It's Mission Time!
Mar. 21st, 2009 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azuriteSophia's a killah, and she's back with the third Mission briefing in MacHeist 3!
The Mission Briefing features Sophia clearly pretending to be someone she is not. She poisons her unsuspecting coffee mate and rushes off in a car to parts unknown after telling us that the epicenter of all this time madness is an office somewhere in Palm HQ! We need to find the computer that is the source of all the anomalies.
To begin with, we get the phrase "iBeforePre." When we go to palminternal.com, the URL supplied by Sophia, we see a numberless and letterless keypad, like that on an old-school phone. Assuming the phrase is some sort of code, why not enter it? Assume that the letters correspond to the buttons the same way they would on a traditional push-button phone:
1 = nothing (or Q, Z)
2 = ABC
3 = DEF
4 = GHI
5 = JKL
6 = MNO
7 = PRS
8 = TUV
9 = WXY
The asterisk key (*) is on the bottom left, the 0 key in the middle of the bottom row, and the pound sign (#) is on the bottom right.
iBeforePre then translates to 4 233673 773. But what to do to "activate it?" Well, try the standard "enter" key for phones: pound (#)! The keypad will slide away to reveal a diagram of an office with some arrow keys on the bottom right.
You control the "robot" with the arrows. Your goal is to move the white boxes onto the red boxes. You can't do this if you move any of the boxes against a wall, because then the only way you can move them is up and down, and you will need to move all of the white boxes left or right at some point. Be careful! Also be careful that you don't "reset" the position of your blocks accidentally by clicking on the center "refresh" key!
There's an awesome graphic of what to do step-by-step in the Backroom. The key in solving this puzzle is to move the white blocks in place, but not on top of the three red squares until you're ready to solve the puzzle in one fell swoop.
Once you do, you'll be taken to a file directory with some files. Most are *.tmf files, which aren't a common filetype. What do we open them with? As with previous missions, save the files. You'll get a chance to inspect them in a bit. We can read one file: the 3-06-2009 text file. It looks like a private blog entry by someone in Palm who is trying to sabotage Apple. They seem to have an idea that us Agents are thwarting their plans, but not a very clear idea....
Still, this text file isn't much of a clue of where to go from here. What next? The *.tmf files, of course! If you noticed, at the top of the screen in the "root" directory, you'll see a Mainframe bar indicating that there are "Time Machine files detected," and with the simple click of a button, you can upload them all! This will take you to a new briefing, entitled "URGENT."
Sophia reveals a lot in this new briefing, including a name of a former Apple employee turned Palm (heresy!), the idea of a time paradox causing the failure that was the G4 Cube Mac, and the possibility of a new horror: a cube mouse! We can't let Apple be brought down by such innane ideas and a paranoid former employee! Let's stop him!
But to do so, we must look at the images we were given along with the briefing. One is for the Bostwicktonville Old Museum of Modern Art. How's that for a name? Coincidentally (or not), the image just links to a static MacHeist page, and the image is cut off right before the URL to the museum's site. But using a bit of logic, we can reason that the site is bomoma.org-- after all, that's what it would be if it was an acronym, which most of the other museums across the nation use....
It's also worth noting that the image is named stophere.jpg. Stop Here? Why here? Where?
Anyway, at the BOMoMA site, there's an interesting line in the intro: "Edwina was particularly interested in the usage of Greek iconography in new ways, and also strangely fascinated with flags." Hmmm! Take a note, Agents, this may come into play later!
Let's check out the rest of the site. You can view some very nice artwork if you click on the "Featured Gallery" page, but none of the images seem too out of place or relevant in any way. One of them is the same "hidden face" image that was featured on the BOMoMa flyer, though. If you go to the "Visit the Museum" page, you'll notice there are bolded letters when referring to the Bostwicktonville transportation system: BAMSPART. Click on them to be taken to bamspart.com.
Did you grab the second image in the URGENT briefing? It's an overlay which looks like it would fit in perfectly with our handy BAMSPART map.
Actually, the sizes don't seem to fit perfectly, but some of the glyphs seem to fit right on top of the stops on the map. Let's double-check with the interactive BAMSPART site and see whether the glyphs being at those stops has any significance.
