine 'scores'. Dunno if that gives you anymore to go on

[roadrunner_0]

Originally Posted by Leshy

< clickable

whoever came up with that is an absolute bastard

[JetLinus]

It could also look like dates of the month, you know, all being between 1 and 31.

I think "evaluating" the numbers (i.e. 30+3 becomes 33) doesn't make sense -- why else would they give us this additional info?

[JetLinus]

Originally Posted by Bravestarr

They look quite like archery scores, with the +/- 1-3 after some of the numbers, nine bows, nine 'scores'. Dunno if that gives you anymore to go on

So what does this mean? Good scores? Bad scores?

How do they look like on the "target". Could you sort of "draw" a picture, if you put the scores back on the "map"?
[you know what I mean]

[djbass]

Has anyone considered the possibility it could be a reference to the Nine Bows in Egyptian mythology? They look like potential page/paragraph numbers to me.

[Structural Integrity]

Originally Posted by JetLinus

So what does this mean? Good scores? Bad scores?

How do they look like on the "target". Could you sort of "draw" a picture, if you put the scores back on the "map"?
[you know what I mean]

Wikipedia doesn't tell.

[Androme]

www.ninebows.com/# /

&3 = part 3 / address 3
newline carriage return (next line basically)
# " " (" " theres a space inbetween)

Anyway, Im thinking the next step isnt on www.ninebows.com - because a google search for inurl:ninebows.com gives only a few pages.

Looking up what someone else found - HomeSeer0 login (port :8081) I'm pretty sure that login is not part of the game, a quick google of "HomeSeer" (what the login/password is for) brings up this site. www.homeseer.com/

"Control lighting, security, HVAC and home theatre all from one central point with your PC. Access your PC via the web, your home
network, PDA, telephone or voice!"

unless the prize for figureing out the number sequence is control of this guys house........

[djbass]

Originally Posted by Androme2

Anyway, Im thinking the next step isnt on www.ninebows.com - because a google search for inurl:ninebows.com gives only a few pages.

I can't imagine why anyone would have thought so anyway. Especially when I read all these forums stating "oh oh.. Google doesn't report any other pages so there is no puzzle 3". Of course there's no ****ing pages reported moron! Google can't see pages unless there's a link it can crawl to get there, if there's no link to a page it doesn't mean that page does not exist.. learn how the ****ing internet works you n00b... *shortly followed by me beating his head with a rather large technical manual.

[Kurashima]

And how many alphabets in the world have more than 26 letters?
Chinese?
Latin?
Arabic?

Worth looking into.

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

And how many alphabets in the world have more than 26 letters?
Chinese?
Latin?
Arabic?

Don't forget Geordie.

[Kurashima]

Originally Posted by Marilyn Manson

Don't forget Geordie.

No , it only has 6 or 7 letters.

Welsh has even less. The only language in the world without vowels.

[Leshy]

Cuneiform has hundreds of different characters!

[Kurashima]

Originally Posted by Leshy

Cuneiform has hundreds of different characters!

Can you fluently speak Cuneiform?

And can you translate those numbers to symbolss in Cuneiform, and then to the English Alphabet?

[Leshy]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

Can you fluently speak Cuneiform?

I don't think anyone can, nor has anyone ever been able to, speak a method of writing.

And can you translate those numbers to symbolss in Cuneiform, and then to the English Alphabet?

No, there is no particular order in cuneiform symbols like there is in our alphabet.

[djbass]

Originally Posted by djbass

Has anyone considered the possibility it could be a reference to the Nine Bows in Egyptian mythology? They look like potential page/paragraph numbers to me.

Repeated for significance....

[roadrunner_0]

jesus, i seriously doubt that a middle schooler could solve them then though

[Androme]

I know Tamil and the alphabet has > 246 letters

[JetLinus]

Ok, I just assume it's NOT something about really complicated foreign languages.
And at SOME point, it must have to do with some IT stuff, no?

[1-X]

Originally Posted by JetLinus

Ok, I just assume it's NOT something about really complicated foreign languages.
And at SOME point, it must have to do with some IT stuff, no?

yes, judging by the previous two puzzles, it's going to be something geek related

[Androme]

Adding em up, taking the number and nocking them into letters - 284339 - If you do the ASCII for these indivudually you get: ☻◘♦♥♥○ - doing the entire # you get: │ - doing them for every 2 numbers you get: ∟+'

for a second I thought it would be a html colour, but it came out - BHDCCI - so that screwed that idea.

[midge5]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

Welsh has even less. The only language in the world without vowels.

I'm not sure how serious you are here but Welsh has more vowels than English.

[Zword]

27 26 30+3 11+1 15 22+1 23-1 23-1 22-2

27+26+33 +12+15+23+22+22+20 = 200

[JonnyBGood]

I think the answer might be something slightly more complicated than just 200. I noticed that last night myself but I couldn't think of anything that is intrinsically involved with the number 200.

[Leshy]

The only geek thing that I can think of involved with the number 200 is the HTTP Status Code 200, which is the code returned to the web browser for a succesful page request - the famous 404 being the one sent when a page or file cannot be found at the specified location.

The page's HTTP headers seem fairly inconspicuous though:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 19:27:06 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4
Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 20:58:07 GMT
ETag: "23f242-ed-3f7de2df"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 237
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
X-Pad: avoid browser bug

[JetLinus]

Again: If they wanted us to use 33 and 12, why did they explicitly give 30+3 and 11+1?
It's not like these calculations are the real "crack" you've got to do...

