Weednesday 10/28 Watchmaker again

oops sorry didn't see this when I made my topic post!

"Weednesday" might be my second-best typo on this forum yet. :)

Code is fresh and I see no achievements yet...let's do thins thing! One question, though..shouldn't that be Lorem?

Mark of the Watcher
Put the words together
Earned by: Aer

Didn't take long! We're playing catch-up again....

And Cloin, I think we were just typing at the same time...love the thrill of discovery!

There is a Mark of the Suffragist as well
same MO
Put the words together
Earned by Aer

heh. I hate latin!

oops, my son didnt sign out, brat, hes doin hw now, he got the gears, brat! Love him anyway! Micci * see post in MY name, lol

Stilll...trying....hate ciphers!

Didn't take THEM long to get it. I'm hoping Cloin gets it before I get really frustrated!

Double post.

http://picturetheimpossible.com/forums/forge/9006#new go to this link and use rumkin!

Okay all you decoding genuises! For those of us who know Nothin and need the dummies version - word clues please -
I know you love that part Kim, giving me another puzzle to figure out, and I can do it from the words alone! HELP! LOL Micci

apparently the Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed works for all of the paragraphs so you only have to decode one!

Is this what you mean?

http://www.lipsum.com/
Something about Dummy Text? Okay, I am sooooo confused! Micci

No, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. sed, is as far as iv'e gotten with the passcode for the viginere.

I tried to have it translated and got nothin, makes no sense, are we talking about that Studio 63 thing again? I AM confused, this is a crazy twist and I feel like I am on a Merry-go-Round, so I have to get off here and wait until someone finds a concrete trail to follow or word clues for me! Micci

Cloin, if you've got the first paragraph you're way ahead of me...still stuck after the first two sentences.

I wish i had the first paragraph!
LATINLATINLATINLATINLATINLATINLATINLATINLATIN. Next thing you know, the watchmaker will post a gnommish code. UGH!

Did you try BabbleFish? Whenever I need to translate Italian, I go there, and Latin is VERY close to Italian. Micci

cloin, that link you gave above just leads to your post above it.

What studio 63 thing?

Delos,

The studio 63 thing was this:
http://picturetheimpossible.com/forums/forge/5384
it never amounted to anything...

As for this code, a vigenere cipher uses a "passphrase" to figure out how to decode the letters:
http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/vigenere.php

So... if you use as the passphrase the standard Lorem Ipsum passage from this website:
http://www.lipsum.com/

you will find that "viola!" you are able to decode the first few words in each letter.

The next trick is to figure out how to get the complete paragraphs decoded...

thank you rochrach because as the great cloin I don't have time for long letters and stink at writing them anyways!

Finally got enough of it to get to the answer phrase...hoping the keystring repeats at some point!

I did find this page helpful (or at least it's made the process slightly less painful) :

Some Lorem Ipsum text

I've been fiddling with the Lorem ipsum at the site that Micci, saphir23 and Rochrach mentioned. I also googled lorem ipsum and that same site was first, so it's probably what the other factions are using.

If so, why does no additional amount of lorem ipsum decode more of the letters?

And, the original lorem ipsum, per the lorem ispum site spells Cloin's "adipiscing" as "adipisicing" (extra i), yet the correct spelling decodes less of the letter than Cloin's version.

And "adipisiing" decodes to the same extent that Cloin's version does in his " Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. sed"

so what gives?

[edit][edit] the extra i spelling comes from the lipsum.com home page, in "The standard Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s" section. It was the only place I saw "sed" used

@saphir23 - how much of the text did you use?

I just can't seem to crack anything past the first few bits. There has got to be a better way! When I figure all this out, I'm coming for you, Watchmaker!

Is there any significance to the Watchmaker spelling it 'lorum ipsum'?

Cloin, where di you get the version that has "sed" in it? I can't find it.

I'm just doing it the brute force method...

add to the passcode one letter at a time based on guessing the proper next letter... then decoding and checking against the 3 letters. It's gonna take awhile...

So.. while I do that, I would love it if someone wanted to jump in and tell me that "Nay, there be an easier way, laddie!"...

that's exactly what I'm doing too - and then checking what I come up with to see if it's legitimate Latin word.