There's a phone, a fish, and a target on the Rue de Musée stop. At that stop though, there doesn't seem to be anything having to do with Target, Fish, or phones. What stop does, then? Is it one without a glyph on it?
We have Franks Flagship Fish Factory at the University stop, two Targets in Mirrorvale, a Target and Abreadcrumb & Fish restaurant at Mount Station, Master Bait Shop at Golden Circle, another Abreadcrumb & Fish at Leary Corner, a Target at Downtown Mall, a Target and an Aquarium at Maple Lane, Seaworld at Harbourside... but none that seem to be the "right combination."
Looking at the BAMSPART map for University, we notice that Franks Flagship Fish Factory has no apostrophe where it should. It wouldn't be odd, except for other items, like "Dick Beaver, M.D." do have the right punctuation. Maybe it's a clue? Go to franksflagshipfishfactory.com and see what you can find!
It seems like a normal enough site, but here's something interesting: they mention a "Collegeview" stop on the red line, but they're not located at that stop; they're located on University, and there is no "Collegeview" stop. In fact, there is no "-view" stop anywhere on the map of Bostwicktonville! Very strange, but what does it mean?
Considering the site has no links, could there be something else of significance on the site? The only thing truly unique are the flags at the top. Their significance doesn't seem to be explained in the site at all, and we did read on the BOMoMA site that Edwina liked flags an awful lot. Maybe semaphores (the use of flags as signals) are a clue here?
This handy page reveals that the shape and design of the flags indicates they are representing numbers, rather than letters or words. If we translate the flags, we get the following numerical string: 8019385306. What to do with these numbers? There are 10 of them, and my default thinking for a 10-digit number is that it's a phone number. No harm in trying, right?
Call (801) 938-5306 and you'll get a message-- the man on the other end says to use Mondrian-Encrypted ASCII coded vertically and to take the following "keys" to the park and work all the angles:
Romeo 1, Yankee 2, Bravo 4, Golf 8, Whiskey 16, Kilo 32
The words preceding the numbers are from the phonetic alphabet, like what the army uses. This means that the words themselves probably aren't significant, but the letters they represent (B, Y, B, G, W, K) are.
There are 6 letters, but what could they mean? B might equal Blue, in which case Y would equal Yellow, G would equal Green (or Gray, maybe), W would equal white, and K would equal Black, but what does that possibility do for us? It might be RGB or CMYK code, since there are six of them. Traditionally RGB colors are input on the web in the format #RRGGBB. But because we also have a "white" and a "black" (black is only found in CMYK values, which are percentages, and there is no "white" in either RGB or CMYK), that probably negates this theory.
Let's hang onto our "keys" and return to our overlay image. You may have noticed a small squiggle in the corner that should look a bit familiar to you. Return to the BOMoMA art gallery and grab the image of the mysteriously-familiar blue, orange, and red lines. If you make your overlay image's squiggle match with that art piece's, you'll notice a new alignment to your glyphs! Click here to see.
This puts the fish, phone, and target at the University stop, the star at the Rue de Musée, and the tree and the target at the end of the red line, at South Point. Even if all of the glyphs at a certain point don't tie to a particular location at that point, perhaps the one that does is significant! Notice that, at University stop, there is no Target store or anything that discernibly has to do with phones, but the fish is equal to Franks Flagship Fish Factory! What about at the other stops? The star at Rue de Musée might refer to Starbucks, and the tree at South Point may refer to Liberation Park!
Since there's no way Starbucks.com would be part of a MacHeist, let's save any potential significance that has (if any at all) for last. Let's try LiberationPark.com and see where it takes us.
Check out the park's website and explore the map. If you download the PDF of the map, you'll learn what the numbered points on the park map refer to. If you go to the "Historical Society" section of the site, you'll see some more detail. Especially mysterious are the statues: an unidentified one that may be of Caerus, the Greek god of opportunity (hint, hint!) that has a visual rendering! This statue, what with the URL saying "limitations" is a pun-- the "statue of limitations," even though the titlebar officially says "Sculpture of Limitations."
This rendering seems to feature a puzzle, in addition to the clue we got from the description about the wings moving.