So I'd guess, simplifying this sequence of numbers is not the right way...


Edit: Wuuuuuuuh, this Leshy has got some niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice idea there... ;-)

[Leshy]

Originally Posted by JetLinus

Again: If they wanted us to use 33 and 12, why did they explicitly give 30+3 and 11+1?

It might be a red herring, although I'm inclined to agree with you.

[1-X]

Originally Posted by Androme2

Adding em up, taking the number and nocking them into letters - 284339 - If you do the ASCII for these indivudually you get: ☻◘♦♥♥○ - doing the entire # you get: │ - doing them for every 2 numbers you get: ∟+'

for a second I thought it would be a html colour, but it came out - BHDCCI - so that screwed that idea.

ignoring the spaces and doing the sum to get 284339 was the only thing I did to that range that seemed to make sense. Like you I was then stuck doing something with the result... eg take them as hex pairs and you get (C9 and that's no kind of answer

has anyone else tried looking at them as "calculator words"?... eg.284339 = beehbz (upside down etc)

Shame it wasn't 80085

[Androme]

Lol 1-X.

Looking at BHDCCI and Googling it came up with PHDCCI but that didn't really give me any useful links.

If I did the same but for 3 numbers I get: ∟S - which looks like a perpendicular line to S - so what's perpendicular to S?

[skiddy]

I thought about adding the individual numbers up, to get 27 26 33 12 15 23 22 22 20

then making them letters of the alphabet, although that wouldn't work with 27 or 33.

So add the two together

9 8 6 3 6 5 4 4 2

I H F C F E D D B

But that comes up to nothing useful either. I'm pretty sure that it means **** all to everyone else but the person who wrote it probably thought it was very simple.

[Emperor Rozenski]

All of the numbers used to make up the numbers are in the range of 0-7...

Could they be Octal Numbers?

Octals?: 
27 26 30+3 11+1 15 22+1 23-1 23-1 22-2

Changed to Denary: 
23 22 27   10    13 19   18   18   16

Changed to letters of the alphabet (except 27):
w  v       j     m  s    r    r    p

Means nothing to me.

Or Octal +/- strings?

Octals?: 
27 26 30+3 11+1 15 22+1 23-1 23-1 22-2

Octals & Strings:
23 22 24+3 9+1 13 18+1 19-1 19-1 18-2

w  v  x+3  i+1 m  r+1  s-1  s-1  r-2

Still nothing. Maybe someone else can see something I can't? Or maybe I'm Iooking in totally the wrong direction!

I had a look at Octal to Hex to Alphabet got this by adding the numbers together at the start (30+3 = 33 etc):

qpabadmllj (where the hex came out as a letter i left it as the hex letter)

By going along the Number+string method I got:

qpujdmllj

...again both look like utter rubbish to me!

[djbass]

Well, assuming they are characters, then the 2nd & 3rd letters from the right are the same, the most common letter in the english alhpabet is e. So replacing those to start with:

27 26 30+3 11+1 15 22+1 e e 22-2

Does it help in figuring the rest though, I've already tried using the e's as a base and referencing the rest of the alphabet from it but it didn't spell anything of significance, plus 11+1 & 15 would be outside the range unless you wrap it back around to z.

[xtrasyn]

For me, the three plusses and three minusses point to something with six positions.

Don´t ask me how or why please

[Stew]

Originally Posted by Bravestarr

They look quite like archery scores, with the +/- 1-3 after some of the numbers, nine bows, nine 'scores'. Dunno if that gives you anymore to go on

This makes sense given the URL, although Excel thinks the answer is 25.

[xtrasyn]

Originally Posted by queball

Or click on the dot.

That was so lame indeed

[xtrasyn]

THANK YOU VERY ****ING MUCH - AS IF I HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT!

Anyway

If you calculate you get

27 26 33 12 15 23 22 22 20

The difference between 27 and 26 is 1, between 26 and 33 is 7 etc

You get

1 7 21 3 8 1 0 2

In sequence you get

0 1 1 2 3 7 8 21

But the first reads as an IP (172.138.10.2) wich holds no web pages btw.

The second looks like a range I´ve seen before but can not place.

[xtrasyn]

NMap of the IP however shows port 80 and 1755 open

Now this 1755 thing was something i´ve seen before again but where oh where

[Knight Theamion]

google doesnt help us here

[JammyJim]

fibonnaci keeps coming up in some of the stuff ive read....

[Ragnarak]

Some of the numbers people are getting look like they could be ICQ IDs or something. If they linked to an ICQ bot that would be pretty cool though it's probably a bit too much of a stretch.

[Ragnarak]

Originally Posted by xtrasyn

NMap of the IP however shows port 80 and 1755 open

Now this 1755 thing was something i´ve seen before again but where oh where

Microsoft Media Server, with TCP-based transport (MMST) TCP port 1755 ?

[Leshy]

Originally Posted by JammyJim

fibonnaci keeps coming up in some of the stuff ive read....

Shame we don't have a Fibonacci sequence, though.

[JammyJim]

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/drmath.middle.html

might help

[xtrasyn]

Originally Posted by JammyJim

fibonnaci keeps coming up in some of the stuff ive read....

Yes that´s it, it looks like it, you´re right.

But it is not...