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so, y0ut hink ur l33t???????????????

August 7, 2004 / Steve Peters

You were bruteforcing passwords in preschool. You taught Kevin Mitnick everything he knew. You’ve telnetted to port 139 on countless computers and typed PWNED, crashing them into oblivion. Nothing’s a challenge any more. What’s left to do??

How about hack a presidential election? OK, maybe not a good idea, but a new book entitled The The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency lets you take a stab at it without the risk of unfortunate consequences. The novel, which is to be available soon, lets the reader interact with the book and accompanying CD, decrypt its contents, and ultimately control the fate of a mock US Presidential Election. According to the Mazonic Agenda website, players can attempt to vote for themselves as the winning candidate during a simulated election to be held in early 2005. Would-be presidents must use their hacking skills to manipulate the results of the Mezonic mock election. The winner will receive a free pass to the BlackHat 2005 conference in Las Vegas, plus a library of security books.

Think you’re up for the challenge? You can download the software without the book, but having the book will give you a leg up, as you’ll gain insights on how to use the software to your best advantage.

In addition, there will be several warm-up hacks for you to cut your teeth on. Each solve will reveal clues and provide insight into the skills needed to enter the contest. New puzzles will be posted every few weeks.

Ilovebees Moderated Announcement List

August 6, 2004 / Steve Peters

We’ve had a lot of requests for this, so ARGN is going to maintain Moderated Announcement Lists for various ARGs in play. The first will be for I Love Bees. If it proves to be a success, we’ll add more lists for other games.

If you’d like to stay current on only the major events in the game, this list is for you. It will be similar in function to the moderated lists on Yahoo or the moderated blog, only the updates will arrive via email. Only updates, new puzzles, solves, and stuff deemed important will be sent on this list, making it as absolutely low-noise as possible.

[Edit: This list will effectively mirror the existing Netninja Bee Blog, sending any updates to your email inbox.]

[Edit: THE SIGN UP FOR THIS LIST IS CLOSED.]

Ilovebees: The Beast is Back?

July 28, 2004 / Steve Peters

What began as a mysterious Fedex package of honey, has become one of the most intriguing and highly anticipated (for some) events on the ‘net in quite a while. At first, when ARGN received the honey (filled with letters that spelled I LOVE BEES, leading to ilovebees.com) a little over a week ago, we thought it was a new grassroots ARG starting up, but when it was discovered that the ilovebees.com address made an appearance in the recent Halo 2 trailer, we realized this may be much bigger than originally anticipated.

We were right. Since the trailer hit the web on Friday, the entire cyberscape is abuzz, trying to figure out what’s going on. The story has been picked up on computer gaming sites such as IGN, GameSpot, and even Slashdot. Thousands of posts on innumerable boards are clamoring to figure out what is going on.

What is confounding some is exciting others who recognize this as a new Alternate Reality Game. Those in the know are even proclaiming this to be the followup to the ARG that started it all: The Beast, which was a promotional game for Spielberg’s film A.I. back in 2001. The Beast spawned Cloudmakers, an online smart mob of over 7000 who rabidly followed, solved, and obsessed over who killed Evan Chan. The Beast was a viral promotion like no other, and was an amazing event for those who were involved.

So, what is going on here with ilovebees.com? How does it relate to the Halo 2 universe?? Well, ilovebees.com is an amateurish website for Margaret’s Honey that’s being hacked by someone…..or something. Margaret’s niece, Dana, is the webmaster, and the site points to her blog, where she is asking for help dealing with the virus or whatever it is that is screwing up her aunt’s site. Players have emailed her, and Dana has actually replied to some players personally, thanking them for their advice. Upon closer examination, it was discovered that the various images on the site were corrupted with text phrases, which when assembled correctly formed a rather bizarre narrative about a Queen and a Widow.

On July 27th, one of the mysterious countdowns on the site expired, resulting in an update with more hacking goodness, and scaring the crap out of Dana. It seems whatever is taking over her aunt’s site is now actually threatening her.

