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A comment on A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack.

Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by thomasqbrady on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @01:16PM (#24982309)
The Screeps detail seems like something that could be fairly easily pursued... there can't have been that many players of that game to begin with, let alone those that would care so much about it that they would journal their thoughts about it. A quick check of the GitHub repo doesn't show he contributed code, but might he have opened an issue, contributed to docs? Might there be someone who was active in the community somehow (maybe showing up on leaderboards) until 2017?
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by jhardy54 on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:05PM (#24982805)
Required reading, IMO: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2937/a-strange-request-for-h...

I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps.

I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by pvaldes on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:09PM (#24985085)
Algae pool, in the context of a list that contains "balanced nutri*nt? foods", is probably a food based in Spirulina. A green algae used in aquaculture. This seems to me like a check list [1] to assure that he didn't forgot anything after leaving a zone.

Is relevant because the man has been most probably poisoned. It was not a fast poison and it was painful but not too alarming. Not a bee, a wasp or a Bothrops. A plant or fungus, yes, could fit.

Is not suicide and terminal illness in my opinion. Nobody dies by starvation in presence of food.

But there is a third category that I was missing. Your own food. A too old Spirulina package can be contaminated and lead to slow poisoning. Emaciated in the context of plenty of food around and plenty of money means that he was deliberately refusing to eat while resting in the tent, this is a common effect of food poisoning.

[1] Speculating "Roach motel" can be an humorous surname for their tent. Nanites could be some kind of "armour", clothes or boots maybe.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by pvaldes on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:50PM (#24985347)
Updated. There is a page talking about nutrition, protein and "trying different flavors". Fits perfectly with Spirulina powder that is used in protein shakes as the source of protein.

Updated again, Nanites are described in the context of a game later. This does not support my checklist hypothesis. Strange list. Maybe could be just a list of names for different worlds and items in the game.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by jml7c5 on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:36PM (#24985643)
Given it is followed by "Roach Motel (area/?quest)", it seems more likely this is something from a game idea.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by pvaldes on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @08:18PM (#24985863)
You are right, I was unable to understand the last words

And one item of the list is just "screeps". I was wrong, Now It looks much more like a plan of things to think about while hiking. Maybe a plan to develop a startup based in energetic food and/or a videogame. This web shows a resume of his activity.

https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/fl-big-cypress-nat...

There is a mention about a non specified health problem also.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by pvaldes on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @09:08PM (#24986037)
Disproved,

it reads "algae pool (area)", so is a game and all that I wrote above about Spirulina is wrong, as jml7c5 pointed correctly

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by asphyxiac on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:43PM (#24983208)
OP, based on the Screeps thread, we have a purported Steam profile for MH. Did that yield anything?

Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by fuzxi on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @05:44PM (#24984894)
>Do badges ever auto-unlock

That specific badge is for game ownership. I believe it's possible for games to be added to your account automatically in some cases (like an HD version given out for free to existing owners) which could unlock the badge without user intervention.

>or could this person have shared a steam account?

Definitely possible as well.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by chaostheory on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:53PM (#24983299)
With an all time peak of 357 players playing at a time, Screeps is still the best lead especially when you link it to a Steam account.

https://steamcharts.com/app/464350

Hopefully, the developer still has logs and data for 2018 and earlier

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by tedivm on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:58PM (#24985757)
That number is way off- the steam client came out well after the website version (they both connect to the same MMO server), and there are a lot of users who just use the website to play the game.

The community- with the admins- put a lot of work into trying to figure this out. I lead a group who does analysis of other people's codebases by scraping data from the game, as a way to identify unique codebases (and players who use open source bots). The admins went through logs and we all poured through the game history looking for anything that might match up.

The problem is that it looks like he may never have played the MMO. Besides having the shared server the game is also open sourced. It's extremely common for players to run either in the simulator or on their own private server while testing out their codebase. Looking at his journals (and a journalist did share copies of everything they had with us) I really feel that he was in the early draft phase thinking about the game but not actually playing yet on the shared server.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by chaostheory on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @02:35AM (#24987072)
This is terrible news.

It’s great though how both the developer and community came together to help ID the guy.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by stevehawk on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:34PM (#24985236)
Ya. There was a game that unlocked a badge one year after your purchase for no reason than the anniversary of it
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by anotheryou on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @09:43AM (#24989437)
According to this https://steamid.uk/profile/76561198004426967 the friends are mostly canadian.

