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One quick note on paying for the camping fees and t-shirts…
If you pay via PayPal (the preferred payment method), please click on the “Return to Merchant” button on the PayPal site after making your payment. If you don’t do this, your order will not be complete and recorded on the WGA site. These incomplete orders require extra work by our treasurer, who then has to manually re-enter your order information into the WGA store system.
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Originally posted by EnergySaver:
Just checking out your photo on the “About Us” page … it’s sooooo amazing how similar the new board members look to the old board members.
The photo of the 2005 Board is now posted on the “About Us” page. Click on the thumbnail image on the left hand side of the page to open a new browser window with a larger image.
The three outgoing Board members were also presented with plaques (and large bottles of wine)… here they are proudly showing them off:
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Originally posted by Cathunter:
Manually, it is pretty much impossible.BUT, using the same technology that brings us the “recent logs” page, it could be automated.
Hey, just pile one more thing on my to-do list.
Actually, switching over to storing the recent logs in a database was something that I have considered. Such an arrangement would allow us to make better use of the data we are already grabbing from gc.com (and have permission to grab), like identifying new cachers, the most active caches in the last week, number of finds per day, etc. We probably wouldn’t bother keeping the logs more than a week or so, but we could keep summary statistics.
Cathunter, do you mean automate the entire process (including sending the welcome email) or just identifying new cachers? I think the welcome email would be more effective (“friendlier”) if it came from a person, not a ‘bot. Maybe recruit some members to be virtual pen pals, writing the new cachers automatically identified and answering any questions they have…
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 02-14-2005).]
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Originally posted by Buy_The_Tie:
…It doesn’t seem to render the COTM voting page correctly…
If you are referring to the problem with the percentage numbers overlapping the percentage “bars”, I fixed that a couple weeks back. I noticed it when I switched to Firefox myself, but it took me awhile to get around to figuring out the problem.
Just a reminder… if anyone notices anything weird on the WGA site when using Firefox (or any alternative browser), don’t hesitate to mention it in the “Suggestion Box” forum so we can get it fixed.
I also have Thunderbird installed on my laptop and it is OK, but I still prefer Microsoft Outlook (not Express). I’d probably go with Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express if I were looking for a free solution…
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 02-14-2005).]
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Originally posted by teameverest:
Team Everest, having members/friends of the team who are majoring in computer cryptology. We believe we are getting real close to cracking this. So close were planning on taking off from work/school. But we cant say for sure yet. We’ll let ya know.
Don’t pack your bags just yet. On Feb. 9, “Tharagleb” posted this note which I just decrypted:
i-have-solved-the-code-and-am-coming-
to-get-the-money-this-saturday.-i-have-
communicated-the-entire-text-of-the-
message-to-nfa-and-he-agrees-it-is-the-
correct-solutionSo it sounds like we are out of luck and shouldn’t bother with a chat session.
If you want to know what other encrypted notes people have posted to the cache page, let me know…
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Originally posted by Flamingo 4:
I think we need to use the chat room to get together and find out what everyone has tried and discuss ideas that we might have to break this code.How about it?
Sunday night at lets say 9:00ish
I’ll try to make it… you mean the “Flushingrouse Wisconsin Geo-Chat” chat room, right?
Anyway, I worked on it for an hour tonight and made no additional progress. I really thought I was on to something yesterday, and maybe I still am, but I can’t figure out how the pattern continues. If you look at what I posted yesterday and want me to try something, let me know.
If the key truly begins with ‘iodsiods’ or even ‘iods’, I’ve proven that ‘iods’ never appears in the key string again… this means it is not a short key that repeats, which is what most people have been trying.
Quick heads up to everyone:
Try the key:
iodsiodsown
offset 23
Should decrypt to:
pigs-got-cap6z,88yhsa363ka00299,
tvfaioxaovwabqonac8.t7s9i,0huflu…How did I arrive at this weird key? 7/8/04… seventh paragraph, 8th word, fourth letter from start (periods… last four letters are iods). Next number in the letter is $2000, assume you repeat it (‘iods’) 2 times. Next number is 3k, so you skip ahead 3 words (shown) and pick up the last 3 letters. Next number in the letter is 4th, so you think you’d repeat ‘own’ four times, but this gives a weird result. This is where I got lost… I would assume the next word is cache or cash.
