Does Internet still care looking onto steganographed/enciphered data?
As far as I remember the old Web, riddles and puzzles were quite common, everywhere from old social media and bulletin boards to blogs and their webrings.
Y’all may remember things such as Cicada 3301 and that 11b x 1371 cryptic YouTube video; of course, unless you’re not a millennial or zennial as I am.
How could these puzzles and riddles, useful for learning a plethora of things such as Math and ciphers and steganography, messages hiding in plain sight, are seemingly gone, nowhere to be found across the so-called modern Web of nowadays?
You’re currently facing one of those puzzles, except I’m just another dust in the wind so, to which extent it’s still a thing nowadays?
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Letting aside any attempt to fit a text into a steganography (it’s not easy to decipher a hidden message, but it’s definitely harder to craft one; yes, both the title and the previous text conceal three hidden messages), what truly happened, what is happening? It’s been a while since I stopped seeing and spotting such puzzles and riddles online.
I expected to find it the most across Fediverse and Geminispace, said to be places where humans are supposed to enjoy content with layers of depth and meaning… but, since I’ve been wandering around, even long-form content without hidden messages seems to be met with (seems like humans can’t trust lengthy texts such as this one, believing it’s AI-generated), as I observe my attempts on “being the change I crave for” being met with this… void… from the cold Web of nowadays.
Given how Web is essentially defined by human users (although Dead Internet has been a thing for some time), does this have something to do with the collective tiredness going on in the world, with humans too tired to try and focus on reading beyond the visible portion of a text they see online?
Perhaps it’s just the online analogous manifestation of “Dark Forest Hypothesis” (i.e. there are humans who’d engage with said content, but they’re hidden and keeping absolute silence, afraid of the possibility I’d be one of the ones they’re hiding from)?
Perhaps I’ve been just an unemployed and pedantic guy in a world where humans are too busy with mundaneness so they can’t afford the time to deal with all the effort required to read online content (textual or artistic) with all the depth it requires?
Or is it just my neurodivergence being unable to find meaningful connection with this neurotypical world?
Maybe the concept and practice of “hidden messages” are somehow associated with evil things or groups of people so humans refrain from dealing with something which would (in their minds) be potentially “dangerous” or “illegal”? (I once asked about the recent deactivation of the global live feed from mastodon.social and I got a reply explicitly conflating my interest in digitally-guided spiritual gnosis with “unsafe content”, two things completely unrelated).
A lot of the cybersecurity world does. It’s not super common in the wild, but it’s common in puzzles and challenges.
@WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world @asklemmy@lemmy.world
While part of the Cicada 3301 (and similar) puzzles and the techniques required to solve these puzzles revolved around cybersecurity (i.e. inspecting a website looking for vulnerabilities that would lead to a hidden webpage, or sandboxed environments where SQL injection were required as part of the techniques to discover a solution to the current step, etc), there was this multicultural factor, fun facts and trivias (e.g. nods to certain philosophical or esoteric books; the “cicada” itself is a potent symbol across mythology and philosophy such as Phaedrus). Then there were entire theories about the identity of those in charge of these puzzles; entire internet lores emerged, adding to the cultural factor.
Meanwhile, current cybersecurity events such as Hackathons, while truly interesting and valuable source of technical knowledge, these events seem, at least to my subjective perception, to be exclusively focused on cybersecurity with occasional (if any) cross-cultural nods (e.g. few to none “TIL about Ancient Egypt” moments).
And back in my initial post, I was also referring to what I could call “Cicada 3301 puzzle ancestors/derivatives/copycats” or, how it’s likely known nowadays, ARGs. Orkut and bulletin boards (dark web BBSes as well) used to have these random people suddenly posting challenges out of nowhere, challenges whose decipherment led to funny or ominous outcomes; people bringing lores and stories about how they were “time travellers” (inspired by stories such as that of John Titor; John Titor themselves was also an example of that).
I used to participate with several other people on trying to make sense of these puzzles and lores, I used to laugh at the funny theories that emerged and, well, we learned a lot of new concepts across disparate fields of human knowledge. Now it all feels a relic from a distant past. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia speaking.