But it also says that one friendship is just 280 days old or something.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by AlphaWeaver on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @10:21PM (#24986269)
I'm a Space Station 13 player - each server is very different, but there's nothing here I recognize from SS13.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by NhanH on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:52PM (#24985723)
The screeps community spent alot of time on this and we got nowhere.

Unfortunately the Screeps dev team is Russian based, so they declined to provide helps with their data.

The journalist contacted players who were active in 2017 and earlier individually (I was one of those) in hope of getting some leads. But from what I knew, even though we had some suspected players, it ended up not getting the lead we wanted.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by ColanR on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @01:59PM (#24982758)
If someone wants to check, I'd bet he at least forked or starred the github repo. A script to pull the list of those people, minus anyone whos been active since april 2017, would probably show his account.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by momothereal on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:11PM (#24983461)
I wrote a quick script through Github's API, and found 10 users[1] matching the criteria:

* starred any screeps repo before May 2017, and no other screeps repo since then

* no public contributions or events since April 2017

If someone has some time to do further filtering, ensure the users have not starred any GitHub repo since May 2017

I didn't go through forks but that would also be an avenue.

[1] https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658...

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by Copenjin on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:43PM (#24983756)
This guy with his Screeps-Main repo is interesting, he also removed a txt file with some description of what he wanted to do: https://github.com/NihilRex/Screeps-Main/commit/e2c34e211226...

The last things he did were in 2017.

Edit: Nope, same user is on the forum, https://screeps.com/forum/user/nihilrex

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by momothereal on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:46PM (#24983784)
As someone else pointed out, it seems this user was recently active on Screeps forums, so ruled out.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by mynegation on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:48PM (#24983810)
You can exclude bandsaw1961 based on user pic and yacobjardon who was a student at Carleton University and a picture on his LinkedIn and career beyond 2017.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by strstr on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:42PM (#24983747)
A few of the users have the same in game username, and have been online recently.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by withinboredom on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @05:49PM (#24984949)
I don't really trust the steam online thing. I once got a notification that my brother was playing a game and he was driving a car and his computer was off. No, his account wasn't hacked. We spent awhile and noticed that it seems to randomly say your online and playing if you disconnect for awhile (my account too).
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by alecbcs on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:32PM (#24983648)
Checking for users who forked the repo in 2017 and haven't been active since 2017 I got.

- amidman

- eqzus

- Mike Hancoski (follows users from NY, wrote PHP code, his personal website domain wasn't renewed and is now available.)

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by grawprog on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:45PM (#24983775)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-hancoski-b342aa53

This guy looks like a clean shaven version of those pictures. Noses look the same. The eyes. No updates to the account since 2015.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by jack_riminton on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:08PM (#24983988)
You might be right

Here they are side by side https://ibb.co/4Zn4qqX

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by getlawgdon on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:51PM (#24985720)
Do not look alike to me at all. different eyebrow shape and texture and possibly color, different teeth and different nose shape. nose on the right has a bulbous end quite different from shape on left.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by lixtra on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:04PM (#24983959)
He has an instagram profile with an update nov 2018.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by tildeath on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @05:46PM (#24984915)
Damn, they really DO look very similar. Mike appears to have unattached earlobes, and MH's appear attached, however.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by pvaldes on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:19PM (#24985538)
Definitely several similar characteristics. Could be a brother.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by withinboredom on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @07:17PM (#24985528)
Maybe brothers or closely related.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by sebmellen on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:50PM (#24984405)
Might be worth reaching out to other people working for "Xcite Media Group". 23 employees is small enough to know if someone went missing.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by eneveu on Friday November 06, 2020 @03:49PM (#25010994)
It would be funny if the real Mike Hancoski googles himself and stumbles upon this thread.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by mynegation on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:45PM (#24983779)
Mike Hancoski as of 2018 was living in Denver, posted to Instagram and looks different than photos. I think you also missed Maxim2030 who is also in the list by momothereal. And also manhyper
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by alecbcs on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:08PM (#24983998)
We're hitting the end of the allowed reply indents but I think you're right modernerd. Looks like he's likely still active online.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by alecbcs on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:00PM (#24983911)
Ahh thank you I had missed Maxim2030. Looks like manhyper updated his fork of screeps on February 11th?

Also saw Mike Hancoski's Instagram but it's odd he hasn't posted anything to his LinkedIn since 2014? Maybe worth awkwardly reaching out just in case?

