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This is important. I need you to listen…
(Thanks to f'' for the help in chat! He solved the majority of this puzzle - I just came in at the end.)
Step 1: Crossword
The crossword was solved by feelinferrety, Z. Dailey, and Sleafar:
Step 2: ...
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Secret Admirer Secret Message
Disclaimer: This is only posted in a half-serious manner because I was bored and looking for alternative decodings.
The message was sent by:
The first trap is the simple answer (given by Joe).
If ...
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Who killed Tom?
There was no murder, the police officer is trying to set you up. (Possibly trying to prove that you would be ready to accuse someone of murder based on a garbled message on a computer.)
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86
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Strange women and their strange ways of giving you phone numbers
Her name is
Her phone number is
Because
The translated message is:
Which, converted to plain text is:
The result above
Translating this, we get:
These are the
Which spells out the following:
...
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80
votes
Four boys are playing football and one of them breaks a window
Here's my interpretation.
It's
Let me tell you why.
Observe this ==> hE iS thE CuLpriT?
Now read the entire line.
Now the teacher knows whom to inquire.
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77
votes
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76
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The needle in the network - find it!
I noticed that four of the nodes of the graph have a quarter missing, and each of those four is missing a different quarter.
With this...
Though many people might convert these numbers into letters ...
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What was my wife trying to say?
This is
Text input:
output:
It took me a while but when I finally got a result I was full of joy! Why was I happy?
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Why did they close my riddle?
To solve this puzzle, note the key word in the text:
If we employ this on each of the three parts of the puzzle text, we can get the following:
So the reason your puzzle was closed is because it ...
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67
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Do you *really* know Stack Exchange?
More partial answer, work in progress:
As noted in Rupert Morrish's answer:
The hint:
So if we decode the cipher text found above using that cipher and key, we get:
So if we ROT-13 the remaining ...
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53
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Decipher this message for instructions to decipher this message
Let's solve this backwards as intended.
Observe that every word ...
Further, we can ...
And indeed, ...
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51
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Do you *really* know Stack Exchange?
Trevor Powell did most of the work in his answer.
He ended up here:
This requires two stages of interpretation.
First:
Alternatively:
Then:
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votes
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47
votes
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Break the subsitution cipher with a twist
Scroll to the end if you just want the answer. I give a detailed explanation of how I reached it.
First, I hypothesized that the permutation has two cycles: one of length 9, and one length 17. The ...
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28 Minutes Later
The eight patient names
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
Summary:
And finally:
Easter eggs / references:
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What characteristics of a ciphertext can be indicators of a particular cipher?
I'll start with a few simple ones to get us rolling.
Base64 has a 2/3 chance of requiring one or two trailing = signs - if you spot any of these, there's a very ...
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44
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Geography at the pixel level
Looks like
Once all of the places are found,
44
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Can you name the Country Code™?
The country code of Brazil is:
This is because:
For a full explanation for each country in the original list, see the following table:
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42
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What does this modern art picture represent?
Here is an answer that decodes this image. Not being a programmer, I used ImageJ and Stegsolve to look at this file.
Viewing with bit0 then bit1 provides these two images:
Then continuing to toggle ...
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The strange SMS
If you interpret each two-digit number as
We can interpret the full string as:
Which looks a lot like
Interpreting the numbers in this way gives us the string
Which, with spaces, says
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41
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40
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Guide to Codes and Ciphers
This guide aims to explain various ciphers, help you understand how they work, and how to decode them with or without a key.
This answer is currently being split into multiple posts to improve ...
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40
votes
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My Spying Girlfriend
The boss has encoded the numbers using:
For example:
The numbers are thus as follows:
My contact @hagfy (real name unknown) has identified this as the highly-advanced
...and has used enhanced ...
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Dot message on a Star Wars frisbee team
The dots and dashes are Morse Code as noticed by @Randal'thor
When it is translated to text it reads as follows:
These are
As a bonus
'Fall MMXVI'
is Roman numerals for
which was the season and ...
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38
votes
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The Writing's on the Wall
Taking the lines with squares on them, we get this message:
$(K(AK^T)^{-1}+E^TH^T(HKO((AO)^{-1}C^T+O^{-1}K^{-1}L^T)+T^T))^T+S$
Superscript T has a specific meaning: it's the transpose of a matrix. ...
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