> "a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime"

Excuse me?

> "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"

Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.

   #include <stdio.h>
   int main() {
       printf("%d\n",2147483629*2147483647);
   }
   $ gcc test.c -o test 2> /dev/null
   $ ./test
   19

    $ python -c "print '0x%x' % (2147483629*2147483647)"
    0x3ffffff600000013

> 2147483629*2147483647

[1] 4.611686e+18

That made my eyes bleed, but OA has given me a superb Maths revision lesson for some bored teenagers. I'd already planned to get them decoding a ROT13 text by reference to letter frequencies, and now this 'quest' as well. Nice.

> Sure... the "surface" web is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Journalism at its best.

They seem to have confused some concepts. But the deep web isn't something mythical made up by 4chan trolls or science fiction writers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web

>> Private Web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).

so, yeah.

Most people here understand quite well that primes are not closed under multiplication, by definition, and it wasn't really central to the story. Neither was their weird understanding of Tor.

Well, he obviously has misunderstood both TOR and the definition of a darknet. The surface web _is_ just the tip of the iceberg though, but that's because it's defined as the part of the web being indexed by public search engines.

Your private Facebook posts, your Gmail inbox, private Dropbox files, and so on, are all parts of the so called deep web according to this definition. Due to this, it's not a very meaningful concept, and says absolutely nothing about the size of any "human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks".

PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that Chris interviewed for the article in question, and for anyone who would like more detailed and less sensationalist information about the Cicada 3301 stuff, feel free to read my writeup at http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/. :)

Is a Daily Telegraph writer, don't expect scientific literacy.

I remember reading an article about Fred Hoyle, in a copy of the Telegraph that I found on a train, where they described him as a 'famous astrologer', so them not understanding what a prime number is doesn't really surprise me.

This is high-school math.

> Well, Professors Kimball and Smith, welcome to journalism, where “bad at math” isn’t just a destructive idea — it’s a badge of honor. It’s your admission to the club. It’s woven into the very fabric of identity as a journalist.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/matt-waite-how-i-faced-my-f...

The newspaper article has basically one source. The Wikipedia article dates from the day the newspaper article was published, and only has the article (and a reprint) as its sources.

http://uncovering-cicada.wikia.com doesn't seem to have any activity from more than 6 days ago.

I'm really not a cyber-sleuth like the guy in the story, but the first two pages of Google didn't show anything from before 11/26/2013.

I'm sure the puzzles are engaging, but this looks like fake buzz.

Edit: oh well, nevermind. A google search between 1/1/2010 and 1/1/2012 returns plenty of stuff, for example a discussion [1] on the xkcd forums from January 2012.

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=79579

PS. I'm the Joel Eriksson that was interviewed for the article in question.

[0] https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cicada-3301-wiki

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31932/chasing-cicada-explorin...

Sounds an awful lot like an ARG to me. While coordinating an ARG, a marketing firm never struggles to look like "a global organization."

I didn't do much detective work on I Love Bees, but somehow one of my friends was paying attention when dozens of GPS coordinates were released. One of them was clearly pointing to the student center at NCSU. We were freshman living on campus (2004-2005) and we simply walked there at the prescribed time. There were two other guys standing there next to the payphones:

"Watcha doing?"

"Oh, just waiting on a phone call."

We all laughed. My friend answered one of the phones and had to answer some trivia question about the ILB backstory. It was quite surreal. Again, my pattern matching indicates a PR stunt more than a recruiting tool (there seems way too much fluff for that), but who knows.

    "After completing the test each solver was sent the following email 
    to the address they had inputted. [...]

    'In the programming language of your choice build a TCP server 
    that implements the protocol below.  
    The server code must be written by you and you alone, 
    although you are free to use any modules or libraries publicly available 
    for the selected programming language.'"

I agree. In addition, the amount of chance involved in actually solving one of the puzzles in the OP article reminds me of those stupid brain teasers big companies used to ask in interviews years ago.

Interestingly, the NSA has access to enough Internet traffic to be able to identify people who are playing this game, even if they don't get to the final round.

Am I missing something? That obviously isn't correct.

>TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines.

>Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks.

[edit: To be perfectly clear, I was only highlighting what was actually said. I don't know anything about the dark webs.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Internet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

These are three completely different things.

I guess the way it's written it's technically true - if you count the darknet as part of the deepweb, then it is indeed in the deepweb that you find the nasty bits. But that's extremely disingenuous, and it seems more likely that the author doesn't understand it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/

Very popular with the teens in my family with fantasies of being whisked away 'cause they're just so damn smart.

Huh?

-- Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com August 9, 2002

Why even use a clever dommainname? An IP address would work just as well.

Apparently he now this ks about it every time he uses public rest rooms.

His xkcd talk at Google is we worth googling :)

1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10468112/The-...

From a year ago.

I think I made is to minus 15 with a friend. I might start again...

Someone has to say loudly "who gives a shit about this crap" and just move on.

Think about it - you have an anonymous entity posting on an internet forum, leaving an elaborate string of clues involving multiple technologies and real world locations, solved collaboratively by a bunch of people all around the world. How is that not in the slightest bit intriguing? Evidently there are a lot of people "who give a shit about this crap".

Hacker News is known for its intelligent reader-base, but also for its critical tone. Whilst comments can often appear cycnical or pessimistic, they are usually also insightful and truthful. But I think people assume that its overall negative tone is the norm, and make negative comments without much thought or rationale behind them, and feel like they're "contributing". Your comment is a completely baseless claim, and contributes nothing but vitriol.

You did say "rarely".

and didn't have to fly anywhere to scan a qr code.

http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest

subtitle is "Cicada 3301 online mystery enthralls codebreakers around the world"

wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed he was working on cahoots with whatever person or organization is running this. With stuff happening all around the world, you'd expect some intern or low level employee would spill the beans sooner or later. I'm surprised nothing has really be released yet on who or what is running this.

http://1o57.wikispaces.com/DC20+Badge+Contest

How about a shadow-crowdsourced game? You know, just a forum of people hacking stuff up and suggesting new twists. Like the submarine captains and destroyers in the 2nd world war. They almost felt they 'knew' each other.

There are probably multiple extant communities where such a thing could be started. SCP comes to mind for already having a mostly-coherent fictional universe in which such a game could take place:

http://www.scp-wiki.net/

> "TOR is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the “darknet” — the vast, murky portion of the Internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web, it’s in these recesses that you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks"

That said, this does seem like it's a bit, erm, big, to be a simple recruiting initiative, even if it is recruiting for the NSA or something. I'm leaning towards some movie / game promotion angle. There was at least one TRON reference in there, so maybe all of this is leading up to a TR3N announcement?

I stopped at about 2nd riddle. (Basically because I googled the solution and found all the results posted on some pastebin, deducing that somebody surely found the results first, plus, I am not THAT smart and good with riddles.)

Who cares, basically.

I did most of it a couple of years ago, got to the personalized e-mail stage before I decided to work on other things.

It was strange how the pictures got put up all around the world at the same time, though.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

-- Bertrand Russell

-- Asher Roth

And each stage clearly has solutions.