This last summer, I took a vacation to Alaska, and soon after it, I made this video of all of the photos I took. I don’t think I got a chance to show it to anyone else outside of my family, so I finally got around to uploading it. It’s in 720p, so enjoy!
Happy Veteran’s Day holiday, Cal Poly!
I find it ironic that my prototype solver (written in Python) is less buggy than my production solver (written in Java).
As promised, I’m here to report more of the White Rabbit happenings. At the request of my friends, I’ve omitted the actual QR codes and their decoded text for the benefit of the game. However, I will tell the events as they were.
Friday morning, we reconnected to the slowhiterabbit.org SSH account that we had previously deduced. The lovable ASCII rabbit appeared along with a PEM-encoded certificate, a set of GPS coordinates, and the following message:
Bring a camera, the view is beautiful.
The GPS coordinates were in the forest right behind campus, so after class, we all hiked to the coordinates given. Naturally, I brought my camera, and took a couple pictures on the way up.
When we got to the coordinates, we found a tree with the rabbit hanging from a branch and a QR code on the opposite side:
The QR code decoded to the private key for the certificate. We thought about what the certificate could be for, I decided to try going to https://slowhiterabbit.org/ , which requires a client certificate. After some command-line hackery, we created a browser-usable certificate file which allowed us into the website—a forum board. I registered, but just as the confirmation page appeared, my username began to delete itself, as if someone was hitting the backspace key. I freaked out. However, the username then replaced itself with the word “Alpha”. In the rabbit hole, just like in Project Mayhem, no one has names.
The quest will (presumably) continue next Friday…
There has been more White Rabbit activity involving GPS coordinates. Brandon and I are going to check it out soon.
These fliers (Photo 1) popped up all over Cal Poly campus a week ago. I thought it was weird, but went on with my daily routine, thinking it was some concert ad.
I didn’t notice the fliers anymore until I left my computer science lab today, and my friends and I saw another flier that replaced the first one. The flier contained a QR Code (not pictured), the white rabbit, and a barcode at the bottom (Photo 2). Ryan happened to have an iPhone app for scanning QR codes and determined that the QR code was an email address: alice@slowhiterabbit.org . We weren’t sure what to send to that address, but we figured that the barcode may have something to do with it. I determined—after an hour of trying different scanning software—that the barcode was Code-128 encoded with the following URL:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/
This ended up leading us to a barcode-reading Java program. Since we already decoded the QR and bar codes, this seemed redundant, so I sent an email to Alice asking “What is the Matrix?” accompanied by the URL for good measure.
Not being satisfied with waiting for a response from Alice, I decided to do some additional research. The domain slowhiterabbit.org yields no results from a browser, but the emails don’t bounce. I checked the DNS information to find that it is a valid domain, but registered under DyDNS, a popular dynamic DNS company, so no dice on the web hosting account. What was bizarre is that there is no WHOIS information, the obligatory public records for any domain name, for slowhiterabbit.org. So who operates it?
I did a trace of the IP traffic to find that the domain is running from the IP address 68.123.180.229. I cross-referenced this with an IP geolocation service to find that the server is a personal computer in Suisun City, CA. From there, I don’t know where to go.
I’m not sure how far the rabbit hole goes, but it’s gone pretty far already. I’ll keep posting this week as I find out more.
Me at my apartment. Fight Club for the win!
I’m going to be back home for this next weekend, anyone want to hang out?
And now you can ask me questions, too.
