Worst Puzzle Ever (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Worst Puzzle Ever (2009)

blog.rongarret.info

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Mr Puzzle did a set of videos exploring the flaws of the ISIS Orb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0sCGotCw2Y

The Mr Puzzle channel as a whole is highly recommended if you're into puzzles of this sort.

> The Mr Puzzle channel as a whole is highly recommended if you're into puzzles of this sort.

Or even if you're not, I found that video highly entertaining. :)

> And they know something much more important: every one of these people was affluent enough (or knew someone affluent enough) to spend a three-digit sum on a puzzle in the middle of the worst economic downturn in living memory.

Let's not hyperventilate too much; on any given weekend you can find people who hover around the poverty line spending hundreds of dollars on "toys", although those toys will probably continue to provide value and enjoyment significantly longer than this dumb puzzle.

Also, I would hardly consider the Great Depression to be out of "living memory", and are we still going to say we're "in the middle of" a huge economic downturn in 2028 just to support whatever histrionic point we need to make that day?

Edit: Either the (2009) wasn't in the title when I first clicked, or I just missed the damn thing. Thanks for pointing that out, Shaanie

Article is from 2009.

Floren seems to be posting from 2028. The continuum is all over the place.

> I would hardly consider the Great Depression to be out of "living memory"

If you were 5 in 1938, you'd be 85 today. And your memories of the Depression probably wouldn't be that good.

The older you were in the Depression, the more dead you are now.

Follow up post is here:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/12/isis-update.html

The puzzle website is obviously dead, but the domain is still registered: isisadventure.com. Good luck to anyone doing anything with that domain

the domain is registered by info@chinacapital.com, which registered over 500 domains, 2 of them marked malicious. the cisco umbrella risk of the domain is 77, medium

Yes, it’s just there’s certain bad publicity associated with the name these days due to some other people known by the appellation Isis.

“Marked malicious” by whom?

The company website is still up and they have produced further 'puzzles' in the series.

Puzzle companies need a lot of trust from their customers for hobbyists to buy them and spend hours working on them. To solve this problem, is there a community review site for puzzles without spoilers? Solvers would want to avoid Googling around, since the solution could accidentally be revealed, making the $200 purchase worthless.

I have seen youtube reviewers that give difficulty ratings etc before showing solutions.

So did he ever get spam at the fake address?

That's a good question. No, I didn't.

The comments on that post are particularly interesting.

Like the first one comparing the puzzles registration flow to the holocaust?

WTF.

It was an example of seemingly innocuous compliance with "please provide us with your personal info, we promise we won't do anything bad with it!" leading to horrific consequences.

Oh I thought it was a brilliant illustration of the risk of complying with ISIS requests.

Why would anyone call a puzzle Isis.

Isis was an Egyptian goddess before her name got coopted by a terrorist group.

It's not like the terrorist group choose that name. They choose to call themselves Daesh. ISIS was a term coined by Western miliary and/or media.

The actual name is ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, "Islamic State". The Arabic acronym Daesh ("D.S.") is considered derogatory by IS itself.

Anyone remember the NFC mobile payments platform from 2011 that was called Isis Wallet?

It was a pretty big deal (huge backing by carriers, phone manufacturers, and credit card companies). They changed the name to Softcard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard

My brother adopted a dog a few years back named Isis (after the Egyptian god). Even though Isis now had a very different connotation, they felt bad to change the dog's name. They recently adopted another dog which I jokingly recommended they name Al Qaeda.

I didn't know the name "Isis" had actually seen its popularity affected that much in the US? It still feels like a beautiful classical name to me, but then we never used the English name "ISIS" for the organisation, here in France.

It's a shame that the multimillenial name of an ancient god could be ruined for some people by an organization that lasted less than a decade, I hope this effect doesn't last.

My friend has a 10 year old daughter named Isis.

"Al Qaeda" can be translated as "The Foundation", and there is apparently some discussion about Bin Laden being an Asimov fan and basing the name of his organisation on the Foundation Series. Also, I am reliably informed that wiping your Al Qaeda has apparently become slang in some places.

Was Isis a well known terrorist organisation in 2009 ?

No.

They weren't even calling themselves ISIS back in 2009, so no.

I believe it came out when Al Qaeda was the boogey man. ISIS didn't get any press until 2013:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...

The Pentagon didn't start calling it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) until 2017. Prior to then, it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Worth noting that the Islamic State has preferred being called ISIS. I think calling them ISIL was being done in part to annoy them.

No, it's more to do with the ambiguity of the Arabic original ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām. The "Sham" bit here can be refer either to the present day state of Syria, hence ISIS; or the historical greater Syria aka Levant, hence ISIL. However, the group internally dropped the qualified some time ago, now it's just Islamic State, with the obvious implication that it's the global state for true believers.

Wikipedia goes into all this in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_...

There was a tweet about the poor NSA intern who would be tasked with the code to identify whether "is" referred to the organization or the verb. The paranoid side of me always assumed that the rebranding to Isis could have been suggested by the Pentagon to news organizations for that reason.

Isis and ISIS are two completely different and unrelated things.

Yes, there are a lot of people named Isis. It used to be possible to get a Coke that said 'Share a Coke with Isis' on it, but i think they stopped making them.

Parts of the Thames that flow through Oxford are called “The Isis” (presumably after the Goddess), and there are (or at least were) a good number of Oxford things called that

He's clearly insanely paranoid about personal information, but that does sound like a terrible puzzle.

Maybe he is paranoid, but it is his information, so he has every right to be! If only more people are like him, we wouldn't have all these multi billion dollar companies doing whatever they feel like with their users' info

Sure, but why not just create a fake persona and call it a day. Transient email address, fake name, google voice phone number, done...

> why not just create a fake persona

If you read the article, you will see that the author did exactly that.

His rationale that the accumulated mailing list would be highly valuable is not wrong. The idea such a list would be sold by a luxury toy company looking for cash in hard economic times isn't hard to fathom. And this is before robo calls ruined our cell phones, back then you could keep your spam calls to almost zero if you were smart about giving your number out.

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