Smooth Blog

Clue: This bird went from professional guest to halfway house, and his final scene is a point in the middle

Solution:Credit for this one goes to LiveInGeorge

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0083433/
Richard Bird

1931 – The Professional Guest
1944 – The Halfway House

Died 28 Sept, 1986 in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada…

A bucket brigade clears rubble at the World Trade Center after the 911 attacks

Clue: Richard is on the bucket brigade

Solution: Bucket Brigade refers to transportation of items where items are passed from one stationary person to the next. More specifically, it refers to a method of firefighting before the advent of hand pumped fire engines, whereby firefighters would pass buckets to each other to extinguish a blaze. A famous example of this is the Union Fire Company.

But other than this description I think we should focus more on the following description from Wiki:

For the hacking method known as the bucket brigade attack, see Man-in-the-middle attack.

Which means that Richard is the man in the middle listener and parser.

The man in the middle attack is used in the following way:

Updates: Looking more into it, I find that the man in middle could be also used in other contexts, have a look at these two articles:

BBC Man In The Middle

Time News: Man In the Middle

Clue: Let us call them Tom, Dick and Harry, but not necessarily in that order.

Solution: By Wombat:

First thoughts: Tom, Dick and Harry often mean to “the general public”. They were also the names of the 3 tunnels dug by the prisoners-of-war in The Great Escape.
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=the+great+escape
http://www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/40/GreatEscapes/about5.htm

“Not necessarily in that order” reminds me of the Morecambe and Wise sketch with Andre Previn. Eric grabs Andre by the lapels and says, “I am playing all the RIGHT notes. But not necessarily in the right order!”

There are several tools to keep in mind so you can use during the competition, after all this is a cracking competition.

In some of the clues they have mentioned Marvel and Solomon.

The following page is a decoder of encoded codes (crack the code) done by Captain Marvel.

Notice how it mentions Solomon on the pic

Feel free to also use a base64 decoder: link

Many people have now figured out the correct website for this competition and hopefully faster with this post people that haven’t figured it out will be able to get it right but we are keeping the website private for now as we believe that only a few people have worked really hard to get this far so we have been asked to keep this site safe from the public for a temporary time.

People are getting much faster and better at this competition although there are still some clues that have not yet been figured out unfortunately, but no matter we will continue with the next clues and see what the outcome will be like.

The URL consists of 4 words as follows: **** **** ******* ****** It is a full domain name, so it would be the following: www.*********************.com The page has a background quite similar to that of the background of the image on http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/default.aspx

You will be able to notice a box where you need to input a password that accepts a maximum of 16 characters which could be alpha-numerical as well it could accept special characters.

The password at the moment cannot be brute forced into (as we figured from one of the clues) since it has a captcha image script to verify that it is a human using the page instead of a hacking program.

The website is not being indexed by any websites so you wont find it in bing or google or any others, this is specified on its robots file.

Credit for this goes to Dweb (Arun)!!!!!

News: Nevermind about the password being cracked, it was all faked by puppy, shame on him!

Stay tuned for a new post releasing full web site address

Clue: Oh, a virtue of our post

Solution: Temporary post by Wombat:

I’ll put money on an anagram, including the word “private”!

Clue: Slip-ons will (re)direct you

Solution: Information from Wikipedia

A shoulder mark, also called a shoulder loop, (rank) slide, slip on, epaulette sleeve, or (erroneously) an epaulette, is a flat cloth sleeve worn on the shoulder strap of a uniform. It may bear rank or other insignia.

This clue links with previous solutions we have spoken about the isignias (also with the twitter photo from a clue which was modified by putting insignias on the uniforms of the characters).

One thing to note on all of this though is the way that insignias are used and they are used for ranks, so this probably has to do a lot with the new Bing search engine [ranking methods].

Thomas Truxtun

Clue: Thomas belongs at the author’s namesake

Solution: I think this clue confirms that the Thomas link with the brute clue.

Notice the name on the left picture, Thomas Truxtun (click on the image to go to the source page for this image) and see how this is linked to the TUN clue.

Further looking into this clue shows the following site (Behind the Name) so we search for Thomas and we our result here.

Follow the link on the right panel and click on “namesakes” within the results you will notice that there is one noticeable author called thomas.

But it looks like what MS is trying to say on this clue is the actual name of the site “Behind the Name” this is the possible solution to this clue, it can surely be a big clue to the people that have already found the correct site.

This link gives information about the name Thomas and its branches.

Clue: http://tinyurl.com/4h5kxb – He’s not your son, he’s a soldier. Now, put him at ease and send him home.

Solution: By Wombat: This is the video:

Viewing the clip, the only “son” mentioned is when the “General” is inspecting the troops and asks, “Where you from, son?”. The soldier answers, “Madison City, Missouri, sir.”. Coincidentally (?) there is a Madison on the Regina map to the north-west of Regina.

Although I don’t think Madison, Sas. is significant (apart from being on the map) as it is a village of 6 dwellings with a population of 10!

Note: Just in case you dont want to watch full video, you will find the annotations on the following segments of it:

Where are you from son? 2.50 mins

Clue: The right man isn’t a brute

Solution: I think that with this clue it is saying that for those that have found the website already they should not use brute force attacks on the password as it wont work, usually you would start brute forcing password by dictionary attacks and then randomizing the words, letters, numbers, chars, of course this will always work but it might take a long time, since the site can accept passwords of a length of 16 characters.  So in a way it would be less time consuming resolving the clues that will give the password away.