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As plain text:

  # The fastest person to solve this will win our entire catalog
  bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn
  ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q
  cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==
I added whitespace as in the picture, you probably want to remove it. (I transcribed this by hand, let me know if I messed anything up)


In case the rows play a role, I have it (OCR'd and manually corrected) as :

bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

The == at the end make it look suspiciously like some kind of base64, but no luck.

Edit: updated for s/0/O/

Edit 2: it isn't a simple rotation of a base64 string either. Maybe the == is a red herring.


base64 decoding of the text results in:

  m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt
That's all printable ASCII, which I don't suspect is a coincidence.


  base64: bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtnZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5qcz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==
  text: m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt
  letters:  $&(48:=>BDIJLNPVY[`aehjkquvw~*.13;@TX]dflprsxyz2Umogintc
  counted: 111111111111111111111111111111222222222222222222333345556
  progressively hiding infrequent letters:
  m o r c zmzTX2.     lx. i] 2;U smodrg 3n 3@;gft]1 nf *U2i i  lnn@ i nxg  ctc c c XiTo1yU  s t*dp ygpctt
  m o   c  m   2          i  2 U  mo  g  n    g t   n   U2i i   nn  i n g  ctc c c  i o  U    t     g ctt
        c                 i           g  n    g t   n     i i   nn  i n g  ctc c c  i         t     g ctt
        c                 i              n      t   n     i i   nn  i n    ctc c c  i         t       ctt
        c                                                                  c c c c                    c
Python script: http://pastebin.com/7Jv891zg


Hah, of course!

Well, ROTing that doesn't yield anything either, and it's too small to analyse character frequency if it's a cipher. I tried using 'thinkcode' as a substitution key, and the end looks a bit like 'thinkcode' itself!


Have you considered that it is probably valid perl? ;)


That's just cruel of you.

I spent entirely too long parsing that in my head just to see if you could be right...


Is it? I can't get it to work, it complains about the backtick in column 27.


One of my friends thought it looked like base85, but it is not.


I wonder if its just coincidence that the cursor is on column 42 of the first line in the image?


At 140 bytes even, it looks a lot like an SSH RSA public key to me (RSA 1024 bit).


Your hand-transcription matches my hand-transcription, so I'd call it good. :)

Edit: yep, 24th character is an "oh", not a zero.


puzzle[24] is O (capital o) not 0 (zero).


Good catch, fixed.




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