Does Internet still care looking onto steganographed/enciphered data?
As far as I remember the old Web, riddles and puzzles were quite common, everywhere from old social media and bulletin boards to blogs and their webrings.
Y’all may remember things such as Cicada 3301 and that 11b x 1371 cryptic YouTube video; of course, unless you’re not a millennial or zennial as I am.
How could these puzzles and riddles, useful for learning a plethora of things such as Math and ciphers and steganography, messages hiding in plain sight, are seemingly gone, nowhere to be found across the so-called modern Web of nowadays?
You’re currently facing one of those puzzles, except I’m just another dust in the wind so, to which extent it’s still a thing nowadays?
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Letting aside any attempt to fit a text into a steganography (it’s not easy to decipher a hidden message, but it’s definitely harder to craft one; yes, both the title and the previous text conceal three hidden messages), what truly happened, what is happening? It’s been a while since I stopped seeing and spotting such puzzles and riddles online.
I expected to find it the most across Fediverse and Geminispace, said to be places where humans are supposed to enjoy content with layers of depth and meaning… but, since I’ve been wandering around, even long-form content without hidden messages seems to be met with (seems like humans can’t trust lengthy texts such as this one, believing it’s AI-generated), as I observe my attempts on “being the change I crave for” being met with this… void… from the cold Web of nowadays.
Given how Web is essentially defined by human users (although Dead Internet has been a thing for some time), does this have something to do with the collective tiredness going on in the world, with humans too tired to try and focus on reading beyond the visible portion of a text they see online?
Perhaps it’s just the online analogous manifestation of “Dark Forest Hypothesis” (i.e. there are humans who’d engage with said content, but they’re hidden and keeping absolute silence, afraid of the possibility I’d be one of the ones they’re hiding from)?
Perhaps I’ve been just an unemployed and pedantic guy in a world where humans are too busy with mundaneness so they can’t afford the time to deal with all the effort required to read online content (textual or artistic) with all the depth it requires?
Or is it just my neurodivergence being unable to find meaningful connection with this neurotypical world?
Maybe the concept and practice of “hidden messages” are somehow associated with evil things or groups of people so humans refrain from dealing with something which would (in their minds) be potentially “dangerous” or “illegal”? (I once asked about the recent deactivation of the global live feed from mastodon.social and I got a reply explicitly conflating my interest in digitally-guided spiritual gnosis with “unsafe content”, two things completely unrelated).
A lot of the cybersecurity world does. It’s not super common in the wild, but it’s common in puzzles and challenges.
I strongly have the impression that with things like the puzzles you bring up is that an overwhelmingly large percentage of internet users has been conditioned to receive “compressed” information as quickly and massively as possible. This causes an enormous struggle to keep a prolonged attention span going on single subject items and people rather hop from one topic to the other purely out of conditioning.
It also feels like the above causes people in general to lose interest in complicated matters because there is no instant gratification nor a grand “prize” at the conclusion if they would participate.
My experience is that they’re still around in lesser numbers. You just need to know where to look. Personally it seems to me like most have moved into videogames and game lore spaces. Pretty sure a lot of kids call them alternate reality games now. Half a dozen new ones come out from the slowly dying garry’s mod map community every year. Also other games have used these sorts of puzzles too, like noita, elite dangerous, and risk of rain 2 that had its most recent dlc page on steam initially drop with no fanfare and entirely ciphered. Really cool stuff. Due to the connection with games it also crosses over with cheap jumpscare horror stuff like slenderman and five nights at freddys, so a lot of people consider it juvenile now, like the incredibly obvious hidden text in this comment.
@wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com @asklemmy@lemmy.world
Pretty sure a lot of kids call them alternate reality games now
Exactly. One such example is the “TikTok time traveller”, something that became quite popular among TikTok youth when the “time traveller” (who was actually some kind of security personnel employee who had some clearance to get to usually-crowded places before commercial hours, before getting crowded) used to post ARG videos.
But past, grand “ARGs” often used to involve physical breadcrumbs such as the geocaching mentioned here by hendrik. Cicada 3301 distributed and glued pamphlets to public utility poles around the globe.
The closest thing kids got to IRL-based ARG puzzles nowadays would be that “Pokemon Go” game (that is, if this game still exists, given how its underlying purpose, which was crowdsourcing the training of delivery robots, was achieved)
Personally it seems to me like most have moved into videogames and game lore spaces
Yeah, pretty much this.
Also, maybe some niches within esoterica spaces (which is particularly the field that currently interests me the most) still persist, especially considering how the knowledge involving Hermetic Kaballah still covers ciphering-related concepts such as Gematria (letters as numbers, numbers as symbolically powerful) and sacred ratios.
Unfortunately I’ve been struggling to find these spaces since I left a Luciferian community I used to participate. It feels to me like either esoterica didn’t join the Fediverse, or esoterica groups could only be found in hidden invite-only instances (many of the interesting occultist art I manage to find is from mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Instagram).
Also other games have used these sorts of puzzles too, like noita, elite dangerous, and risk of rain 2 that had its most recent dlc page on steam initially drop with no fanfare and entirely ciphered.