We may have some sort of pattern, so let’s see if we can figure out the rest of the key… it appears like the rest of it is quite long because I tried adding pad characters and got no additional parts of the message to decode.
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Originally posted by brkster:
Any chance the code is a decoy, and the answer lies somewhere in the letter itself???
Man I sure hope not! If this guy posted this supposed encrypted text that everyone is working to decode and it is a fake, he may be (insert one: shot, hung, shunned, forced to find a cache hidden in a beehive while naked and covered with honey) at the next geocaching event he attends!
Anyway, I checked out my “brute force” results and found nothing. And for you manual folks, you can also forget trying numbers 1 through 10,000 as the key.
Maybe a different method of encryption than what I am (and everybody else is) trying was used, though I don’t see how that is possible…
And I’m in for $25 if someone can figure out the mystery!
Here is the last time the thread was accessed. Only moderators or wzbt03 himself could have deleted the thread…
68.78.239.214 – – [07/Feb/2005:17:44:17 -0600] “POST /cgi-bin/ubb/postings.cgi HTTP/1.1” 200 1072 “http://wi-geocaching.com/cgi-bin/ubb/
postings.cgi?action=editpost&forum=General&number=8
&topic=000692.cgi&ReplyNum=000000&
TopicSubject=WGA,+Whats+in+it+for+you” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”Also edited or deleted at the same time were two other posts:
683: COTM+Voting+in+January
696: Where+do+they+GoA quick Google search shows that both of these threads were also started by wzbt03. Unfortunately, Google did not cache any of these pages.
IP address 68.78.239.214 resolves to adsl-68-78-239-214.dsl.mdsnwi.ameritech.net.
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 02-08-2005).]
OK, I’m just about to give up on this one. For those of you trying to attack this one manually, with some sort of “alphanumeric wheel” or spreadsheet, I can tell you this:
[*] The key is not a single english word or proper name (I tried 250,000 of them)
[*] The key is not any word in the “letter”, nor any combination of 2 or 3 these words in the order they are listed in the “letter”Assumption now is that the key is a nonsensical word or an extremely long combination of words (or the original cacher didn’t encode the message correctly or is pulling our legs ).
I’m now just throwing things at it, assuming the words “north”, “west”, or “cache” will appear somewhere in the message. We’ll see if I get any hits on this… it will probably take overnight.
Why did someone post this? Just to torture people?
I also spent way too much time on this one last night (when I should have been working on school work!). I’ve got a Python script that allows me to do the same thing as Jeff’s spreadsheet. Someone has posted a tool on web that will let people try different keys… go here.
I also went through the trouble of trying to figure out the key via a technique known as the Friedman Test (or Friedman Attack). (See this presentation… I’ve got a textbook that explains it better.) My index of coincidence analysis showed (though not conclusively) that the key is 13 characters long. You should be able to determine the actual key characters using the Friedman Test as well, but this seemed to break down… probably not enough text, or not enough like “English prose”.
Note that “saranaclakeny” is 13 characters long but is not the key…
Maybe it is time to just “brute force” this one. If the first thing in the message is an English word (and better yet, if the key is an English word), I’m guessing my blazin’ fast 64-bit processor can find what the start of the key is in less than a day…
Sorry for the trouble… give it another shot. As you might imagine, the ‘&’ in your nickname threw the election system for a loop. Unfortunately, the code that checks the nicknames for the renewal is not the same as the code used by the election system, so it worked in one case but not in the other… I’m hoping the new Board will force me (or some other webmaster ) to implement a common log in system, eliminating these problems.
If anyone else has issues voting, don’t hesitate to post them here or contact Jeff Thorson or myself directly.
I’ve “unfrozen” the recent logs page and it should be working again. Thanks for letting us know it wasn’t working properly!
OK, I’ve changed all the email addresses on the About Us page to images. Note that the CacheCows already had them encoded in a numeric format that probably would have tripped up some (but not all) email harvesters.
I did not bother to set any spambot “traps” on the WGA site… I’ll let other people come up with creative ways to slow the harvesters down. Restricting which “User Agents” can access the site seems worthless, as the harvesters can just use the same string reported by IE or Mozilla or a random string.