Maybe our clue now is the "Mondrian-Encrypted ASCII." I know what ASCII is, but who's Mondrian? The first Google result when looking up Mondrian is about a Dutch artist famous for an art style he termed "Neo-Plasticism." This art featured a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colors (Yellow, Blue, Red). Hey, didn't we see something like that in the BOMoMa Featured Gallery?
Notice that there's no green, but there IS Gray-- which means we get colored squares that could possibly correspond to all the "blocks" shown on the Mondrian art.
Again: R1, Y2, B4, G8, W16, K32. All the red blocks = 1, all the white blocks = 16, and so forth. If we're supposed code vertically, then why not start in the upper left and go down?
We get 1, 16, 4, 16, 8, 4, and 16. Then it's the bottom of the column. What should we do with these numbers? There are 7 total, but there's no indication of how they might be used together. Since we did get the clue about ASCII as well, it's worth pointing out that letters in ASCII are larger numbers-- A begins with 65, so maybe we should try adding the numbers to see if they can get that large?
1+16+4+16+8+4+16 = 65!
Hey, maybe that column = the letter A in ASCII!
Let's move onto the second column. How do know what direction to go when some squares are larger than others? Well, notice that even in columns with a large rectangle or square, there are also some smaller ones. These smaller ones seem to create the overall "width" of the column, so we'd only count those rectangles that fall within this width. To make it easier for you, I'd recommend looking at the Mondrian artwork in an image editing program that uses guidelines. Adjust the guides so that they sit vertically on top of the black lines for the smallest (thinnest) rectangles in each column. This means that wide rectangles will count twice, for at least two columns.
Check out all the numbers in this image I made.
The second column, then, consists of 1, 16, 8, 16, 8, 16, 1. Add these up, and you'll get 66! That = B in ASCII!
Continue on with this until your letters start to spell something out. This is the quick and dirty version of the Mondrian-encoded ASCII, coded vertically:
16+2+8+32+8+16+1 = 83 = S
4+4+16+32+4+16+8 = 84 = T
4+4+16+32+16+2+8 = 82 = R
2+32+1+16+8+2+4 = 65 = A
2+32+1+4+8+16+4 = 67 = C
16+2+16+1+1+32+16 = 84 = T
8+8+16+4+16+16+1 = 69 = E
16+1+16+16+16+16+1 = 82 = R
16+1+4+4+32+4+4 = 65 = A
The total end result is ABSTRACT ERA.
If you remember from the park description of the Caerus, the historical society mentioned that it is placed on top of an "old optical telegraph." An optical telegraph is also known as a semaphore machine! Since we can move Caerus' wings, perhaps we can spell out ABSTRACT ERA using his wings?
If you use this semaphore reference, you'll notice all of the letters we have can be replicated with Caerus' wings if you position them correctly. Do so, and be sure to click on the letter that you're trying to correspond the wings to.
For example, A = the right wing straight down, and the left wing at a slight angle just upwards from that. The wings can only move in increments of angles, not individual ones, so just move the left wing one "click" upwards. Then click on the first letter "A" on the base of the statue-- the one in first row.
Once you enter the entire message, the base of Caerus' statue will open up and reveal a *.pdf file! Download and print it out. Fold it along the lines. Doesn't that black arrow look a little familiar? It resembles the compass point on the map of Liberation Park!
Normally you would print this image out and fold it where the lines designate, "cutting out" the middle section. There's a way to do this virtually with an image editor and save a piece of paper and some ink. Import the PDFs as images. Overlay the "overprint" PDF on top of the map, and set the overprint layer to a mid-level opacity (I used about 65%). Cut out the middle section that you would normally fold. Then, move either the remaining left or right hand sections so that they meet, as they would if you had printed the park map and folded it. There is a shape that could very well be the gesture you enter on the MacHeist page! It looks like a short vertical line coming up from the bottom, a long straight line at an angle, and a chevron attached to the end of the long line. For a visual, click here.
Enter this gesture on the MacHeist page and you're done with Mission 3!
Don't forget to watch the Debriefing (even if the beginning is a bit cheesy, the end result is so very worth it) and get your Evidence.
