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| | EVERY hint and password refers to hackers or hacking [Try googling hacker ___], even possible alternatives such as SHEEN (actor's name) or HARPER (character name). 'Fav of 12 apostles' -- 'hacker 12' reveals news articles about a 12-year old Canadian boy convicted of hacking, and 'hacker apostle' sends you to "The 13th Apostle," an apparently terrible novel about a teenaged hacker. | | EVERY hint and password refers to hackers or hacking [Try googling hacker ___], even possible alternatives such as SHEEN (actor's name) or HARPER (character name). 'Fav of 12 apostles' -- 'hacker 12' reveals news articles about a 12-year old Canadian boy convicted of hacking, and 'hacker apostle' sends you to "The 13th Apostle," an apparently terrible novel about a teenaged hacker. |
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| − | EVERYTHING is related. 'Apostle' helped us figure out 'weather vane sword' (which was hidden, but a POEm was left hinting at where). '57' seems random - until you PURLOIN 1 from it (l and 1 often interchanged either purposely or accidently) and end up with 56 - and the 56th most common password on the list was asdfghjkl. [[User:Eve|Eve]] ([[User talk:Eve|talk]]) 21:24, 13 November 2013 (UTC) | + | EVERYTHING is related. 'Apostle' helped us figure out 'weather vane sword' (which was hidden, but a POEm was left hinting at where). '57' seems random - until you PURLOIN 1 from it (l and 1 often interchanged either purposely or accidently) and end up with 56 - and the 56th most common password on the list was asdfghjkl. ~Eve {{unsigned ip|108.162.216.31}} |
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| − | The thought just occured to me that water-3 could refer to the 3rd phase of water, so we might be looking for an ice pokemon instead. Then again, this might just be more noise. {{unsigned ip|108.162.219.35}}
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| − | Fav water-3 Pokemon has to be tentacool. It fits the format tentacoo l using the purloined l from asdfghjk l. Tentacool is (was ?) a well-known Pokemon hacker, and tentacool references LaughingSquid and its 'Chief Tentacle" Scott Beale. Finally, tentacool's number is 72, and if you add the numerals in the top half of the passwords (1, 57, 15, 10) and then subtract the numbers-represented by letters in the bottom half of the passwords (x = roman 10 and l = 1) you get 72. Everything is related. [[User:Eve|Eve]] ([[User talk:Eve|talk]]) 21:23, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
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| − | Eve i have no idea if what your saying is right but either way i think you need to slow down a bit.--[[User:Lackadaisical|Lackadaisical]] ([[User talk:Lackadaisical|talk]]) 23:08, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
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| − | Sorry. I’ll slow down and back up, and I apologize in advance if this is too much or too verbose.
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| − | The seeming randomness of both the hints/passwords chosen and their arrangement on the physical page bugged me, especially given the “greatest crossword puzzle” claim. Great crossword puzzles aren’t random; they’re thematic, amazingly inter-connected, and self-validating.
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| − | The subject of the puzzle seemed to indicate its theme, so I started googling ‘hacker ___,” inserting random words from the hints, and then from the passwords themselves as they were deciphered. The results were kinda amazing and very educational. As I said earlier, everything in the puzzle is related to hackers/hacking, even things you’d think couldn’t possibly be. Hacker Sheen, for example, led me to a Sheen News Network story on “Hackers being treated like terrorists,” which discussed the Auerheimer and Hammond cases. So, general thematic relevance established, though ‘57' still bothered me...
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| − | As did the physical arrangement of the puzzle. Why was ‘favorite of 12 apostles’ several lines away from “weather vane sword” when these two clues self-validated? Why was ‘Judith15' so markedly out of alignment with both of the hints that produced it, which were themselves separated? Questions like these eventually led me to believe that we should look for connections and validations within the puzzle as a whole, not just in consecutive or nearly-consecutive clues.
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| − | Which brought me back to ‘57,’ and the last group of hints/passwords that seemed to have no connection to any other hints/passwords and no validation within the puzzle...and it finally dawned me that the reason this bugged me so much was that asdfghjkl was the 56th rather than 57th entry in the list of common passwords, and my first thought was Why couldn’t it have been 56, and my second thought was But if you take away 1 then it is, and the Eureka moment came when I realized that ‘take away’ is a synonym of ‘purloined’ and l and 1 are often interchanged either accidentally or purposefully and 57 - 1 = 56.
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| − | So then I looked up Tentacool’s number, and looked at all the other numbers in the puzzle, to see if they would somehow produce 072. My heart sank when I realized that 1 + 57 + 15 + 10 = 83, and that even subtracting the purloined l/1 didn’t get me there, but then I realized that if the x were a roman numeral 10, and it too was subtracted, then the result was 72 and, again, internal validation of an answer.
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| − | Farfetched? -Sure. Too great a stretch? -Perhaps. Ingenious and beautiful? - Absolutely. [[User:Eve|Eve]] ([[User talk:Eve|talk]]) 01:41, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
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| − | ... I like you --[[User:Lackadaisical|Lackadaisical]] ([[User talk:Lackadaisical|talk]]) 17:49, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
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| − | http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/04/anatomy-of-a-password-disaster-adobes-giant-sized-cryptographic-blunder/ points out that the password lengths in the real dump include the null terminator, so that you get one block for 0-7 characters, two for 8-15 and so on. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.236|141.101.98.236]] 11:41, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
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| − | alpha for me implied alphabet which meant either password being "alphabet" or "abc", which both were plausible since abc is less than 8 and alphabet is 8 letters long. this combined with obvious corresponding to same sequence and abc being more used than alphabet to refer to... well, the alphabet made me think it would be abc. also the duh one needed no thinking because it was obviously going to be password and the mash one i thought it would be keyboard smash because i usually smash my keyboard by accident lol [[User:An user who has no account yet|An user who has no account yet]] ([[User talk:An user who has no account yet|talk]]) 22:04, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
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