Watch out - I found more than one letter produced the same letter in the same place in the code. e.g. "h" produced an "a" and "j" produced an "a"

I found I was guiding the words by what looked reasonable. e.g. in that first note, Cloin's passphrase decode ended with "... researching this." The next word is 4 letters. I found I was trying to make that next word "What." I wound up with "eend" - not Latin!

This is too much work. So many people have been breezing by with the achievement for this to be the right way to decode this.

Is this really a Vigenere cipher?

It really is a Vigenere cipher, and it's likely the encoding string was just generated (maybe even using the lipsum site) by requesting a given length of random pseudo-Latin, starting with the Lorem Ipsum text. So there's probably no easier way than the brute force method we're doing.

I've gotten all the way through the first letter, and (consequently) most of the way through the second.

If it is a Vigenere cipher, I think we should concentrate on the third letter, first paragraph ... Specifically "Kwi xeat ycfz tutzuivb ocrd ivblagx xlyn fcm fowm cecwuxrf dz hsdhrd"
It fits the clue: The ____ with ________ ____ adormed even the most innocent of papers…

dtrabjohns,

Sounds good. If we know the corresponding words from the other letters, you can jump right to the brute force method for the answer.

I'm getting a bit weary though... so I may wait until tomorrow to figure that out. The best I can do right now is to keep going with extending my now nonsense string of letters which forms the "pass code" as it is a pretty mindless type of task...

The good thing is that for someone, like me, who isn't trying to stay at the top of the leaderboard, it's o.k. to get these points tomorrow or even Friday as they'll still count this week for the Forge.

Who knows, maybe they'll even toss us another bone tomorrow...

From following all of this and from reading all forum posts and clues, there is clearly a commonality in some kind of "MARK" on all the letters, proposals and other documents, there has to be one Stand Out thing that ties it all together and gives us what we have been waiting on, the big secret that has been alluded to and hidden in plain sight, so time to THINK like Pooh and brainstorm a bit. I think that from what I read in the proposal, that it might have something to do with Belmont. I have not read all the documents, but his story has been mentioned MANY times. Do we have a complete list of the 13? Micci

I'll have to review what I have to answer Micci's question.

In the meantime, in looking at just the "Kwi xeat ycfz tutzuivb ocrd ivblagx xlyn fcm fowm cecwuxrf dz hsdhrd " sentence, I've found "Rpe" generates the first word, "The."

Not Latin.

I've noticed that any one letter in the passphrase not only affects a corresponding letter in the coded message, but also many of the letters that follow it.

The decoding of any one sentence will be affected by the decoding of the sentences that came before it.

[edit] I put Rpe in the passphrase box & pasted the whole first paragraph in to the decrypt box - and "The" stood out.

I've seen http://www.lipsum.com/feed/html a couple of times as a helpful reference. Each time I view the page, it changes. I'm getting the feeling that the pass code is not part of a larger phrase, but rather a smaller one... It alsways starts the same "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit"

If the passcode was a smaller phrase, then the folks that "solved" this would have said so. Instead, they've said that the passcode hasn't repeated on them yet.

As I slog my way through this, the passcode is not repeating... but this definitely is a Vigenere cipher which is why the prior letters matter...

yeah, I had already tried variations of a shorter version of the standard opener. I threw in "lorum" too. All I got was a decoding of the first few words... hmm, may be showing us the way in general, but not meant to be actual.

Any way, I took a guess as to the 1st blank word in the clue and from that found the passphrase that decoded "with" was "cum s(something)" Prolly coincidence that cum is Latin for with. My guess was what might be typical to adorn papers with and would be considered over-the-top on the most innocent paper.

I've found it's useless to try to decode the what might be "adorned" word without knowing the words in the last two blanks. For me, at least.

[edit] I agree with Rochrach. We gotta start at the beginning.

When I've found a few passphrase letters that work, I've then switched checked them in the other two letters to see the effect the new passphrase letters have all around. I'm hoping this keeps me on track for correctly decoding.

Are you saying that the passcode required for the 3rd letter is based off of the prior two letters or that the passcode starts over for each letter?

Found some of the words in this translation:

Lorem Ipsum"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."
"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."

Does this help anyone, and if it does, ya better tell me why, lol, this was just a hunch on my part.

I knew that Dolor meant pain, usually headache, but it could mean heartache as well. Micci

I saw that quote at the top of the lipsum.com site a couple hours ago & tried it. It didn't do anything for me. Except make me think of pain. And am I seeking this decoding simply because it is pain?

