Results and archival data

Discussion & Speculation for the Alpha Lupi ARG - February 2013

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General Vagueness
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Results and archival data

Unread post by General Vagueness »

We all know about this now, right? http://alphalupi.bungie.net/data/
The link on http://alphalupi.bungie.net/ArraySuccessResult.html is easy to miss so if you didn't I don't blame you. I also wasn't sure if it wasn't being discussed or the discussion was going on elsewhere.
There's also the PNG that's kind of in the background of the result page that the new easy pointed out in another thread.
There's interesting stuff in that archive and two things in particular I'm wondering about, and I'm going to look at that background image. Right now I can say the background picture and the other files I'm thinking of don't seem to have any notable text in them (looking at the files in ASCII form), and in looking I realized one of the files isn't what it appears to be. If I investigate I'll probably be up all night, so I'll leave this at that for now.
edit: OK, here's what I found, I haven't gotten to checking more than one thing yet. In that archive, there's a text file with instructions (which I mostly didn't understand), a file that can't be opened (it's called web.config and I think it just has to do with server stuff), and seven directories (folders). Each directory there has files relating to each day of "transmissions". They have copies of the geomask and output pictures at varying intervals (they start at five minutes) from when each day's transmission became available to now (they didn't stop when the week was over or on the "end date" of 2/23). Along with those they have transformations of each output, what looks like all the output together, transformations of that, and apparently the same pictures with a repeated transformation, going by the file names. They also have the 512x512 version of the final picture for each day (picture.jpg). The kicker is that each directory has a puzzlemask.bmp, which seems to be the picture that was hidden each day.
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Re: Results and archival data

Unread post by General Vagueness »

These puzzlemask pictures have numbers in them that, AFAIK, weren't detected before. I've tried putting them together to form URLs of HTML pages, JPEGs, bitmaps, and PNGs, and I always get 404s. [edit: I see now UnrealCh13f found these already] I'm interested in how the picture for day 4 (Thursday), every third digit disappears if you remove one of the color channels (RGB).
What I was talking about with something not being what it appears is that the second version of the sixth picture, from when it got rotated, puzzlemask 6b.bmp, isn't actually a bitmap. It's a PNG. I saved it as a PNG and tried doing all kinds of stuff with it but nothing unusual showed up in the picture or in the altered versions of the file (from the visual stuff I did with it), except that when I saved out the original as a bitmap with MS Paint (instead of Paint.net, which I've been using for all this), it had the "BM" in it that shows up at the start of bitmap files... twice in fact. I tried saving out the part from the first "BM" to the second one (including the "BM") but it didn't register as a valid bitmap file. So if there's something hidden besides what format the file was really in, I'm not seeing it.
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Re: Results and archival data

Unread post by General Vagueness »

I think something's going on with the radial.png picture, beyond what you can probably see (assuming you can see anything in the picture by itself). It uses transparency (the alpha channel), and specifically it uses it like some of the Halo section 3 pictures from a while ago and what I think was the first picture Bungie put out having to do with Destiny, particles.png from last summer IIRC.
One thing I thought was interesting was how most of the picture is completely transparent (with an alpha of 0), and all of it is close, only going up to about 35.
I tried all kinds of things but I wasn't able to find anything hidden in the transparent parts of the picture (or for that matter anywhere else in the picture). I looked through the file in ASCII form, and a version of it where the alpha was set to be opaque, and where it was inverted, and one where the alpha and color channels were inverted, and I didn't find much in the way of suspicious text. I did find "BM" like you'd have at the beginning of a bitmap file in the original, and twice in the version with inverted alpha and color. I copied out everything from there to the end of the file in the original and everything from the first one to the second one in the inverted version, and this time I tried a regular copy and paste along with one that preserves everything, but none of the four files were valid bitmaps.
I've attached the inverted alpha version of the picture so you can see the weirdness I'm talking about.
Attachments
radial alpha inv.png
radial alpha inv.png (236.23 KiB) Viewed 187687 times
General Vagueness
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Re: Results and archival data

Unread post by General Vagueness »

I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one or the only one to notice the hex at the beginning of the piece of music we got (eighth.mp3), so I'm guessing either no one has a clue or it's already been figured out, and since I haven't seen anyone talking about it (I don't think so anyway), I'm leaning towards it just being incidental stuff, but I'll ask: has anyone made heads or tails of this?
edit: it looks like this is volume normalization data put in by iTunes, which probably doesn't have any bearing on... well, anything
arohi
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Re: Results and archival data

Unread post by arohi »

Myung had some harsh words, to be sure. But they did resonate with some of us. More than a few of us hung our heads in shame. Some of us retired. There were those amongst our numbers who strove to make things right as best we could; though there are some admirals who balked at bodies disappearing, obviously bound for Reach and their home in 23 Zulu, we stood up to them. We had help from others, one specific other in particular but we knew our moral stand now.
:lol:
Stefan6874
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Re: Results and archival data

Unread post by Stefan6874 »

Thanks for sharing.
Last edited by Stefan6874 on Tue Dec 22, 2015 10:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
mangoman
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Re: Results and archival data

Unread post by mangoman »

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