New results
What this project found that was not known before - new keys, posts nobody had read, new readings of old posts, and the filler generators.
Most of what this site shows was worked out by the r/Solving_A858 community years ago, and the site credits it as such. This page lists what is new: results this project found, and posts that nobody had read before because they were missing from the community's archive. The post pages say so too, under "New here".
Posts the community had already decrypted are not listed here, even where this project re-checked them.
New keys
Five posts were opened with four keys nobody had tried. Most of A858's keys are built from the account name; these are not. They are a label printed in the post, a word, or the year the post greets.
| Post | Title | Posted | Status | What was found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| p5dsk | 201201311658 | 2012-02-01 | explained | Key found: MD5 of the uppercase hex MD5 of "BORG". It decrypts to an ordinary masked GUID list. |
| u1rti | 201205231544 | 2012-05-23 | partial | Key found: MD5("A858"), the label printed in clear at the top of the post. It decrypts to a SHA-1 digest, identified as the info-hash of a BitTorrent file. |
| u58gm | 201205251618 | 2012-05-25 | partial | Same key as u1rti, MD5("A858"); it decrypts to a second SHA-1 digest. |
| 15qth4 | 201301010015 | 2012-12-31 | solved | Key found: MD5("2013"), the year it greets, in CBC mode. It decrypts to a "Happy New Year 2013" banner. |
| 1we0v9 | 201401281330 | 2014-01-28 | solved | Key found: MD5("cakeday"), in CBC mode. It decrypts to an ASCII birthday cake, posted on A858's cake day. |
Posts nobody had read
The community's archive was collected from the subreddit while A858 was active, and it does not have every post. The
Arctic Shift Reddit archive has most of the missing ones. Fetching the whole subreddit from it, rather than only
the account's own posts (which misses the 2011–2013 posts whose author now shows as [deleted]), turned up about
2,040 posts the community had never seen. These hand-made ones decrypt with A858's usual keys, or need no key at all:
| Post | Title | Posted | Status | What was found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| if6wk | 201107021324 | 2011-07-02 | solved | An unencrypted hex-ASCII message nobody had read: "You appear to show interest in the data cycles …". |
| ji1vn | 201108131938 | 2011-08-13 | solved | A Gandhi quotation, with a typo that is A858's own. |
| joc3i | 201108192339 | 2011-08-19 | solved | The IOCCC 2000 checkers program robison.c, byte for byte. |
| jvohf | 201108261730 | 2011-08-27 | solved | Hex inside hex, then 3DES under MD5(name), then Base64: "Lo and behold. I am the Internet." |
| my2v2 | 201112021751 | 2011-12-02 | solved | Joan G. Stark's ASCII Christmas tree. |
| mymne | 201112030249 | 2011-12-03 | explained | A 32-bit word list under MD5(name), regenerated from new Random(798). |
| n1ley | 201112051941 | 2011-12-05 | explained | 32-bit words and 32 masked GUIDs: the only post with both generators. |
| p71hu | 201202011755 | 2012-02-02 | solved | A Poe quotation from "Marginalia", posted on A858's cake day. |
| pegdm | 201202070030 | 2012-02-07 | solved | A Washington Post link to that week's story on congressional earmarks. |
A lost post, partly recovered
| Post | Title | Posted | Status | What was found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| k7zqv | 201109071444 | 2011-09-07 | partial | The body survives nowhere, but a 184-byte span of its plaintext (Carl Sagan, "Wonder and Skepticism") was recovered from ciphertext quoted in a comment. |
New readings of known posts
These posts were already readable. What is new is what they mean, or that they mean nothing:
| Post | Title | Posted | Status | What was found |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fwvnu | 201003031505 | 2011-03-03 | explained | Not ciphertext: a plain list of genuine v4 GUIDs, the last one cut off. |
| if4fl | 201107021123 | 2011-07-02 | explained | The blank line separates two runs of the generator, seeds 360 and 318, each after one discarded call; read as one list, no seed fits. |
| igmjv | 201107041325 | 2011-07-04 | best-guess | Its decrypted GUIDs are masked, not genuine v4. The sidebar held all eight in July 2011, and its first GUID's missing start is the sidebar's own value; best-guess mask seed 369. |
| j95o6 | 201108042016 | 2011-08-04 | best-guess | The 32-byte hex tail after the quotation is a best guess: two masked GUIDs (filler), whose shape fits the mask-digit lists. No seed is identified. |
| jbucr | 201108071521 | 2011-08-07 | explained | Its decrypted list is ordinary filler (seed 494), not a hidden message. |
| jkscb | 201108161340 | 2011-08-16 | explained | The hex grid is 9 masked GUIDs (seed 880), and its MD5 was that evening's sidebar and jkuyr's key. |
| ljcad | 201110201724 | 2011-10-21 | best-guess | 0x257959 read as a Julian Day Number: the exact day A858 came back after a 42-day silence. Best guess. |
| 12yvg0 | 201211101158 | 2012-11-10 | solved | The decrypted time 201212031123 is when the bot restarted, 23 days later (11:23 Pacific, the first post after the silence). |
| 14eki0 | 201212061614 | 2012-12-06 | best-guess | The colour words read as a hand-made reaction to the December 2012 newcomers, with no payload. Best guess. |
| 14xfr4 | 201212152045 | 2012-12-16 | best-guess | The number groups read as a hand-typed numbers-station pastiche with no payload. Best guess. |
| 2jtoce | 201410210620 | 2014-10-20 | solved | Completed the community's partial solution: every # is a box wall, and the other cells are random filler with no hidden text. |
| 3hxe8v | 201508212247 | 2015-08-22 | solved | The AMA reply codebook checked against the ciphertexts its poster quoted, and its filler shown to be hand-typed. |
| 40t6rg | 201601132259 | 2016-01-13 | explained | The six bytes are a valid Powerball ticket for that night's record draw, posted before it. |
The best guess entries are checked readings, not proofs; each post page says what was tested.
The filler
The biggest result is not about any one post. Nearly all of A858's posts are filler, and this project found the three generators that made it:
- the mask digit: the odd version digit in every GUID is
new Random(millisecond).Next(9); - the 32-bit word posts: four
Next(lo, hi)calls per word on one seededRandom; - the count RNG: the number of GUIDs in each post is drawn from a long-lived
Randomseeded by the machine's uptime, which identifies A858's individual program runs and when the machine booted.
With those, the content of every decrypted filler post is accounted for, and so is the size of every post in the 74 reproduced seed runs and the four probable runs, including the thousands that can no longer be decrypted. The count RNG also gives the seed of the companion account's run of January 2016: a second copy of the program, started seven seconds after a main run on the same machine.
First decryptions from the extra archive material
Most of the posts that only Arctic Shift had are ordinary filler. The ones from before the October 2013 key change decrypt with the usual keys, and had simply never been decrypted, because nobody had them:
Their post pages carry the tag arctic-only.