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1. Open PNG in text editor, see comment:

    As I read, numbers I see. 'Twould be a shame not to
    count this art among the great texts of our time

2. Threshold so some of the pixels are black and others are white. Save as ASCII PBM.

3. Strip the PBM header lines and remove newlines so that it's just 0's and 1's.

4. Now feed it through this program:

    #include <stdio.h>
    main() {
      int c, l=0, n=1;
      while(EOF != (c=getchar())) {
        if(c == l) n++;
        else {
          putchar(n);
          n=1;
        }
        l = c;
      }
      putchar('\n');
      return 0;
    }

Output is the following:

    43-6F-6E-67-72-61-74-75-6C-61-74-69-6F-6E-73-2C-20-79-6F-75-20-73-6F-
    6C-76-65-64-20-74-68-65-20-70-75-7A-7A-6C-65-21-20-57-68-79-20-64-6F-
    6E-92-74-20-79-6F-75-20-61-70-70-6C-79-20-74-6F-20-6A-6F-69-6E-20-6F-
    75-72-20-74-65-61-6D-3F-20-6D-69-35-2E-67-6F-76-2E-75-6B-2F-63-61-72-
    65-65-72-73-20

5. This smells like ASCII, let's decode it with tr -d - | xxd -p -r

> Congratulations, you solved the puzzle! Why dont you apply to join our team? mi5.gov.uk/careers

From: https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/52888920#p5289...

View on HN

<img src="puzzle2.png" id="puzzle-image"> <script> /* Pink (white) 232,3,138 Blue (black) 58,185,229 */ window.addEventListener("load", function() { var image = document.getElementById("puzzle-image"), canvas = document.createElement("canvas"), context = canvas.getContext("2d"); canvas.width = image.width; canvas.height = image.height; context.drawImage(image, 0, 0, image.width, image.height); // Test 1 - rle (function() { var rle = [], prev = null, count = 0; for (let y = 0; y < image.height; y++) { for (let x = 0; x < image.width; x++) { let pd = context.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1).data; if (prev === null) { prev = pd[0]; } if (pd[0] == prev) { count++; } else { rle.push(count); count = 1; prev = pd[0]; } } } var r1 = ""; for (let i = 0; i < rle.length; i++) { r1 += String.fromCharCode(rle[i]); } console.log(r1); var r2 = ""; for (let i = 0; i < r1.length; i += 3) { r2 += String.fromCharCode(parseInt(r1[i] + r1[i + 1], 16)); } console.log(r2); }()); }, false); </script>

#!/bin/sh wget https://www.mi5.gov.uk/sites/default/files/u2/puzzle.png convert puzzle.png puzzle.xpm # Convert the image to XPM with ImageMagick. # Here is what the contents of puzzle.xpm looks like: # http://pastebin.com/0PySSAXx. The spaces represent one color and the dots # the other. We'll replace the spaces with underscores for readability. <puzzle.xpm tr ' ' _ \ | tr -d "\n" \ | sed -e 's|","||g; s|^.*\*/"||; s|".*$|| # Remove metadata, C framing.' \ | sed -e 's|_\.|_\n.|g; s|\._|.\n_|g # New line on color change. ' \ | awk '{printf "%c", length($0)}' \ | xxd -r -p