Notices

Honestly, i was really ... off, at least when i read the solution for code #19, the El Gamal one. But humans make mistakes, right? Especially those in the executive suite of Nokia but thats a different story;-)

Overall, I like the contest and a lot of people in my environment also. I would also participate in a contest which does not offer a material price, just for fun, as i learnt something related to things like cryptography, hash sums, CMYK/RGB, coptic alphabet etc analyzing single frames extracted from the videos,using own, small scripts for this and that, discovering the city of Toronto with Google streetview. You may complete this list for yourself.

There is a hidden message - lets interprete it as a message - in one of the videos (at the end of "Maps"), which says "Serving for the community", so lets do it;-)

First of all there is a poll. Maybe there is no interest for such a community based game, maybe there is, and here are my thoughts, please add yours:

Infrastructure: Less is more.

The priceWe dont need material prices. Lets say the winners with their TMO nicknames will be announced, that should fullfill them with pride for the rest of their life.

Captcha: Not needed as there is no real price. If someone hacks the codes automatically he will be stoned to death and he has to publish his source code (before stoning).

Videos: We dont need them, something like google streetview is more than enough, see codes.

Codes and admins: If we agree to use lets say google streetview several admins will present their city/district of choice, GPS coordinates of their center and a certain radius should be published. The admins will come up with their puzzles/codes/clues and are not allowed to participate for this round.

Main application: It will be enough to simulate the input method from n9seconds.com. We may consider to trigger a twitter channel (used for announcements and clues) and a gps application like spotme which shows the center of the place from this main app.

Packages for the single rounds: Maybe its a good idea to encode the codes in a simple file. This file should also contain the puzzles and maybe also the clues if we decide to run it
completly "offline".

Programming language: Maybe Qt/Qml?

Okay, thats all for now. We need someone to implement this, where is MAG?;-)


Blues

Interesting idea

As long you promise not to use your favorite color (or a flawed cipher implementation) as one of the hints..

ps: I'd like to pitch in to the prize pool, if there's one.

funny thing about this contest

many of the winners were from maemo.org, some of them lurkers. i was close a few times, beaten by mere seconds.