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

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

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. 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


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  1. identicon
    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?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2011 @ 6:24pm

    Re:

    It's x86 machine code.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2011 @ 6:26pm

    Re:

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. icon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    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+

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. icon
    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

    link to this | view in thread ]


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