So, what does Halo 2 have to do with all of this? Well, a great Story So Far explains things pretty well, even though it is a lot of speculation at this point. [EDIT: The Guide is also a great place to start, as it’s a chronological narrative of what’s been going on, and is kept very up to date.]

The ARG community has done an absolutely amazing job so far, organizing information and using tools that were unavailable just a few years ago to create an information and dissemination system the likes of which have never been seen before. If they’re right, this is just the beginning of what is sure to be an amazing ride. Stay tuned.

Here are some links to get you on your way:

QuickStart
I Love Bees Guide
I Love Bees Wiki Guide
I Love Bees Trail
Bee Quicklinks
Moderated Blog

Here are some forums discussing I Love Bees:
Unfiction
TeamXBox
Bungie.net

IRC Chat:
#ilovebees

Ilovebees.com Link to Halo 2 Release Confirmed

July 23, 2004 / Steve Peters

It looks like ilovebees.com (aka SPiDeR) is definitely tied in with the upcoming Halo 2 release for XBox. Check out the trailer for the game being shown in theaters around the US:
Super Hi-Rez version (64mb) | Regular version

Watch the end. It’s there. So, we know there’s something major going on here, and know that there’s a countdown of sorts in progress. Watch for something big within a few days. With Microsoft and Bungie behind this, who knows how deep this rabbithole will go!

Discussion:
Unfiction Forums
Bungie.net

Urban Hunt: It’s not what you Think

July 22, 2004 / Steve Peters

Major find by Yanka on unfiction. Seems there’s a new reality TV show in pre-production entitled Urban Hunt. According to the website (www.urbanhunt.com), Urban Hunt will center around a group of contestants that will criss-cross the United States in pursuit of a cash prize of up to $500,000. Bonus Missions will include the use of a team of ‘online advisors’ comprised of home viewers, who will help contestants’ missions.

Also on the site, you can apply to become a contestant and/or an online advisor. Sounds like fun. A cool urban scavenger hunt/online reality show……..

…..or is it?

If you apply to be an online advisor, you receive an autoresponse confirming the receipt of your application. Interestingly enough, though, there seems to be a puzzle hidden in the message. Is it a test to see if you can pass muster? Or is it something else?

We won’t ruin it for you, but this is definitely some sort of ARG-like rabbithole. The puzzle leads to more sites which reveal a dark secret of a reality show gone very, very wrong. This isn’t a reality show, it’s a game. And it looks like they’ve even pulled the wool over on some media outlets.

Props go out to Yanka for finding this.

Busy week in the ARG world. When it rains, it pours.

Trailhead: Urban Hunt
Discussion: Unfiction

This Is Not An ARG: A Labyrinth Tutorial

July 20, 2004 / Krystyn Wells

Recently, many players were alerted to a series of puzzles that were hidden in plain sight – puzzles that ultimately revealed a shiny new tool called Labyrinth. This tidy, no-nonsense program is maintained, designed, and implemented by the Karetao group.

Although the Labyrinth tool itself is straightforward and organizationally versatile, we thought we’d provide a couple of short tutorials for you. It seemed only natural to approach the Labyrinth launch puzzle itself, and use it as a means to display some of the basic features of the program.

Let’s get started, shall we?

We have a trailhead, found in a known puppetmaster’s personal website. The indication here, in a comment code, turns out to be a pointer to a sub-directory on the site named ‘thisisnotanarg.’ So, we’ll call it that!

We open the Labyrinth application, and use the project properties to set the name of our mini-puzzle: â€˜This Is Not An ARGâ€™.

Since this does not appear to be a story-based game, our plot elements arenâ€™t going to be characters and locations; theyâ€™re going to be the individual pages we come across. Later on, it becomes apparent to us that the pages lead to one another, so for purposes of clarity with this tutorial, we’ll use the term ‘stage.’ We create a new element for the first stage.