Where We Stand Now

It's been a crazy past few days--lots going on in regards to the ARG.  First and foremost, I want to thank all of you who have put forth the effort and decoded these ciphers at a rapid-fire pace.  Since the one-time pad cipher, we've received another major code.  Referenced in the one-time cipher as the HALOS file, the HALOS.txt file was discovered on Stormseeker's website [NOTE:  To access this link, you will need to input "drhorn" as the username and "1001085139140914" as the password].

As of now, the HALOS.txt file has been decrypted . . . mostly.  The decrypted .txt file reads:

[[Proxyhost@-84-9-123-345.dslgb.com//closed.proxy.accepted//?OTR,3,4,?OTR:[INCOMING TRANSMISSION CLASSIFIED SOURCE]SUBJECT ANALYSIS - TENACIOUS. SITE OFFLINE.........{Primary Servers Overloaded}... USER ACTIVATION REQUIRED... PASSCODE INPUT FOR SITE ACTIVATION REQUIRED...SET FOR FINAL TEST PATTERN....ANALYSIS COMPLETE>>> [CLASSIFIED INFORMATION LEVEL 8][OTR//4.0]b32b003a35badd66577c24c14fc919064346d131a7c54bb82ffe03e022615777247
923dc21f62cd4182e91c3b267b545abcaedaf0261510d4eea1e87cd33c7c77131309cc4280eb42
43d1154f044f9cf6296d9bff7397e4390987fe63203da0de40278b3a54f5ddc6975fa04f749849e1
a62595a9f630b0795913de0153e3aac388c45fb9d850cfe913541d6c08398f2c88332a82fdf0028
1d62fcdc4fe7e46ae90c51c5c806b41164e33ab92c96862e068b0c16c09990b8381a00da7915b6
7fe4a20f599b0f1b6d481913c7b9538cee639144f41561ba92e4fe751d1e242cd88f51d69551988
7136a7c15aabd7b40044922014130a91f170f66ccb3c139463a7e909a37aa863fb27805fc9731c
09c8c79067e79930a406546b24c9a629b26c2ce2a4be48f589a375feb731fc4ab225c11848cf89e
291fb27133970c063618474a892801edd68f54698c5e5b506746f6765a6f7f1225dea4da1140feb
60f650745241c693695883dcb21e6fbfefbb85a2991948036a52b5d[/][End Transmission]|¬[ABORTIVE.] ~~ [Transmission Ends]]

The part of most interest is the part I've highlighted.  This is obviously hexadecimal, but how is it converted?  My theory is that it is some sort of image--a very, very basic image, of course, but an image nonetheless.  There is also some speculation that it is related to off-the record encoding, although all of the messages to this point have referenced OTR.

So, that is where we stand.

As for the blog, I'm going to put up a poll related to the entirety rather than each individual piece (at least for now), and will be removing the Cipher Formats page.  I'm doing the latter because we've gotten past the roadblock that was the SECOM cipher, and as of now we haven't seen any reversed or columnated text.  That said, it's rather pointless.  Should the need arise, however, I will of course implement the page again, or something similar.

I will also be implementing a rating widget that will allow each of you to rate your experience with the ARG.  Although it doesn't directly impact the ARG in any way, I am curious to see how each of you feels about the progress, difficulty, etc.