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by modernerd on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:03PM (#24983945)
Maybe he just stopped using LinkedIn? I think these are the same Mike:

Work photo (2018): https://thexcitegroup.com/xcite-family/mike-hancoski/mike-h/

Facebook (2019): https://www.facebook.com/mike.hancoski

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by beowulfey on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:27PM (#24985197)
Hancoski also has an active facebook page. I won't link it but I found it with a Google search and he last posted in Dec 2019.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by Componica on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:26PM (#24983024)
Looking at https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF The code that he writes is a blend of languages. The arrow operators -> is indicative of C/C++ but C/C++ doesn't use nil or function. It's like he thinks in C/C++ first which puts him at about my age mid-40s. Anyone younger than 40 would be using dots '.' due to Java/Javascript/Python instead of '->'. Does anyone else get that vibe?
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by hultner on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:23PM (#24983581)
Wouldn't say that, I'm around 30 and grew up coding C, C++ and later, in my teens some Perl anf PHP, all these languages use the -> syntax and I still used that in my notes up until two or three years ago, I also use nil from my lisp adventures and prefer snake_caas. The first languages have I learned as a young child made an strong impression in my mental visualisation of programming concepts even of I haven't used them in many years. I found notes on my iPhone using the arrow syntax with snake_case variables. And from the pictures he looks about my age so I'd say 30 is a real possibility as well.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by rxhernandez on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @01:50AM (#24986890)
A lot (I would be surprised if it's not the majority of EEs/CpEs) of electrical/computer engineers are taught how to program with C/C++; using that to understand what age someone is, is an error.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by beowulfey on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:22PM (#24985174)
Based on the "being in tech for about a decade" his "initially looks old with the beard but has young looking eyes" and your comments here, I'd put him squarely in his 30s.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by pulse7 on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:09PM (#24984010)
On the 3. page of the scanned notebook [1] he mentions Java.

[1] https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by X6S1x6Okd1st on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:45PM (#24984358)
Somewhat amusing to see the police highlighting "trust no one" as a note on p2p networking.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by gabereiser on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:30PM (#24983065)
PHP also uses -> and is still popular with those younger than 40. The lack of $ gives it away though. This is a very curious case indeed.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by Componica on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:35PM (#24983124)
Definitely not drowning in $variables, he's 40 something.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by Piskvorrr on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @03:30AM (#24987303)
If I were making paper notes, I would not bother with exact syntax - especially not for tokens which only exist for the machine parser's sake.

In other words, I have written PHP pseudocode which definitely omits $. But these notes are generic enough to allow virtually anything C-descended.

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by Bayart on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @11:36AM (#24990532)
I've just hit 30 and I still default to C or C-style to think about code. I've been formally taught coding with the K&R (while being introduced to Perl, Bash, PHP and LUA as a teenager), and I'm far from the only one.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by heavyset_go on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @03:23PM (#24983574)
Some colleges teach courses with C++, and if students or young programmers want to get into game development or graphics, they're often recommended to pick up C++. Systems programming is often taught using C++, if not C.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by jcelerier on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:12PM (#24985104)
Uh, I'm 28, and a lot of my college education was in C & C++, much more than Java/Python/... - in a large french university.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by uberman on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:29PM (#24983044)
This seems like this would be the way to go. Steam shows less than 200 players for March and April of 2017 and if there are logs that far back, the Screeps team can likely provide some data about users who dropped out in March or April of that year as well
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by robotresearcher on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:08PM (#24983986)
I don't want identifying data leaked by my game hosts.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by withinboredom on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @06:28PM (#24985202)
I wish we had better images of the notebook. I noticed a few constants `*_ENERGY_TARGET` which might be searchable if I could make out the first part. It seems that if any code exists for this stuff, it might be those constants come from real code.
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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by ravendawn on Thursday November 05, 2020 @08:21PM (#25003923)
Links :Transcripts of his complete notebook- https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF

Here’s a link to the transcript of the notes typed out

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Re:A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack by MereInterest on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:33PM (#24984260)
A post on this topic is the top post on the screeps subreddit, but with no clear answers. Some posters found players who stopped playing unexpectedly during the appropriate timeframe, along with the group that player collaborated with. However, I don't know if there was any follow-up there, or if it was a dead end.

https://www.reddit.com/r/screeps/comments/fnwhvr/who_is_this...

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