The companion account

A second account, the account name reversed (9CB9D65F54ED858A), posted eight posts on the main subreddit in February 2014 and a run of 122 on its own subreddit in January 2016; a seed reproduces all 122 counts, but none is read. Also the main account's 117 posts on its second subreddit, r/A858DE45.

The archive has a second account. Its name is the main account's name reversed, 9CB9D65F54ED858A, and it posted in two places: eight posts on the main subreddit, r/A858DE45F56D9BC9, in February 2014, and a run of 122 posts on its own subreddit, r/9CB9D65F54ED858A, in January 2016. Its posts are marked on their pages: the Account field in the metadata, and a badge at the top. The run is on the runs page with the same mark.

Almost none of it can be read. One of the eight is a partly recovered hand post. One is empty, and the other six are undecrypted filler. None of the 122 is decrypted, but their counts are: one seed gives every one of them, as in the main account's runs.

The eight posts on the main subreddit

The account's first post is at 17:07 UTC on 25 February 2014, the evening the operator set the account up. Three empty setup posts follow that evening, one of them the companion's, and from 20:00 UTC the account posts filler on a six-hour schedule, in the same second as the main account's own posts.

1ywl20 is the only post with content. It is a hand post in the old upper-case format, 3DES-CBC with the key MD5 of the account name and the title, and its first block is lost. It opens a masked GUID list, seed 804.

The six filler posts follow the length law, so their counts come from their lengths alone. Taken as one count stream shared by both accounts they do not fit, and no separate stream for each account can be found. The runs page lists them as a group of nine posts from two accounts.

The run on the companion subreddit

Between 19 and 24 January 2016 the account posted on its own subreddit, once an hour. Each post came about two minutes after a post on the main subreddit, and its titles are on a UTC+2 clock. The run page lists all 122 posts, each with its own page and the main-subreddit post it pairs with.

The run, post by post: 122 posts, each with its own page →

Here the author field on Reddit does show the companion account. On the main subreddit Reddit shows [deleted], so the attribution of those eight posts rests on the setup night and the timing, not on the author field.

The bodies are hex in 32-character blocks with a 16-character tail: 64N+16 characters, the same length law as the main subreddit's filler. They show no plaintext structure, no repeated blocks, and byte statistics that look like ciphertext. Keys built from the account names, the companion name, each post's title and its timestamp fields, under the cipher and key-derivation families the main subreddit's posts use, open none of them. Two large families are not tested yet: the random-salt derivation and the GPU key sweeps. The operator has said publicly that the filler is encrypted with a random salted key. If that is so, these bodies may stay closed.

The counts

The counts come from new Random(546395639), one Next(10,35) per post, and the seed reproduces all 122 of them, at draws 1 to 122. Draw 0 is never posted. That is the startup draw every main-account run from 2013 on also skips, so the companion's app behaved like the main one from its first call.

The seed puts it on the same boot as run 73, the main subreddit's run at the time. Run 73's seed is 546,388,634, 7,005 ms smaller, so the two app instances were started seven seconds apart and ran side by side with the same count rule and the same hourly schedule. They differ in three things: the companion posts two minutes after its main post, its titles are on UTC+2 where run 73's are on UTC−5, and it stopped after draw 122, on 24 January, while run 73 went on to 25 January. Whether the companion's length was set at launch or the instance was closed early can't be told from the posts; across all the seeded runs, the post counts show no round numbers or other sign of a quota.

The other subreddit, r/A858DE45

The main account also posted to a second subreddit of its own, r/A858DE45. The subreddit was wiped in January and again in May 2014, and none of the archives this site is built from holds it. Wayback Machine captures of its pages list 117 posts by the main account, from 21 February 2013 to 27 May 2014. It was a separate instance of the program, not a mirror of the main subreddit: on 21 and 22 February 2013 it posted every five minutes while the main subreddit was silent; in August 2013 it posted every three hours at :59 while the main subreddit posted at :06; and from 26 September to 8 October 2013 it posted twice a day. That last stretch ends on 8 October 2013, with the last run in the old format on the main subreddit. In May 2014 it posted hourly.

Seven bodies survive in the captures. The six from 2013 decrypt with the main subreddit's key of the time, MD5 of the name and the title, to ordinary masked GUID lists of 32 to 60 GUIDs, each with its own mask seed: the same filler as the main subreddit. The seventh, from May 2014, has the post-cutover 64N+16 format and does not decrypt, like every main post of that time. A short value once quoted from this subreddit, 71845121b5734280, is the last block of one of these posts, not a key of its own.

Each post has a page of its own, with the six decryptions worked through like any post on the main subreddit, and links to the Wayback captures that list it. They are kept out of the A858 counts and post listings.

What is not in the archive

• Fifteen comments on companion-subreddit posts survive. Five of them are on two May 2014 posts whose bodies were never retained.
• 110 of the 117 posts on r/A858DE45 are known by their titles only.