Monday 7 May 2007

Sleeping beauty?

Remember the strange mail message I talked about? We (that is, me and some persons in the offices around me) are trying to figure out what it is in our free time. Actually, I had already given up last week after spending several hours without getting anywhere, but today, I can report our first success. Guess what? More or less by accident, Bastiaan Heeren (also a member of the contest organization committee) found a picture hidden in the flood of seemingly random data. He says it was encrypted, and that he somehow managed to decrypt it. I do not know the details, but I am not sure he did it right, as it looks really strange. But see for yourself!

5 comments:

Justin said...

Am I the only who thinks this is the beginning of a really cheese Stephen King novel? "Spam Zombies - first they eat your server, then they eat your BRAIN!"

Darren said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Darren said...

Looks like the image has been distorted, possibly as part of a catchpa. I can see a face in the lower right corner.

The transform is probably an anticlockwise rotation about some central point using rotation that is a non-linear function of the distance from the rotation point.

zsbana said...

Last time an encrypted codex found during an excavation, this time an encrypted image in a strange mail message. Quite suspiciuos.

scruzia said...

Maybe it's a first puzzle/hint for the upcoming ICFP contest?