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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.

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Pretty sure a lot of kids call them alternate reality games now

Exactly. One such example is the “TikTok time traveller”, something that became quite popular among TikTok youth when the “time traveller” (who was actually some kind of security personnel employee who had some clearance to get to usually-crowded places before commercial hours, before getting crowded) used to post ARG videos.

But past, grand “ARGs” often used to involve physical breadcrumbs such as the geocaching mentioned here by hendrik. Cicada 3301 distributed and glued pamphlets to public utility poles around the globe.

The closest thing kids got to IRL-based ARG puzzles nowadays would be that “Pokemon Go” game (that is, if this game still exists, given how its underlying purpose, which was crowdsourcing the training of delivery robots, was achieved)

Personally it seems to me like most have moved into videogames and game lore spaces

Yeah, pretty much this.

Also, maybe some niches within esoterica spaces (which is particularly the field that currently interests me the most) still persist, especially considering how the knowledge involving Hermetic Kaballah still covers ciphering-related concepts such as Gematria (letters as numbers, numbers as symbolically powerful) and sacred ratios.

Unfortunately I’ve been struggling to find these spaces since I left a Luciferian community I used to participate. It feels to me like either esoterica didn’t join the Fediverse, or esoterica groups could only be found in hidden invite-only instances (many of the interesting occultist art I manage to find is from mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Instagram).

Also other games have used these sorts of puzzles too, like noita, elite dangerous, and risk of rain 2 that had its most recent dlc page on steam initially drop with no fanfare and entirely ciphered.

Exactly. Kerbal Space Program too, with a SSTV easter egg when the player gets to Duna. Considering the way games are being “vibe coded” and enshittified nowadays, it’s becoming more and more of a relic from a golden era of gaming, sadly.

like the incredibly obvious hidden text in this comment.

It took me several minutes looking at your comment in search for a hidden message until… LOL! Now I’m thinking if it would be appropriate for me say “I spotted it” or “good one!” given the subject in your hidden message 🤣

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Well, computer programmers still do things like Project Euler and code wars. Some people go Geocaching and more organized events which include riddles and different places. We got Escape Rooms…

I recognize some of it. I heard about Geocaching (boxes and pen-drives hidden in forests and public places), code wars (is it code golfing? It’s something I often catch myself doing in a lonely manner) and vaguely about the other two.

People still listen to shortwave radio and figure out whether number stations change due to the Iran war

Oh, yeah, UVB-76 and similar! I used to listen to these. Also, part of my journey involves amateur radio, as well as tinkering with methods such as voice inversion, modulations and protocols (I once implemented from scratch the encoding method from “EAS broadcasts”).

I read people tried to use modern AI on the Voynich manuscript and other older riddles

As I replied to RoidingOldMan, AIs fail when it comes to uncommon ciphers. They can parse acrostics and, especially, poetically coded language, but they can only get so far with ciphers involving different ways of spelling letters or doing nested layers of calculation (they famously struggle with “how many r’s are in strawberry?” kinds of prompt). And, as I said to RoidingOldMan, ciphers and coded language seems to be a perfect weapon against the indiscriminate scrapping from clankers.

It’s probably all out there

Yes. Unfortunately, it feels to me like this kind of community became unreachable, and your next sentence perfectly explains why:

just the internet changed, and now it’s almost impossible to find in the big haystack and walled discord rooms etc

… and I’d add another aspect as well: algorithms. Back when I still used Youtube, I noticed how the “algorithm” was somehow programmed to shadowban ciphered content.

For example, I used to post videos involving ciphering/steganography and, when I tried to look up for my own content using a whole other IP as a guest (as if I were another person), my videos and comments were simply invisible (thus, a shadow-ban).

A similar thing seemed to happen for Facebook and TikTok. Those platforms weren’t removing the content, they were actually limiting the reach, and, well, there’s no purpose on publishing a content that won’t make it to anyone. There’s an unknowable amount of content right now lurking on social media platforms, but unreachable due to shadow-banning.

You’d (on average) be mindlessly doomscrolling there, these days. Not actively look for puzzles to solve.

I kind of do both. In Lemmy, I often doomscroll and consume. But I also creating things sometimes (even though I end up creating to the void). That’s why I don’t have a Lemmy account, but a Sharkey, because it offers both worlds: I can interact with Lemmy (as I’m doing right now) while I got a personal microblogging feed where I post the things I make.

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Not sure I understood your question.

You didn’t, but that’s okay. I was asking about my perceived lack of people’s engagement with content (not just mine) that requires some decoding, either technical (ciphers, such as Caesar, Vigenère and Playfair) and/or literary (steganography, such as the one I employed in my post) and/or symbolic (i.e. metaphysics references, “creative linguistics”, metaphors and “coded language”, semiotics). You probably don’t know (or don’t remember) the Cicada 3301 charades. I’m saying about things like that, from a time where the Web was a deep sandbox for creativity.

What you might think as a text may be, in fact, a carrier for subtexts. In such cases, the visible sings while the invisible screeches, but few can perceive and extract the high-pitched nocturnal screech beyond the clear song… even worse, some people can’t even fathom the song. And as someone who hoots and screeches in the night, I can’t help but miss the times where the world were more receptive to these screeches, now every high-pitched noise is said to be “AI” because of how AIs have been annoyingly beeping lately. And, to break the fourth wall, this very paragraph is such an example of a text with a subtext (in this case, symbolic/poetic language), this is what my thread is about.

If it’s on the internet archive, then it’s probably been scanned by AI.

Ciphering and steganographic techniques aren’t limited to the existing ones. I myself sometimes enjoy creating new methods, many of which are far from trivial for current Language Models to decipher (some of my techniques involve multiple steps for decoding, some involve conceptual references and semiotics). I tested the clankers against many of my creations and, in most situations, they all failed laughably.

Then the people, especially here in the Fediverse, often complain about LLMs but, as far as I can perceive (especially across the Fediverse), people seem to refrain from engaging with (or they’re unaware of) the very form of content that would protect them from LLMs, because those kinds of texts (such as this one I’m writing right now, and the one I initially posted) often “sound like AI” or something.

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Blindness can be a condition with which someone was born, or can be something acquired late during one’s biological existence. The very condition of blindness varies: some blind people get to, at least roughly, see shapes and forms (considered as “legally blind”, for example, in cases of extremely high myopia unable to be corrected with lenses, or some cases of macular damage)

In the one hand, racism isn’t restricted to physical appearance. There is racism against accents or the manner someone talks. There’s racism against the kinds of food eaten by certain cultures (perceived through smell and taste).

On the other hand, blind people themselves are often victims of prejudice.

Having said all this, I’d say racism doesn’t feel entirely correlated with sight. But maybe some correlation holds, and blind people would be more respectful and empathetic to others, especially given the prejudice they themselves experience.