Here is a poll for you
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I wonder what one expects when opens this thread...
Anyway, this has to be fun, there are images and also things to vote for. Have fun, or something.
Hint1: the tooltip of the potato says http://folk.uio.no/gergelyc/a.html, yes, it is yet again my usual binary mess
Hint2: the answer to the question in the title happens to be d}ck (the one in the poll is wrong and can not be fixed, sorry)
Hint3: a cheerful chant for the occasion - Wise-wise, bit-wise, yeah-yeah, bit-wise
Megahint
Bitwise operations actually exist, and they operate on bits.
Here is what or is doing:
If someone visits xlate, it is easy to get binary representation of strings from there. For example Duck or dick:
So the thing can be done manually, just it may be a bit tedious - if someone has 288 bits for example. Also, if someone wants to shorten those 288 bits, care should be taken to cut n*8 digits (and thus preserve the byte boundaries). However xlate has hexadecimal output, which nicely preserves bytes, and Windows has Calculator, which can work with up to 16-digit hexadecimal numbers at a time (in Programmer view).
Calculator even skips the spaces, so one could directly take
44 75 63 6b
from xlate for Duck, paste, click on Or, take64 69 63 6b
for dick, paste, press Enter, and get647D636B
as result. The xlate page does not care about spaces, so this hexadecimal code can be pasted into it directly, and d}ck will appear after decoding.Solution
This was just a re-iteration of my steganography mania, but everything was present in this thread. a.html first was linked as tooltip for the artistic potato, but very soon appeared as a hint.
Decoding the images lead to two binary codes of 288 bits each. I made sure that all characters are printable, so xlate could be used to get the text from them:
The "Almost There, " part is trivially removable, and if someone watches carefully it can be guessed that the first binary part combines to "Just'Cause", which is true: in ASCII, binary or-ing a space and a lower-case letter results in the lower-case letter.
What remains is
While Calculator in Windows can deal with 16 hexadecimal digits (8 characters) at a time, pasting these numbers works already (just the last 6 digits will be ignored), or-ing and decoding leads to "6IX85 uh", a small train starting with Just Cause Collection.
The last 6 digits combine to "...".
189 (plain decimal) is BD in hexadecimal. I needed some sane deadline for the puzzles and today (Aug 27) happens to be my birthday.
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