project-skyscraper

[rain verge]

They're baked-in, YT does not have generated subtitles for the clip.

[rose dust]

Either that, or someone here runs that account 😅

[harsh vapor]

The timestamp on the image is from 3 weeks ago interestingly

[rose dust]

Yea interesting, that's what I was asking.

[rain verge]

HAH, well they had those images loaded and ready to go if so.

[dusky forge]

Edited on the forum to say unknown user

[ember wyvern]

Tweet!

https://x.com/skyscraper_prj/status/2060649594514551241?s=46

Project Skyscraper (@Skyscraper_prj)

Operators

X · May 30, 2026, 9:08 AM

[rose dust]

Oo, it's a screenshot of the post for once

[cyan kraken]

its a ss of the full log

[rose dust]

Also

[cyan kraken]

and operators, i think that means us?

[rose dust]

MB -A ....

[rose dust]

We have a tag for the operators now, MB-A.

Well their authorization at least

[cyan kraken]

MB-A, memory bloc A?

[ember wyvern]

I usually do the thing not to embed the link in line. Decided against this time.

[rose dust]

Likely, I'm guessing that's the password protected one we're working with now

[harsh vapor]

The image is Fragment 1778433240, we which is may 10, at 5:14PM UTC, we got this post at about the same time https://project-skyscraper.com/2026/05/10/security-log-171453/

[rose dust]

Oh I'm talking about the post itself, you're all good!

[harsh vapor]

Which references the TR4CE image

[rose dust]

Just checked, not directly the password but that's a good catch!

[rain verge]

Architect went inactive on ETARC for ~30 minutes as the posts went out. They are actively lurking again.

[ember wyvern]

Also new shit.

[rose dust]

Yep

That's everything we're discussing rn

Sent above

[rain verge]

Ah, the password is a timestamp?

[cyan kraken]

v=xPG-VM__mwU

this is at the bottom of the error post

[rose dust]

Or it's a password to access a certain timestamp

[ember wyvern]

Aight.

[rose dust]

Links to a YT vudeo

[ember wyvern]

That’s a YouTube video code.

[rose dust]

https://youtu.be/xPG-VM__mwU?si=BHd8hxAgrywJ1hfM

[cyan kraken]

of course its in french

[ember wyvern]

Do we want the correct timestamp or the wrong one?

We had some temporal anomaly thing going on no?

[rain verge]

Can't hurt to throw in every epoch timestamp we have.

[dusky forge]

There is a page to drop images in

[cyan kraken]

oh? where?

[dusky forge]

New security log error

[rose dust]

Isn't that just the fragment image?

I don't think we can submit anything there

[cyan kraken]

yeah

[harsh vapor]

If you look at the image very small/far away, it looks nearly identical to the reddit image

[dusky forge]

Click at the very top

[rose dust]

It definitely looks like the Reddit image unscrambled btw

[rose dust]

Could you send the direct link?

[rain verge]

Homepage updated

[rose dust]

Wellz usably unscrambled

[cyan kraken]

looks more pixelated

and homepage looks a lot smoother

[rain verge]

Old homepage moved to: https://project-skyscraper.com/neural-network-status/

[rose dust]

List of posts with a sleeping log highlighted

[rain verge]

I don't see a highlight.

[harsh vapor]

I don't either

[rain verge]

Filename of the image confirms it's related to the May 10 post.

Oh, nevermind, that was the TR4CE image...

[mental saddle]

Yo with 12 connection attempts it's a circle what

maybe we need 16

[cyan kraken]

also, the password doesn't have spellcheck

[harsh vapor]

I've got something!

[mental saddle]

That's just the html for what the input says and has it to not give spellcheck

[cyan kraken]

ah

got it

[mental saddle]

disables browser spellcheck iirc

[harsh vapor]

The background of the image repeats ERROR in binary (uploading image in one sec)

[rain verge]

Not sure if you got an answer but the size there is just the visual width of the password input.

[harsh vapor]

https://forums.atlas-65.com/t/may-30th-security-log-password/9487/11

[rain verge]

Breaks the image neatly into cells then.

