At TryToBreak there’s a little five-stage cryptogram-style puzzle that you can supposedly play to win cash. Since the page neither mentions nor attempts to enforce any restrictions on how you figure out the answer, I immediately wrote a little script that matched the lexical pattern in a word list and presented me with a list of five options. The first one I tried led me to a page that said to send email to a particular email address etc. so I could get the link for step two. After a long delay, I got a message back saying “solution is based on particular encryption method not on/or brute force” – no link. Why, I thought to myself, would the site’s author(s) decline to hold up their side of a bargain when given a correct answer, regardless of how it’s derived but especially when its derivation is in no way precluded by any prior instruction? Don’t they want people to play? Well, actually, no they don’t, and the reason is at the bottom of the page:
Can’t break the code on this page? Buy the solution to Step 1 for US$5
That’s right: they’re selling solutions to an obviously trivial puzzle. Given that it is obviously trivial, it’s not in their interest to have anyone apply efficient means to finding a solution, and the easiest way to accomplish that is to prevent any such people from even seeing the later stages. I’ll bet nobody, anywhere, got a link to the second stage no matter what method they used to find the first solution other than by paying for it. Accordingly, here’s my reply email:
It could be a hundred different methods, which cannot be distinguished with a
single nine-character sample. Take your scam elsewhere.
It’s amazing the ways people will try to make money on the internet nowadays.
You’re talking nonsense :)
Site is Freakin’ Awsome !!!
http://www.thephilpot.com/archives/2004/12/neat_accomplish.htm
Hmmm. A few minutes after what seems to be the conclusion of a heated email exchange with the site’s proprietors, about this post, someone with an IP address that resolves to a geographic location in the same city as those proprietors posts a comment full of gushy praise. What an amazing coincidence.
It looks like they took my advice and added a notice about not trying to solve the first stage programmatically, instead of trying to apply the “invisible rule” after the fact. They also removed the prize-fund number from the front page (it was at $210, not sure if that was US or Canadian). I think I know why both actions were taken, since both subjects were discussed in our email.
Here’s some free advice for Jozef and Diana: don’t threaten people with legal action for what they write on their own weblogs unless (a) you have some clue about the law, and (b) the damages you can claim aren’t just pocket change. Better yet, don’t do it at all. A reputation for litigiousness is almost always worse for business than it’s worth, and incompetent litigiousness can get you on the losing side of a countersuit.
Here’s some more evidence of astroturfing. The owner of the trytobreak.com domain is Jozef Jarosciak. A quick Google (builds aren’t that slow) turns up, among other things, this old page in which we find that Jozef Jarosciak is also known as Enzo Molinare. Is it all that surprising, then, that someone with that name should have gotten to step 3, or does it look more like a fake show of public interest from one of the site’s principals?
Another quick Google shows connections from Jozef Jarosciak to komunita.com (dead), rawolution.com (dead), 74 Technologies (under construction) and of course jarosciak.com (dead). It’s still possible that Jozef Jarosciak is a legitimate businessperson but, in my experience, people who use aliases and leave a string of dead domains behind them are typically trying to hide something. Similarly it’s possible that Diana Siccotte really does “handle internet affairs” for him, but it would also be unsurprising if she turned out to be his girlfriend or even another alias for Jozef himself. Her email did come from the same gmail account, after all, and it doesn’t take much business maturity to at least give different people different email addresses.
I have no idea if Jozef Jarosciak is for real on this, but I’ve solved the first 4 (the first one programatically, but then I figured out the intended answer). No idea if the last one is soluble or if I’d get paid if I solved it, but I’ll try. It’s an amusing way to waste time over break.
Hi everyone, I own the site: trytobreak.com, and I can honestly confirm that my site is not the scam,
and that accusations made by Jeff Darcy are false in this case.
Whoever solves all 5 steps gets paid whatever accumulates in the bank. All steps are solvable.
Student from Harvard University, Mike Hamburg is so far the only person,
who was able to solve the step 4, but there is a whole bunch of people who solved step 1,2 and 3.
I have contacted Jeff to take off this false information about me and my site from this page,
and I very much hope he will do this.
It’s not very nice to read this kind of accusations connected to my name.
I hope Mr. Darcy will understand and delete this page from this forum.
Sincerely,
Jozef Jarosciak
www.trytobreak.com
Well, Jozef, it’s nice to hear from you (or whoever else uses trytobreak@gmail.com) without an insult or a threat attached. That’s certainly progress, I guess, and it’s a fact that previous emails from you or your affiliates have generally contained one or the other. It’s also a fact that I did not receive a step-2 link when I gave a correct answer to step 1, even though it seems that Mike (above) solved step 1 the same way I did and didn’t encounter similar obstruction. I know it must not be easy for you to read such statements, but they are not false and they were brought on by your own behavior. When you’ve already started by insulting someone and continued with laughable legal threats, it’s a little late to complain about the natural conclusions people reach regarding your character. Try being civil to start with next time, not just after other approaches have led to uncomfortable revelations.
Jeff, this is very sad what you decided to do.
But go ahead. Have a great rest of the day and I wish you all the best to new year.
Sincerely,
Jozef Jarosciak
Just wanted to mention that I did “encounter similar obstruction”. My first solution explained how I solved it, which was a perl filter on the words dictionary. I got a response that said “Sorry, that’s based on brute force or guessing.” So I wrote down specifically what the substitution was (not just that it was a substitution, and not just a list of what was substituted, but how it was derived) and sent it in, and Jozef sent me a link to step 2.
Happy new year to both of you.
I encountered the “obstruction,” then sent in the correct explanation but received no such link. Just saying.