Congratulations, agents!
Hey There Delilah by Plain White T's from All That We Needed
The Mission Briefing features Sophia clearly pretending to be someone she is not. She poisons her unsuspecting coffee mate and rushes off in a car to parts unknown after telling us that the epicenter of all this time madness is an office somewhere in Palm HQ! We need to find the computer that is the source of all the anomalies.
To begin with, we get the phrase "iBeforePre." When we go to palminternal.com, the URL supplied by Sophia, we see a numberless and letterless keypad, like that on an old-school phone. Assuming the phrase is some sort of code, why not enter it? Assume that the letters correspond to the buttons the same way they would on a traditional push-button phone:
1 = nothing (or Q, Z)
2 = ABC
3 = DEF
4 = GHI
5 = JKL
6 = MNO
7 = PRS
8 = TUV
9 = WXY
The asterisk key (*) is on the bottom left, the 0 key in the middle of the bottom row, and the pound sign (#) is on the bottom right.
iBeforePre then translates to 4 233673 773. But what to do to "activate it?" Well, try the standard "enter" key for phones: pound (#)! The keypad will slide away to reveal a diagram of an office with some arrow keys on the bottom right.
You control the "robot" with the arrows. Your goal is to move the white boxes onto the red boxes. You can't do this if you move any of the boxes against a wall, because then the only way you can move them is up and down, and you will need to move all of the white boxes left or right at some point. Be careful! Also be careful that you don't "reset" the position of your blocks accidentally by clicking on the center "refresh" key!
There's an awesome graphic of what to do step-by-step in the Backroom. The key in solving this puzzle is to move the white blocks in place, but not on top of the three red squares until you're ready to solve the puzzle in one fell swoop.
Once you do, you'll be taken to a file directory with some files. Most are *.tmf files, which aren't a common filetype. What do we open them with? As with previous missions, save the files. You'll get a chance to inspect them in a bit. We can read one file: the 3-06-2009 text file. It looks like a private blog entry by someone in Palm who is trying to sabotage Apple. They seem to have an idea that us Agents are thwarting their plans, but not a very clear idea....
Still, this text file isn't much of a clue of where to go from here. What next? The *.tmf files, of course! If you noticed, at the top of the screen in the "root" directory, you'll see a Mainframe bar indicating that there are "Time Machine files detected," and with the simple click of a button, you can upload them all! This will take you to a new briefing, entitled "URGENT."
Sophia reveals a lot in this new briefing, including a name of a former Apple employee turned Palm (heresy!), the idea of a time paradox causing the failure that was the G4 Cube Mac, and the possibility of a new horror: a cube mouse! We can't let Apple be brought down by such innane ideas and a paranoid former employee! Let's stop him!
But to do so, we must look at the images we were given along with the briefing. One is for the Bostwicktonville Old Museum of Modern Art. How's that for a name? Coincidentally (or not), the image just links to a static MacHeist page, and the image is cut off right before the URL to the museum's site. But using a bit of logic, we can reason that the site is bomoma.org-- after all, that's what it would be if it was an acronym, which most of the other museums across the nation use....
It's also worth noting that the image is named stophere.jpg. Stop Here? Why here? Where?
Anyway, at the BOMoMA site, there's an interesting line in the intro: "Edwina was particularly interested in the usage of Greek iconography in new ways, and also strangely fascinated with flags." Hmmm! Take a note, Agents, this may come into play later!
Let's check out the rest of the site. You can view some very nice artwork if you click on the "Featured Gallery" page, but none of the images seem too out of place or relevant in any way. One of them is the same "hidden face" image that was featured on the BOMoMa flyer, though. If you go to the "Visit the Museum" page, you'll notice there are bolded letters when referring to the Bostwicktonville transportation system: BAMSPART. Click on them to be taken to bamspart.com.
Did you grab the second image in the URGENT briefing? It's an overlay which looks like it would fit in perfectly with our handy BAMSPART map.
Actually, the sizes don't seem to fit perfectly, but some of the glyphs seem to fit right on top of the stops on the map. Let's double-check with the interactive BAMSPART site and see whether the glyphs being at those stops has any significance.