And since I’m also getting spam at my @wi-geocaching.com address which is no longer listed on the page, I’m guessing the addresses were harvested some time ago and are only now being sold and spammed.
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 12-19-2004).]
Here’s the listing of the 17 teams that attended our first campout. For some reason Sam (Yawningdog) is not listed… probably because he forgot to fill out the registration sheet. Anyway, it gives you an idea of the number of finds people had and what caches had been placed back in August 2001.
Geocaching.com Username: Lee42048
Real Name(s): Lee Ashelger
Hometown: Milwaukee, WI
Found/Placed: 2/1
Names of Caches Placed: WauwatosaGeocaching.com Username: geogirl
Real Name(s): Bill (Bill-bo) and Nikki
Hometown: Germantown, WI
Found/Placed: 8/3
Names of Caches Placed: Snake Den, Monches Redemption, Lord of the CachesGeocaching.com Username: Lavalamp
Real Name(s): Andrew, Rob, and Kay Goethel
Hometown: Cedarburg, WI
Found/Placed: 0/3
Names of Caches Placed: Andrew’s Cache, Flutter Flutter, Toys Are Us!Geocaching.com Username: Team CacheCows
Real Name(s): Alan, Arlene, Eryn Fiebig
Hometown: Darien, WI
Found/Placed: 25/5
Names of Caches Placed: Tales from the Crypt, Ode to Bearded Lady, 3 Blind Mice, Puff + Stinky’s Great Race, Little Cache Calf in the WildwoodGeocaching.com Username: BadLatitude
Real Name(s): Ken and Nate Nelson
Hometown: Waukesha, WI
Found/Placed: 12/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: Team Rusch
Real Name(s): Jason and Chris Rusch
Hometown: Fond Du Lac (Jason) and Green Bay (Chris)
Found/Placed: 3/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: The Searchers
Real Name(s): Bill and Deb Rusch
Hometown: Oakfield, WI
Found/Placed: 3/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: –
Real Name(s): Floyd and Margene Creamer
Hometown: Black Earth, WI
Found/Placed: 0/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: –
Real Name(s): Steve, Chantel, and April Brittain
Hometown: Milwaukee, WI
Found/Placed: 1/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: TGuner
Real Name(s): Mark, Debbie, Stephan, Alicia, and Caitlin Kappes
Hometown: Franklin, WI
Found/Placed: 5/1
Names of Caches Placed: Oak Leaf Trail’Geocaching.com Username: Nicole
Real Name(s): Jason Engel / Nicole Buttke
Hometown: Cedarburg / Oak Creek, WI
Found/Placed: 14/3
Names of Caches Placed: Ladybug Adventure (archived), Telltale Tombstone, Wehr in Whitnall Park?Geocaching.com Username: Team GrouseTales
Real Name(s): Brian, Becky, Doug, and Nick
Hometown: West Allis, WI
Found/Placed: 20/3
Names of Caches Placed: Ice Age Vista, Big Arb Ruins, Salute to StuteGeocaching.com Username: InsideEdge
Real Name(s): Jim Jarosz
Hometown: Marshfield, WI
Found/Placed: 3/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: Cachew
Real Name(s): John and Heidi Carvin
Hometown: Madison, WI
Found/Placed: -/3
Names of Caches Placed: Capitol City Trail, Thor’s Thunder, Capital City TrailGeocaching.com Username: Thraxman
Real Name(s): Joe Schnicke
Hometown: Janesville, WI
Found/Placed: 9/0
Names of Caches Placed: –Geocaching.com Username: jvechinski
Real Name(s): Jeremy Vechinski
Hometown: Milwaukee, WI
Found/Placed: 27/4
Names of Caches Placed: Vernon Marsh, Magnolia Bluff, Powers Bluff, Wy Not Wyalusing?Geocaching.com Username: kbraband
Real Name(s): Ken, Robin, and Jacey Braband
Hometown: Cedarburg, WI
Found/Placed: 27/10
Names of Caches Placed: Pleasant Valley Sunday, Pike Powder Hike, Devil’s Lake, New Prospect, Lake by a Lake, Family Bicycling Virtual Cache, Tourist Attraction Virtual Cache, Grandpa Kettleson’s Farm, Wild Goose Chase[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 07-07-2004).]
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