Mystery.

[balinares]

Right.

So there exists, somewhere, someone who figured they had something very important to contribute to a very old post of mine, dated from years ago. The information was of such importance they had to post anonymously.

The title of their post is, quote, 'JpecZJEkfwtVmngJk'.

The content of their post is, quote, 'a6a7d2745ee994377352f07b209ce0d6'.

Alright... so.

Might be spam... but if so, that has the most obscure spam EVER. Aren't they supposed to point you to their site or something?

On the other hand:

That the post's contents is a valid hexadecimal string would tend to show that the post is not absolutely random. The relatively low entropy of title corroborates that idea.

That the length of the title covers almost exactly the length of the hexadecimal string, once decoded to ASCII, actually makes me think of one-time-pad encryption.

In other words: What. The. Fuck.

I am baffled. :) Any ideas?


[Edit: A winner is growf, who did the clever thing and offered a suitably plausible explanation. Thank you, growf. :)]

Comments

[ralesk.livejournal.com]

MD5 or SHA-1? :)

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Might be. Do you know any reverse dictionary where we could look this up?

[ralesk.livejournal.com]

They’re one-way; though MD5 has been “cracked” in the sense that there exists a method to create a passphrase that MD5s into the same hash.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Yah, but I think there exist dictionaries that match hashes to the original string for a large number of strings (think, dictionary attack cache), so I was wondering if you knew of any, since you know a lot about a lot of things. :)

[grey-wolf-xvii.livejournal.com]

It's you, from the future!

I might be watching too much Star Trek.

[jallora.livejournal.com]

> I am baffled. :)

What should I say ? :p
Try and press it a little further, then make an objection on the fourth statement. If it doesn't work, show evidence.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

I am SO going to tonguekiss you for this. :)

[kefen.livejournal.com]

Objection! Affection!

[msondo.livejournal.com]

I had the same thing happen. :S

Oddly, it was a fairly controversial post. I had a few anonymous people leave comments which makes me think it was posted somewhere else. Perhaps it is some spam robot going crazy.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Possibly. Shall we compare the source IPs of the respective comments?

[msondo.livejournal.com]

Eek, I deleted the post. :(

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Awr well. Doesn't matter. :)

[growf.livejournal.com]

Have you Googled it? It gets 42,800 hits most of which are similarly cryptic comment spam.

Possibly it's a dry-run of a spamming app with a uniquely identifiable string so it can be tracked via Google.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

D'OH! I googled the title, but not the comment itself. Good catch there! Thank you dear. :)

[balinares.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but that's a very interesting hypothesis. Time will tell. :)

[ozonegriffox.livejournal.com]

Ou comment faire chercher les gens pour un truc qui ne veut strictement rien dire ? Une possibilité :)