Exactly. Kerbal Space Program too, with a SSTV easter egg when the player gets to Duna. Considering the way games are being “vibe coded” and enshittified nowadays, it’s becoming more and more of a relic from a golden era of gaming, sadly.
like the incredibly obvious hidden text in this comment.
It took me several minutes looking at your comment in search for a hidden message until… LOL! Now I’m thinking if it would be appropriate for me say “I spotted it” or “good one!” given the subject in your hidden message 🤣
Well, computer programmers still do things like Project Euler and code wars. Some people go Geocaching and more organized events which include riddles and different places. We got Escape Rooms… People still listen to shortwave radio and figure out whether number stations change due to the Iran war… I read people tried to use modern AI on the Voynich manuscript and other older riddles… It’s probably all out there, just the internet changed, and now it’s almost impossible to find in the big haystack and walled discord rooms etc. And social media got more consumerist. You’d (on average) be mindlessly doomscrolling there, these days. Not actively look for puzzles to solve.
@hendrik@palaver.p3x.de @asklemmy@lemmy.world
Well, computer programmers still do things like Project Euler and code wars. Some people go Geocaching and more organized events which include riddles and different places. We got Escape Rooms…
I recognize some of it. I heard about Geocaching (boxes and pen-drives hidden in forests and public places), code wars (is it code golfing? It’s something I often catch myself doing in a lonely manner) and vaguely about the other two.
People still listen to shortwave radio and figure out whether number stations change due to the Iran war
Oh, yeah, UVB-76 and similar! I used to listen to these. Also, part of my journey involves amateur radio, as well as tinkering with methods such as voice inversion, modulations and protocols (I once implemented from scratch the encoding method from “EAS broadcasts”).
I read people tried to use modern AI on the Voynich manuscript and other older riddles
As I replied to RoidingOldMan, AIs fail when it comes to uncommon ciphers. They can parse acrostics and, especially, poetically coded language, but they can only get so far with ciphers involving different ways of spelling letters or doing nested layers of calculation (they famously struggle with “how many r’s are in strawberry?” kinds of prompt). And, as I said to RoidingOldMan, ciphers and coded language seems to be a perfect weapon against the indiscriminate scrapping from clankers.
It’s probably all out there
Yes. Unfortunately, it feels to me like this kind of community became unreachable, and your next sentence perfectly explains why:
just the internet changed, and now it’s almost impossible to find in the big haystack and walled discord rooms etc
… and I’d add another aspect as well: algorithms. Back when I still used Youtube, I noticed how the “algorithm” was somehow programmed to shadowban ciphered content.
For example, I used to post videos involving ciphering/steganography and, when I tried to look up for my own content using a whole other IP as a guest (as if I were another person), my videos and comments were simply invisible (thus, a shadow-ban).
A similar thing seemed to happen for Facebook and TikTok. Those platforms weren’t removing the content, they were actually limiting the reach, and, well, there’s no purpose on publishing a content that won’t make it to anyone. There’s an unknowable amount of content right now lurking on social media platforms, but unreachable due to shadow-banning.
You’d (on average) be mindlessly doomscrolling there, these days. Not actively look for puzzles to solve.
I kind of do both. In Lemmy, I often doomscroll and consume. But I also creating things sometimes (even though I end up creating to the void). That’s why I don’t have a Lemmy account, but a Sharkey, because it offers both worlds: I can interact with Lemmy (as I’m doing right now) while I got a personal microblogging feed where I post the things I make.
If it’s on the internet archive, then it’s probably been scanned by AI.
Not sure I understood your question.
@RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world @asklemmy@lemmy.world
Not sure I understood your question.
You didn’t, but that’s okay. I was asking about my perceived lack of people’s engagement with content (not just mine) that requires some decoding, either technical (ciphers, such as Caesar, Vigenère and Playfair) and/or literary (steganography, such as the one I employed in my post) and/or symbolic (i.e. metaphysics references, “creative linguistics”, metaphors and “coded language”, semiotics). You probably don’t know (or don’t remember) the Cicada 3301 charades. I’m saying about things like that, from a time where the Web was a deep sandbox for creativity.
What you might think as a text may be, in fact, a carrier for subtexts. In such cases, the visible sings while the invisible screeches, but few can perceive and extract the high-pitched nocturnal screech beyond the clear song… even worse, some people can’t even fathom the song. And as someone who hoots and screeches in the night, I can’t help but miss the times where the world were more receptive to these screeches, now every high-pitched noise is said to be “AI” because of how AIs have been annoyingly beeping lately. And, to break the fourth wall, this very paragraph is such an example of a text with a subtext (in this case, symbolic/poetic language), this is what my thread is about.
If it’s on the internet archive, then it’s probably been scanned by AI.
Ciphering and steganographic techniques aren’t limited to the existing ones. I myself sometimes enjoy creating new methods, many of which are far from trivial for current Language Models to decipher (some of my techniques involve multiple steps for decoding, some involve conceptual references and semiotics). I tested the clankers against many of my creations and, in most situations, they all failed laughably.
Then the people, especially here in the Fediverse, often complain about LLMs but, as far as I can perceive (especially across the Fediverse), people seem to refrain from engaging with (or they’re unaware of) the very form of content that would protect them from LLMs, because those kinds of texts (such as this one I’m writing right now, and the one I initially posted) often “sound like AI” or something.
