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Comment by johnswamps | Hacker News Reader

As plain text:

  # The fastest person to solve this will win our entire catalog
  bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn
  ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q
  cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

I added whitespace as in the picture, you probably want to remove it. (I transcribed this by hand, let me know if I messed anything up)

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In case the rows play a role, I have it (OCR'd and manually corrected) as :

bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

The == at the end make it look suspiciously like some kind of base64, but no luck.

Edit: updated for s/0/O/

Edit 2: it isn't a simple rotation of a base64 string either. Maybe the == is a red herring.

base64 decoding of the text results in:

  m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt

That's all printable ASCII, which I don't suspect is a coincidence.

Hah, of course!

Well, ROTing that doesn't yield anything either, and it's too small to analyse character frequency if it's a cipher. I tried using 'thinkcode' as a substitution key, and the end looks a bit like 'thinkcode' itself!

Have you considered that it is probably valid perl? ;)

Is it? I can't get it to work, it complains about the backtick in column 27.

That's just cruel of you.

I spent entirely too long parsing that in my head just to see if you could be right...

One of my friends thought it looked like base85, but it is not.

  base64: bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtnZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5qcz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==
  text: m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt
  letters:  $&(48:=>BDIJLNPVY[`aehjkquvw~*.13;@TX]dflprsxyz2Umogintc
  counted: 111111111111111111111111111111222222222222222222333345556
  progressively hiding infrequent letters:
  m o r c zmzTX2.     lx. i] 2;U smodrg 3n 3@;gft]1 nf *U2i i  lnn@ i nxg  ctc c c XiTo1yU  s t*dp ygpctt
  m o   c  m   2          i  2 U  mo  g  n    g t   n   U2i i   nn  i n g  ctc c c  i o  U    t     g ctt
        c                 i           g  n    g t   n     i i   nn  i n g  ctc c c  i         t     g ctt
        c                 i              n      t   n     i i   nn  i n    ctc c c  i         t       ctt
        c                                                                  c c c c                    c

Python script: http://pastebin.com/7Jv891zg

I wonder if its just coincidence that the cursor is on column 42 of the first line in the image?

At 140 bytes even, it looks a lot like an SSH RSA public key to me (RSA 1024 bit).

Your hand-transcription matches my hand-transcription, so I'd call it good. :)

Edit: yep, 24th character is an "oh", not a zero.

puzzle[24] is O (capital o) not 0 (zero).

Good catch, fixed.

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