There's a phone, a fish, and a target on the Rue de Musée stop. At that stop though, there doesn't seem to be anything having to do with Target, Fish, or phones. What stop does, then? Is it one without a glyph on it?
We have Franks Flagship Fish Factory at the University stop, two Targets in Mirrorvale, a Target and Abreadcrumb & Fish restaurant at Mount Station, Master Bait Shop at Golden Circle, another Abreadcrumb & Fish at Leary Corner, a Target at Downtown Mall, a Target and an Aquarium at Maple Lane, Seaworld at Harbourside... but none that seem to be the "right combination."
Looking at the BAMSPART map for University, we notice that Franks Flagship Fish Factory has no apostrophe where it should. It wouldn't be odd, except for other items, like "Dick Beaver, M.D." do have the right punctuation. Maybe it's a clue? Go to franksflagshipfishfactory.com and see what you can find!
It seems like a normal enough site, but here's something interesting: they mention a "Collegeview" stop on the red line, but they're not located at that stop; they're located on University, and there is no "Collegeview" stop. In fact, there is no "-view" stop anywhere on the map of Bostwicktonville! Very strange, but what does it mean?
Considering the site has no links, could there be something else of significance on the site? The only thing truly unique are the flags at the top. Their significance doesn't seem to be explained in the site at all, and we did read on the BOMoMA site that Edwina liked flags an awful lot. Maybe semaphores (the use of flags as signals) are a clue here?
This handy page reveals that the shape and design of the flags indicates they are representing numbers, rather than letters or words. If we translate the flags, we get the following numerical string: 8019385306. What to do with these numbers? There are 10 of them, and my default thinking for a 10-digit number is that it's a phone number. No harm in trying, right?
Call (801) 938-5306 and you'll get a message-- the man on the other end says to use Mondrian-Encrypted ASCII coded vertically and to take the following "keys" to the park and work all the angles:
Romeo 1, Yankee 2, Bravo 4, Golf 8, Whiskey 16, Kilo 32
The words preceding the numbers are from the phonetic alphabet, like what the army uses. This means that the words themselves probably aren't significant, but the letters they represent (B, Y, B, G, W, K) are.
There are 6 letters, but what could they mean? B might equal Blue, in which case Y would equal Yellow, G would equal Green (or Gray, maybe), W would equal white, and K would equal Black, but what does that possibility do for us? It might be RGB or CMYK code, since there are six of them. Traditionally RGB colors are input on the web in the format #RRGGBB. But because we also have a "white" and a "black" (black is only found in CMYK values, which are percentages, and there is no "white" in either RGB or CMYK), that probably negates this theory.
Let's hang onto our "keys" and return to our overlay image. You may have noticed a small squiggle in the corner that should look a bit familiar to you. Return to the BOMoMA art gallery and grab the image of the mysteriously-familiar blue, orange, and red lines. If you make your overlay image's squiggle match with that art piece's, you'll notice a new alignment to your glyphs! Click here to see.
This puts the fish, phone, and target at the University stop, the star at the Rue de Musée, and the tree and the target at the end of the red line, at South Point. Even if all of the glyphs at a certain point don't tie to a particular location at that point, perhaps the one that does is significant! Notice that, at University stop, there is no Target store or anything that discernibly has to do with phones, but the fish is equal to Franks Flagship Fish Factory! What about at the other stops? The star at Rue de Musée might refer to Starbucks, and the tree at South Point may refer to Liberation Park!
Since there's no way Starbucks.com would be part of a MacHeist, let's save any potential significance that has (if any at all) for last. Let's try LiberationPark.com and see where it takes us.
Check out the park's website and explore the map. If you download the PDF of the map, you'll learn what the numbered points on the park map refer to. If you go to the "Historical Society" section of the site, you'll see some more detail. Especially mysterious are the statues: an unidentified one that may be of Caerus, the Greek god of opportunity (hint, hint!) that has a visual rendering! This statue, what with the URL saying "limitations" is a pun-- the "statue of limitations," even though the titlebar officially says "Sculpture of Limitations."
This rendering seems to feature a puzzle, in addition to the clue we got from the description about the wings moving.
