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I have a secret message:

4470638247604044817559339103207250488852606988160972686558960541063247781119710410820484913933821198888332242717068270664790870393005797478769916994593

Can you translate it into English?

Hint:

Add a 0 at the start of the binary number.

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  • $\begingroup$ Has a correct answer been given? If so, please don't forget to $\color{green}{\checkmark \small\text{Accept}}$ it. If not, a comment to the answerer to help them satisfactorily complete their answer would be helpful. $\endgroup$
    – Rubio ♦
    Mar 15 at 3:42

1 Answer 1

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The message decodes to, in ASCII:

Why does everyone give me cookies? I don't want to be tracked!

To do this, you take

4470638247604044817559339103207250488852606988160972686558960541063247781119710410820484913933821198888332242717068270664790870393005797478769916994593 and convert it to binary.

This gives the string

101011101101000011110010010000001100100011011110110010101110011001000000110010101110110011001010111001001111001011011110110111001100101001000000110011101101001011101100110010100100000011011010110010100100000011000110110111101101111011010110110100101100101011100110011111100100000010010010010000001100100011011110110111010000000011001011101000010000001110111011000010110111001110100001000000111010001101111001000000110001001100101001000000111010001110010011000010110001101101011011001010110010000100001

Using the provided hint,

adding a 0 at the beginning

gives the string

Why does everyone give me cookies? I doneÐݹÐѼÑÉ­

Then, taking

the first half and translating it to binary again,

which gives us

01010111011010000111100100100000011001000110111101100101011100110010000001100101011101100110010101110010011110010110111101101110011001010010000001100111011010010111011001100101001000000110110101100101001000000110001101101111011011110110101101101001011001010111001100111111001000000100100100100000011001000110111101101110

You subtract this from

the larger binary

resulting in the remainder

10000000011001011101000010000001110111011000010110111001110100001000000111010001101111001000000110001001100101001000000111010001110010011000010110001101101011011001010110010000100001

This time,

adding two zeroes at the beginning,

this part decodes to

t want to be tracked!

I'm not quite sure what happened to the apostrophe, but putting in the two parts together gives the message

Why does everyone give me cookies? I don't want to be tracked!

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  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Interesting how you decided to subtract the second binary number from the first- I would've never thought of that! :) $\endgroup$
    – Zitian Yang
    Mar 6 at 23:45
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    $\begingroup$ It’s actually Unicode encoding $\endgroup$
    – The Empty String Photographer
    Mar 7 at 13:38

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