DailyDirt: Crack A Puzzle And Score Some Cash (Or A Cool Job)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Dec 5th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

There seem to be plenty of seemingly unsolvable challenges that, once published openly, are completed successfully in an amazingly short amount of time. Clearly there are still a lot of unsolved mysteries left, but the strategy of publicizing problems as a way to get them solved faster is a fascinating phenomenon. Here are just a few more examples of some challenges that have been made open to the public.

DARPA's Shredder Challenge has been solved, and the winner is the team "All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S." Now the companies that make shredders will have to create a challenge that'll make reconstructing shredded documents even harder... [url]
If you have a good idea about how to augment a camera to capture more than a picture, submit it here. The deadline is December 8th, so hurry up! [url]
The next James Bond is apparently supposed to apply online and solve a puzzle for the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Just don't break any laws to crack the code, or else you're disqualified (or worse?). [url]
To discover more interesting business-related content, check out what the deal is on StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: cameras, challenges, james bond, shredders, spy
Companies: darpa, gchq

9 Comments

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Jake, 5 Dec 2011 @ 5:19pm

Am I the only person here who feels that particular DARPA challenge only really called for an old oil drum with the top cut off and a lit match?
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- Michael Ho (profile), 5 Dec 2011 @ 5:38pm
  
  Re:
  yes, DARPA may have inadvertently made it much more difficult to gather intelligence by letting the entire world know that shredders are useless for destroying sensitive information (if someone really wants to reconstruct the chads).
  
  But if DARPA has any old shredded documents lying around that might be important.. all that evidence will probably be looked at again to see if they contain any more info.
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Falindraun (profile), 5 Dec 2011 @ 5:48pm

the code cracking one is done in hexadecimal, but it does not directly translate to any useful on the ASCII table.
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- Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2011 @ 6:24pm
  
  Re:
  It's x86 machine code.
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- Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2011 @ 6:26pm
  
  Re:
  P.S. http://www.canyoucrackit.co.uk/soyoudidit.asp
  
  Hooray. Solved.
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  - Atkray (profile), 5 Dec 2011 @ 8:29pm
    
    Re: Re:
    I hope more people look at this than comment on the daily sites, because that is very funny.
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    - Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2011 @ 8:43pm
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Yeah, they don't seem to know how to put together a site. If you're really interested, here's the code you put into the first site to get there:
      
      Pr0t3ct!on#cyber_security@12*12.2011+
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thegreatsemaj, 5 Dec 2011 @ 7:04pm

An even tougher challange
What about Kryptos? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

I guess it could just be old news.
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Richard (profile), 6 Dec 2011 @ 4:57am

Long history
This stuff has a long history - during the war the British government recruited codebreakers by setting a competition to solve a crossword in 12 minutes
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