The Toronto dead drop explained
So as you know the Toronto Master Collection dead drop was found around 7:30 am this morning. I’m truly amazed that it was found so quick seeing that I didn’t blog about it until around 8:30 pm the night before. Below are the steps that the winner had to take to get the prize.
Search for clues
The first step was simple if you literally did what I said in the blog post. I mentioned that you should search for clues here on theFlashBlog. This meant you literally had to enter the word clues into the search box on the right side of my blog and click search. If you did then you were taken to a small Flash application. Go ahead and do it, it still works.
The STE number
Upon arriving at the Flash site, you will notice that the title of page contains some GPS coordinates. This led you to a small street not far from the Hilton hear in Toronto. On the side of one of the buildings there was a sign that was talking about a zoning permit for the road and it had the following code at the bottom of it: 150716 STE 20. This is what you had to put into the Flash application in order to get to the next step. Now here is the amazing part. The guy who won the software found the street name on Google Maps and then started researching everything about it. He eventually found the zoning permit online at some city website and got the code. That is awesome work.
DTMF Tones
Once you submitted the STE number you were taken to another Flash application with a sequence of circles and a set of DTMF telephone tones playing. First you had to decode the DTMF tones. There are some online sites that allow you to submit an audio file for decoding and there are also some standalone applications that do it to. If you got the number correct, the idea is that you would get on the telephone and dial it.
The number station
I was chatting with Mike Chambers in London about possible ideas for future drops and he mentioned the number station phenomenon. During the Cold War, intelligence agencies used to broadcast sequences of numbers over shortwave radio for their agents. Many of these were recorded by people and some were very creepy. If you called the phone number (1-866-989-3451) you would hear my distorted voice reciting a sequence of numbers. The audio is below for those who can’t call the number.
Braille
So you got the number sequence, but now what? Well you had to recognize that the circles in the Flash application were actually braille. You had to get a braille reference and click on the circles to make the right numbers. There was another thing in there to try and trip you up. In braille, all numbers need to preceded by a certain flag which is the # sign. That was the reason there was 11 braille clips and only 10 numbers on the call. The winner mentioned that he learned braille a little when he was younger but at least one other person, Raz Peel, was right behind him on solving this.
Augmented reality
After solving the braille puzzle you were taken to a 3rd and final Flash application containing a webcam stream and a graphic of the FITC logo. Of course this was an augmented reality application. OK this one was easy but it’s fun. After adding the black rectangle to the logo and printing out the marker, you will see the final GPS location along with a photo pointing to where it was. It was inside of a bush close the US Consulate.
I have to say that I’m so impressed at the speed at which this was solved. This is just more proof about how many really smart people we have in this community!
Lee
