HackerPit: challenge your inner hacker | Hacker News Reader

HackerPit: challenge your inner hacker

hackerpit.com

35 pointsEcco52 comments

You need to change "In this picture, I see _____" to "In this picture, I think you see ____".

I see nothing but static, and have never been able to see the images in those old-fashioned "3D" pictures. Thus, when I say "In this picture, I see static", that is absolutely correct.

Why should I waste another second on your page after you've pulled such a bait-and-switch? What does the page have to do with hacking?

Pull the image into Photoshop and do some tweaking with levels.

Spoiler: This has nothing to do with stereograms [1] - looking at steganography [2] will be much more helpful.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereogram

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

It's not a 3D picture. There's a code hidden in the image.

I found it by opening in gimp and randomly messing with colours/brightness/levels/etc

Level 2 appears to require that I download iTunes to reverse engineer an itunes twitter app... I gave up on that

That's one way to do it, but that's not the only one!

You can also do this in Chrome/webkit by inspecting the element and messing with -webkit-filter, I used: -webkit-filter: brightness(50%) contrast(5000%) sepia(0%); To reveal the code.

I can't why this application will need all these permissions:

  + Read Tweets from your timeline.
  + See who you follow.

Why's that?

Are these standard twitter permissions?

Unless you have locked your account (missing the whole point of Twitter IMHO) this is public information…

And yes, this is just the default settings :-)

I feel like level 4 doesn't take http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-ab... into account.

Also, the question on level 4, "The only gramatically correct address in that file is", grammatically is spelled incorrectly. Since it wouldn't make a good hint, I assume it's a typo.

I definitely see shapes when I back up and focus in the middle of the picture. Reminds me of those awesome hidden picture games as a kid.

I swear I saw Santa.

Don't get yourself a pink eye tough! Hint: I'd be very surprised if you could see "it" with your naked eyes. You'd better fire up your favorite image editor ;-)

Nice, I got the first one. This is fun.

Thanks!

This is actually pretty fun. Although my first reaction to the "white noise" hint was to pull up matlab and do a 2D-fft, figured it might show a picture.

Would never have thought contrast/brightness though :(

Did that for 30 minutes. Sau a flower, pikatchu, a leaf, and a half avocado.

It didn't like "polar bear in a snow storm" so I had play with an image editor and then gave up because of the Twitter requirement.

Really? Is requiring Twitter that bad? I thought it was a convenient way for most people to signup!

You know what's a convenient way for people to sign up? Having them enter an email/password.

What are you gaining from Twitter authentication? What are users gaining from it?

If you use Twitter, I'm sure it's very easy. If you don't it's a new learning curve of unknown length / gradient.

Hm... nice, but I managed to get to level 4 with just using some Google fu (for #2) and the online http://pixlr.com (was lazy enough to download GIMP). And I didn't need to write a line of code so far (yep, not even for #3, took me 5 minutes manually). Is that the intention?

I hope that it gets harder, but so far it doesn't appear it will.

Viewed source, found hint. When I get home I'm going to try searching for all colours that aren't FFFFFF or 000000.

The file name looks like a code.

Got to level 2 and gave up on the Twitter app one, since I'm running Linux and I don't have an Apple computer handy.

Indeed, but that's not the only way to solve this level!

I got to level 3. Then there's talk of writing code about Rainman, and now I'm fully stumped.

Well... either you can do image processing to count the number of blobs...or do a vague count, get a ballpark figure and brute force it

Indeed! Again, that's part of the game. The server is having a bit of a hard time though, as you weren't the only one having this idea :-)

Level 3 is already impressive! The Rainman thing is a joke though ;-)

I got to level 4 by writing a simple script bruteforce method, tried every number from 1 to 100+ until I got the right answer. Don't want to give out the answer, but yes, the answer was more than 100.

I brute forced from 10 to 20,000 :)

I opened the image in photoshop and used its counting tool to manually do it.

Remembering why I don't like OAuth

Well, it's more to do with white box crypto ;-)

The hint in the source is a little strange...it's not really a hint at all.

Well... it is a hint. It does look like that, but it isn't.

Why sign in with twitter? I have no twitter account so they lost me.

Hi, author here.

Restricting login to Twitter was initially an experiment. Turns out it's also very convenient for people who are on Twitter, as you signup in a single click!

And since this website is far from being important for anyone, I thought it made more sense to lose a few users here and there rather than forcing everyone through the tedious tunnel of picking an email, picking a password, checking your email, etc…

Still I'm really sorry to have lost you. Good job on getting to level 2 though!

Level 2? The sign in button is on the first page.

But signing in is only required after you finished the first one.

Once you pass level 1 you are asked to login with Twitter to continue.

I assumed he was on level 2 as you can play the first level without signing up.

Maybe you could offer no tracking or tracking by cookies or something like a password after each puzzle as an alternative.

After your hint above, it took me 30 seconds to hit level 2, but now I fear I'm left out of the fun because I'm on linux, so no mac app store.

A Mac is not needed :)

+ Drag image to desktop

+ Open photoshop

+ Reduce brightness 2-4 times

+ Punch in code

+ Get to level 2

+ Give up

Why? Level 2 isn't good?

As far as I can tell, you're supposed to download iTunes on mac and reverse engineer the oauth secret key from the twitter app.

I just got it by googling twitter oauth key leaks...

Definitely wasn't a fun or interesting challenge.

Agreed. Rather lame, just found the solution on pastebin.

Well, that's one of the ways. The fun one involves GDB :)

reminds me of : http://www.ouverture-facile.com/riddles/

Ouverture facile definitely was an inspiration. This is more developper/hacker oriented though.

Level 4 hint:

Streets:

1. rue du Temple

2. boulevard Montmartre

3. boulevard du Temple

4. impasse du chat

5. rue des blancs-manteaux

6. avenue des champs-elysees

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