I need your help with something I found today.

So earlier today, my friend was reading a book called The Russia House by John le Carré, when he found this on the very first page of the book after opening the cover:



The censored area is a phone number. The rest seems to be lines of code; possibly Base64, but I'm not entirely sure.

Could anyone help me out in unraveling and putting together the lines of code? (This is not the start of an ARG, this is a legitimate thing.)

I'll give it a whack.

EDIT: No clue. It's not Base, MD5, ROT or any other type of encryption I could test. Sorry Steven.

is it possible someone just was stupid and put a bunch of their passwords in it? I mean they put a phone number in it so why wouldn't they do that?

Etreo wrote:

I'll give it a whack.

EDIT: No clue. It's not Base, MD5, ROT or any other type of encryption I could test. Sorry Steven.

I've actually decoded a lot of the lines of code. Most of it is in fact Base64.

spawn250 wrote:

is it possible someone just was stupid and put a bunch of their passwords in it? I mean they put a phone number in it so why wouldn't they do that?

I don't think so. Some of it does translate. I'm going to call the number sometime, though.

I could only get random ASCII characters when I tried Base64. Either way, glad your making progress.

Keep us up to date if you care to, color me curious, man.

Will do, Armada! I plan on calling the number sometime soon.

Here's the lines of code that I was able to translate:

85VwyN = V
Eguh57 = !
wuhvjw = o or Zo
62xEyK = e or ID
jbg6gx = :
uybnmc = &
47x4ny = x
KvGvF6 = * or )Q
98nhvv = (unknown)
PvHwcP = > or =Qp
3x7bac = h, i, ~h, or ~i
JSHXRD = %!D, &D, or &
JHWM7N = $u or $
qJ2AHN = (unknown)

I have a suspicion that whoever wrote those used the wrong capitalization.

That's pretty much what I got, but I just dismissed it as jibberish.

Update: After my friend had been reading the book, he found two underlined sections:





No other part of the book is underlined, as far as I can tell.

On the first page of the book, there is one strand of code by itself, so I thought it might go with the lone underlined sentence. And after that, on the left, there are 8 strands of code in a column, and there are eight lines in the underlined paragraph.

Does anybody have any say in this?

I think it's weird. I also think that if this is some kind of staff proposed forum ARG then it was pretty rude of you all to leave me out of it. But for some reason I don't believe that. Freaky shizzle mah nizzle.

It's not, I assure you, I'm as puzzled at this as you are.

Trust me man this isn't a game. We actually found this in the book. I left it alone for a while before I found the underlined paragraphs.

I might call the number I censored out in the beginning of the thread.

Good idea. If you die I want your stuff.

I have a theory about this:

What if it is just random code and underlined sections that don't actually mean anything?

I mean I've seen this type of stuff before in school textbooks, somebody will underline some random peice of text in the book, or they will scribble some random gibberish that doesn't actually mean anything but at the same time, it looks kinda cryptic. And then the next person to pick it up and look at it, and think "Huh, I wonder if it means something, I should investigate." And then it ends up just being absolutely nothing, and they just got tricked into wasting their time.

Sorry if it was a little long winded, but that's my theory on this.

I had a theory about that, too. Right now, it's just looking like nothing. I've always been a sucker for real-life mysteries, though, so this was a fun experience for me. I still want to try a liiiiittle bit harder to try to figure this out.

I STILL have to call the number.