Maybe our clue now is the "Mondrian-Encrypted ASCII." I know what ASCII is, but who's Mondrian? The first Google result when looking up Mondrian is about a Dutch artist famous for an art style he termed "Neo-Plasticism." This art featured a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colors (Yellow, Blue, Red). Hey, didn't we see something like that in the BOMoMa Featured Gallery?
Notice that there's no green, but there IS Gray-- which means we get colored squares that could possibly correspond to all the "blocks" shown on the Mondrian art.
Again: R1, Y2, B4, G8, W16, K32. All the red blocks = 1, all the white blocks = 16, and so forth. If we're supposed code vertically, then why not start in the upper left and go down?
We get 1, 16, 4, 16, 8, 4, and 16. Then it's the bottom of the column. What should we do with these numbers? There are 7 total, but there's no indication of how they might be used together. Since we did get the clue about ASCII as well, it's worth pointing out that letters in ASCII are larger numbers-- A begins with 65, so maybe we should try adding the numbers to see if they can get that large?
1+16+4+16+8+4+16 = 65!
Hey, maybe that column = the letter A in ASCII!
Let's move onto the second column. How do know what direction to go when some squares are larger than others? Well, notice that even in columns with a large rectangle or square, there are also some smaller ones. These smaller ones seem to create the overall "width" of the column, so we'd only count those rectangles that fall within this width. To make it easier for you, I'd recommend looking at the Mondrian artwork in an image editing program that uses guidelines. Adjust the guides so that they sit vertically on top of the black lines for the smallest (thinnest) rectangles in each column. This means that wide rectangles will count twice, for at least two columns.
Check out all the numbers in this image I made.
The second column, then, consists of 1, 16, 8, 16, 8, 16, 1. Add these up, and you'll get 66! That = B in ASCII!
Continue on with this until your letters start to spell something out. This is the quick and dirty version of the Mondrian-encoded ASCII, coded vertically:
16+2+8+32+8+16+1 = 83 = S
4+4+16+32+4+16+8 = 84 = T
4+4+16+32+16+2+8 = 82 = R
2+32+1+16+8+2+4 = 65 = A
2+32+1+4+8+16+4 = 67 = C
16+2+16+1+1+32+16 = 84 = T
8+8+16+4+16+16+1 = 69 = E
16+1+16+16+16+16+1 = 82 = R
16+1+4+4+32+4+4 = 65 = A
The total end result is ABSTRACT ERA.
If you remember from the park description of the Caerus, the historical society mentioned that it is placed on top of an "old optical telegraph." An optical telegraph is also known as a semaphore machine! Since we can move Caerus' wings, perhaps we can spell out ABSTRACT ERA using his wings?
If you use this semaphore reference, you'll notice all of the letters we have can be replicated with Caerus' wings if you position them correctly. Do so, and be sure to click on the letter that you're trying to correspond the wings to.
For example, A = the right wing straight down, and the left wing at a slight angle just upwards from that. The wings can only move in increments of angles, not individual ones, so just move the left wing one "click" upwards. Then click on the first letter "A" on the base of the statue-- the one in first row.
Once you enter the entire message, the base of Caerus' statue will open up and reveal a *.pdf file! Download and print it out. Fold it along the lines. Doesn't that black arrow look a little familiar? It resembles the compass point on the map of Liberation Park!
Normally you would print this image out and fold it where the lines designate, "cutting out" the middle section. There's a way to do this virtually with an image editor and save a piece of paper and some ink. Import the PDFs as images. Overlay the "overprint" PDF on top of the map, and set the overprint layer to a mid-level opacity (I used about 65%). Cut out the middle section that you would normally fold. Then, move either the remaining left or right hand sections so that they meet, as they would if you had printed the park map and folded it. There is a shape that could very well be the gesture you enter on the MacHeist page! It looks like a short vertical line coming up from the bottom, a long straight line at an angle, and a chevron attached to the end of the long line. For a visual, click here.
Enter this gesture on the MacHeist page and you're done with Mission 3!
Don't forget to watch the Debriefing (even if the beginning is a bit cheesy, the end result is so very worth it) and get your Evidence.
Congratulations, agents!
Hey There Delilah by Plain White T's from All That We Needed
