The Wired Puzzle

Hello, I've recently stumbled upon this puzzle, that apparently dates back to 2018 (I know I need to lurk moar). Has any lainon solved it before? I've been stuck on the penultimate step 9 for 14 hours now. >hsvvrp.zjsvzlsfo.paola.lluayhjlp..pzy.bolyl.

what've you got so far on it? Maybe how you got here might give an idea of where to go

>>68364 The 9th step consists of two files, one of which is just a substitution-ciphered message that reads: >present day >present time >how does it feel >to have entered the wired? >this is the final step >you must escape The other, more substantious one, appears to be a reduced quality version of a particular lain opening VHS rip (https://youtu.be/JlBLcLdTYr4), encoded as h264+pcm16 in a Matroska/WebM container. That video must contain some relevant concealed data, but I wasn't able to extract anything using traditional steganographic methods yet. I'm wary of posting the whole process or the actual video file because it would ruin the fun for other people, but I could post a weakly ciphered version if requested. However, the solutions for the previous steps were mostly based on intuition and pattern matching instead of "hard" crypto- or stegano- graphy, so something tells me the text file isn't completely useless.

>>68365 Any luck so far? If you think it'd help i can look at the file, maybe two heads better than one?

>>68381 No luck yet. There doesn't seem to be anything in the spectrogram, LSBs, or file headers. I thought I had found some kind of trace with uppercase characters (A\x00R\x00E\x00) but it led me nowhere. >maybe two heads better than one? Of course, thanks. The file is located at https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/images/mascots/omnipresence.mkv. Digging a bit deeper I found what seems to be the original /g/ thread https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/66074121, and some anons dropped a few hints about this step, but I neither understand or completely trust it.

>>68383 best guess is maybe just open it as a text file and check it for anything text, I've checked the video's tags and nothing came up. My computer doesn't like it when i just try it as text and i think the file doesn't have audio on my end so maybe its just a personal issue. having looked at those hints of not needing to watch the file, that is the best I've got, but if you've tried the standard methods then probably no dice.

>>68407 >open it as a text file and check it for anything text Thanks, you might be on to something. Stupid me hadn't tried that before, but after stripping all non-printable characters from the raw audio, there's a suspiciously high amount of blank (tab & space only) lines just at the end of the dump, which may mean something. >the file doesn't have audio on my end Huh, that's weird. Would you like me to re-upload my local copy?

>>68409 yeah maybe reuploading it would help, and possibly try other text encoding methods too

Just realized there's been a /λ/ thread for more than a month now. Didn't think it would be relevant there so never even bothered to check. >>/λ/34490

>>68363 I solved it all. one of the easiest CTFs out there.