@dtrabjohns - because that " Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. sed" phrase works in each letter, I think it means the same passphrase works for all three letters.

But to get the passphrase, we have to start decoding at the beginning of a letter, at the beginning of paragraph one. We can't start in the middle of a paragraph and hope to decode it accurately.

Is this the site that you saw, it tells the history of the Type of coding text this seems to be

http://www.lipsum.com/

@delos -
Agreed. Looks like it's going to be a manual process ... tomorrow. Sleep is calling :/

@micci, yes that's the site I saw - it was the one you gave us earlier in this thread.

I've been taking random latin words from the lipsum generator and plugging them into the passphrase box at rumkin.com. so far, not much luck.

any hints, saphir23?

Well... another 4+ hours sunk into a cryptographic puzzle. As with the last one, I just powered through it.

Unless the others who have solved this one stumbled on something, I'd guess that the only solution we have so far is to use the brute force approach...

- start with the beginning of the passphrase
- use our favorite code solving website to guess at the next words in the three letters and roll through the next letter in the passphrase until it looks good.
- repeat for hours

I wouldn't recommend this unless you like this sort of thing.

Now, if it's like the last one, there will be something posted tomorrow which just gives you the answer. And, for at least me and saphir23, visibility to the rest of the documents after the code phrase. I certainly stopped once I got the code.

Glad there are only a few more days of being sleep deprived...

Please correct me if I'm heading the wrong way here....

Using Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. sed, the first letter appeared decoded to 50 letters, not counting punctuation.

I figured the first 50 letters of the 2nd and 3rd letters were also correct, not counting punctuation.

That brought me mid-word in the 2nd and 3rd letters; it was a two-letter word in the 2nd letter. I could think of only two words that would fit.

Thing is, I played around with the password until I got both of those words, but when I checked each new passphrase in the other two letters, in each instance, they didn't pan out.

Should I not assume the first 50 characters are correct?

The first 50 characters are correct.

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed" is the beginning of the passphrase.

If no one speaks up with a more elegant solution (or the passphrase doesn't appear later today somewhere on a PTI website), I am inclined to post the passphrase up to the beginning of the key sentence. This would allow folks to have the "fun" of decoding the key phrase without the tedium of the hours getting to that point.

I'd like to do it in a way that doesn't spoil it for folks that want to decode up to that part by themselves. So... I probably need to figure out how to use google apps to post a text file.

Thoughts?

Whatever you can do is fine...the way my schedule looks I won't have too much more time to devote to this one :(

Or you could ROT-13 the hint part (up to whatever cutoff seems appropriate) so that whoever wanted the hint would have to at least manipulate the text a tiny bit.

I wound up ging back to the lorem ipsum that never changes and starting from there.

To speed things along, I used Notepad to copy/paste snippets of each letter so that I didn't need to copy/paste the entire letter/note into rumkin.com each time and then scroll down to see the decryption.

I used Notepad again to keep track of the decoding letter by letter, with the decoded part of each letter/note in a list format followed by a notation of the number of letters I had decrypted. It was easier than trying to remember where the previous letter/note decoding left off on the rumkin page.

Doing this, I think I found the passphrase for the first 56 letters -- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed hen dre.

If you paste the first 56 decoded letters of each letter/note in a list format, it's easy to see which word to work on next.

I had tried the ROT-13 thing back when I questioned whether this really was a vigenere cipher. I came up empty-handed.

How would ROT-13 work here?

OK... based on Shilfiel's comment, here is the passphrase up until you get to the sentence with the code words for this achievement.

For those that prefer to get to this point themselves, I've taken the extra step of encoding this using ROT-13.

Here's the encoded passphrase:
Yberz vcfhz qbybe fvg nzrg, pbafrpgrghe nqvcvfpvat ryvg frq uraqerevgfhfpvcvgfrzrggvapvqhagrgvnzfbyyvpvghqvarengrgsryvfovoraqhzivireenahyyncbeggvgberyrzraghzsnhpvohfcenrfragcergvhznhthrvazvhyynzpb

Use the rumkin rot13 decoder to decrypt this.

Once you have this you'll now need to use the Vigenere cipher tool on rumkin in conjunction with the three paragraphs to figure out the next sentence in the third letter. (You need to switch back and forth between the paragraphs depending on which "next" word is easier to guess.)