A warning for the Colobot community

[krzys_h]

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15-11-1-25, 9 4-15 14-15-20 11-14-15-23 8-15-23 20-15 4-5-3-15-4-5 20-8-9-19 15-14-5 :/

Sorry for double posting, but I found it

Code:

the truth shall be revealed soon

[Simbax]

Twelve hours has passed, your time has come, TerranovaTeam! BURN!





Alright, enough of jokes, the day is coming to the end and I want to explain the situation in case somebody didn't understand what happened, or just for the sake of it, because villains like explaining their "brilliant" plans to protagonists. Before that, let me make something clear just in case:

This thread is a joke. No harm was done, no harm will be done. The hacker does not exist. It was me. April Fool!

Today is the 1st of April. Day of jokes and pranks. To be honest, I've nearly forgotten it, but (un)fortunately after a few moments of reflections I came up with the idea for the prank and you can see the results. It wasn't a brilliant, thoughtful idea, which had been carefully planned since months, so it's not the best joke ever, but it turned out to work better than I expected. Maybe even too well.

At first, the letter from the first post was supposed to be completely different, but I've rewritten it from scratch, because the clock was ticking and my first idea would require far more effort. So I decided to make it look like some kind of a threat from arcane hacker organization, you know, Illuminati, Anonymous, this kind of stuff.

But, that would be boring and too obvious if I just posted the letter from an account called "Illuminati" or something like that. Since I've just ended watching the full Gravity Falls series (which is amazing by the way, I strongly recommend it, it may look as silly and childish as every cartoon, but trust me, it's one of a kind and totally worth watching!), of course my first thought was to encrypt the message. To make things a little bit harder and less obvious, I put an encrypted text in the encrypted text (yo dawg).

I was going to post this from my account, but then thought "naaah, that would be again too obvious" and the idea of creating a separate "hacker" account didn't seem like a good thing too, and then I remembered that there is a TestUser account I created a long time ago for... well, testing purposes (forum privileges from the point of normal user, if I remember correctly). I logged in to the admin panel, changed the password of TestUser (I'm wondering if that left any trace, but whatever), logged in to the TestUser account, changed the avatar to more... triangular one (it's the Wheel of Intrigue BTW) and posted the encrypted message.

I'm not sure at this point who figured out it was a joke and who didn't. I hope most of you did, otherwise... that totally went too well. The puzzle was becoming more easier with time, especially that there were given more hints and people were sharing their solutions.

In the afternoon I wrote a message in ShoutBox to give a hint, so more people would figure it out. And yes, there is a typo, it should say "ignore" instead of "ignored", but oh well, it doesn't matter.

» Simbax: I just want to completely randomly announce that I love Gravity Falls. That's a completely random information, you should probably totally ignored it. 01 Apr 15:43

Of course, when you google "gravity falls" you not only discover an amazing TV series, but also notice the (totally not obvious) website "Gravity Falls: Break the Code!", where you can play with encrypting/decrypting messages using a few simple ciphers. I hope nobody did go any further, because spoiling this TV series is taking most of the fun of it. After this hint and also from some posts written in this thread, the puzzle should be really easy to figure out, but I hope it still gave you even a slightest feeling of satisfaction from solving this little April Fools' Day puzzle.

Here is solution. The message was encrypted with A1Z26 cipher, the signature with ATBASH (it looks like a name from some exotic country a little, doesn't it?). Here is the original message:

IN ORDER TO PREVENT FURTHER DAMAGES CAUSED BY THE RECKLESS ACTIONS OF THE ORGANIZATION CALLED TERRANOVATEAM, THE COLOBOT: GOLD EDITION PROJECT SHALL BE CLOSED IN TWELVE HOURS SINCE THE MAIN ORGANISATION MAINTAINING THE ILLEGAL PROJECT WILL HAVE RECEIVED THIS LETTER. IF THE ORGANIZATION DOES NOT ACQUIESCE, UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES WILL OCCUR AND ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE ORGANIZATION WILL REGRET THEIR WRONG DECISION.

AS YOU CAN SEE, WE HAVE ALREADY GAINED ACCESS TO YOUR SYSTEM. WE HOPE YOU WILL MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE.

REGARDS,
APRIL FOOLS' DAY

The second message from the "hacker" was posted over an hour before revealing this post. It was encoded in vigenere cipher with a secret key being "hours". The original message said

the truth shall be revealed soon

Where "soon" of course meant 12 hours since the first message, so 2 hours since the second. The "truth" is spoken in this post. The second message was just to make the prank a little bit more fun before the end of the day.

I want to say sorry for every person who did not figure out that this whole thread is a big joke and was uncomfortable because of that. I'm trying to make my "trollings" as obvious as possible so I'm not the only one who has fun, but I guess it always can go wrong. I hope it didn't in this case.

If you figured it out, then I hope you had fun. I surely had, but please tell me you knew all along it was a joke, because if not I should probably feel bad and in fact I am right now a little confused.

I think this thread can be moved to the Archive.

[krzys_h]

(@Simbax would kill me for the double posts but he has no admin power, so...)

3-1-e 1-e-19-2-f-4-19 4-5-3-f-4-5 14-8-9-13 f-e-5?

26-12-1a-4-2-30, 12 18-12-16-a 28-10-12-26 6-12-20-10-a-24 e-2-1a-a, 20-18-a-2-26-a 1a-2-16-a 1a-1e-24-a! 12 2e-1e-1c-8-a-24 10-1e-2e 1a-2-1c-32 20-a-1e-20-18-a 2-6-28-2a-2-18-18-32 4-a-18-12-a-2c-a-8- 32-1e-2a 2-1c-8 10-2-2c-a 26-1e-1a-a c-2a-1c 32-1e-2a-24-26-a-18-c!
EDIT: Oooh I was late. Anyway, anybody wants to take my challenge?

[krzys_h]

I logged in to the admin panel, changed the password of TestUser (I'm wondering if that left any trace, but whatever)

Well, obviously it did. But you could have at least thought not to post this message from the same IP address because that was "too obvious" (even though only admins can see it)

Of course, when you google "gravity falls" you not only discover an amazing TV series, but also notice the (totally not obvious) website "Gravity Falls: Break the Code!", where you can play with encrypting/decrypting messages using a few simple ciphers.

I did not get that hint completly Still, I managed to break all the codes.

The message was encrypted with A1Z26 cipher

This one was so simple I did not even care about the name, I just guessed the 1-A, 2-B, 3-C, ... mapping and it worked

the signature with ATBASH (it looks like a name from some exotic country a little, doesn't it?).

Or, another way to look at it, modify the original message mapping to 1-Z, 2-Y, 3-X, ... The result is the same.
Obviously I did figure it out much earlier, but I didn't want to reveal it because it would ruin the fun

It was encoded in vigenere cipher with a secret key being "hours"

"2hours" worked too, for some reason. I guess the website I used just ignores the numbers.

If you figured it out, then I hope you had fun.

Actually, not only I had fun. A few of my friends had too

[DavivaD]

I know it! Nice Prank TT !

[Simbax]

can anybody decode this one? 

simbax, i like this cipher game, please make more!  i wonder how many people actually believed you  and have some fun yourself!

Took me long enough! Good one.

[CHmSID]

To be completely honest, here is the only time I got pranked today, so well done

I only caught on after posting my first reply, edited it to correct my mistake, then reedited it to play along