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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

A hidden SD card containing encrypted archives could be lots of things. It's like a puzzle. I'm sure it made him curious. Why would you assume the contents are illegal? I wouldn't.

To me the op is no different from people who participate in ARGs. Only in this case, the prize at the end of the game was a ruined life.

If the police behavior sounds implausible, you haven't read any stories about similar cases.

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> To me the op is no different from people who participate in ARGs.

Except, you know, the game part of ar_G_. Real life is not a video game. If you live as if it is, something bad is probably going to happen to you eventually. Brute forcing something that doesn't belong to you is not just bad form, it's stupid, and depending on what it happens to be, possibly illegal.

Does that make the police harassing him OK? Perhaps not. Is any part of this story even true? Also perhaps not.

Many ARGs intentionally attempt to seem as real as possible, which is part of the appeal. There have been examples in the past where this has caused problems for people (the ill-fated game Majestic being one example). Contrived cryptography/hacking puzzles also show up as hiring screens, etc.

My point is that his mindset is essentially the same: He ran across an intriguing puzzle and tried to solve it.

OK. He should solve the meta-puzzle first. "What is this likely to be, and in what proportion of possible worlds is the outcome of knowing the answer to that question good for me."

I agree. A lot of problems that afflict innocent people in our society can be chalked up to not doing that kind of higher-level thinking - what would be a person's possible motives for setting up this scenario? What are the potential consequences? Am I risking my finances, health, or livelihood by getting involved?

Christianity is a massively-multiplayer alternate reality game, is it not?

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