HackMIT Puzzle Guide

medium.com

79 points·dibyo··11 comments

I’m pretty sure the “Give it a try first.” in the intro should be a link :-P

Does anyone have a breakdown of how many people made it to/through each part of the puzzle?

In part 1 you need the sound turned on to solve the puzzle. I don't think I could have ever gotten farther than that on my own. Even at home I keep the sound turned off on my computer unless there is something I specifically want to listen to.

If you look at the network requests when the page loads you can see a good hint that something is going on, 'dialuptone.mp3' is requested from the server (and there are DOM <audio> nodes to play it). I guess if they had wanted to be sneaky they would have generated the sound with the Web Audio API [1], but I'm not sure what browser support is like for that yet.

[1] http://webaudio.github.io/web-audio-api/

The other thing was that if you downloaded the sound file and looked at the metadata, the author's name had that same phone number.

Love the creativity in this - reminds me of the book Ready Player One, except with less 80s references and much harder (well, in some sense) puzzles.

Pretty tough puzzle. The audio part certainly seems the hardest but it looks like there were some other clues ;) on that page to get you to that.

I would call this a good CTF game. Too bad, this year I am out of luck. I just graduated, but last year was a total blast!

I know people from MIT, only those people would have the perseverance to solve this puzzle

It's not as bad as the Valve Args were/are. The hardest part for me would have been finding the red herring!

Look behind you, a three headed monkey!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com