[brazen prawn]

Its the period 108 from my very early notes

[cyan kraken]

so we treat each colour like a seperate binary segments

[rose dust]

Ah gotcha, thanks for that catch, doubted they'd let it be that simple

[rose dust]

See, it was useful!

[brazen prawn]

Need to hurry with dinner so I can look at this stuffffff

[cyan kraken]

if its a grid, i think its a 9x10 grid

[harsh vapor]

The size of the individual small pixels is 1/4 the size of the bigger background ones which I find interesting

[rain verge]

Actual name of the image file is C3q5NYF.png

[steady niche]

Almost home!

[rose dust]

https://bsky.app/profile/skyscraper-prj.bsky.social/post/3mn2qki557k2u

Project Skyscraper (@skyscraper-prj.bsky.social)

-# ↩ Galactic Hub Project | No Man's Sky (@nmsgalactichub.bsky.social)
Operator_Auth_Level: MB-A

Bluesky · May 30, 2026, 9:31 AM

Replied to galactic hub

So we are definitely the operators here?

[brazen prawn]

I adopt it regardless 😛

Someone at a machine take the image into the 10 columns, shift left into right to realign and combine the values

[rain verge]

It feels so random what's been considered a "good" input to this point.

[rose dust]

It kinda made sense with the quote page, but it's hard to even guage what we're inputting for

[rain verge]

I know it's on the scheduled timeline, but that BSky response at least makes it feel like they want us to consider that auth request to be an inciting incident.

[cyan kraken]

ok, each colour is NOT encoding its own set, i tried with cyan in one of them, got gibberish

or maybe i didn't use the right grid

[rain verge]

I count 10x10

[cyan kraken]

should this mean something?

[mental saddle]

huh i had 12 a second ago

[cyan kraken]

the ring being open

[mental saddle]

could just be the random gen

[rain verge]

And each grid cell is 8x5 large pixels.

[rose dust]

oops was on mobile, so the homepage also displays the restored blocs now, nice

[harsh vapor]

The ERROR repeating in the background actually is different in one place in the top right where it has QSRSV in binary https://forums.atlas-65.com/t/may-30th-security-log-password/9487/21 (link since I cant upload image)

[ember wyvern]

This image is 100% sus:

I'm sure it's been discussed already. Have we had @brazen prawn take a look?

[jagged sonnet]

@rain verge

No gifs in this channel please

[cyan kraken]

has the image been cut in any way? because it looks like the left edge is actually supposed to on the right one

[rain verge]

Oh man, the bot gobbled my GIF...

[steady niche]

That's Galaga

[brazen prawn]

I'm cooking 😢

[brazen prawn]

Food that is

[cyan kraken]

went a bit crazy with gemini

could be wrong, but aye

[harsh vapor]

Nope, because of the binary ascii letters always start with 010

[ember wyvern]

You got it! You might finally get your DQT encoding 😛

[steady niche]

I just got home to my proper PC, got some halfway decent bourbon, pizza is on the way, wife is out of town. I'm ready!

[rain verge]

Ok, GIF here: https://forums.atlas-65.com/t/may-30th-security-log-password/9487/24

[harsh vapor]

Oh shit, well done!

[steady niche]

Very nice

[harsh vapor]

Ah I didn't realize it was gemini output at once, did you manually review it?

[cyan kraken]

currently doing that

this. is this supposed to yellow shoved in there to make it green, or just green?

ok i think our dear old gemini is finally hallucinating, bro giving me stuff about fires in some section 9 or something

[rain verge]

Have you decomposed the RGB channels? It might be easier to keep track of them if you do.

Vertical ordering GIF: https://forums.atlas-65.com/t/may-30th-security-log-password/9487/26

[cyan kraken]

good sir i hath no technical means to do that 🥲

the best i got is long ass prompts for LLMs

[rain verge]

It almost feels like there might be some letters in the negative space if we collapse the rows down.

[rain verge]

Oh man, no time like an active ARG to learn GIMP! https://www.gimp.org/

[cyan kraken]

but what counts as the negative space? gray, black or both?

[steady niche]

Hate the interface on GIMP, but now that they do BC7 DDS properly, it's good for NMS

[harsh vapor]

photopea on browser is close enough to photoshop if you need as well

[steady niche]

Doesn't do BC7 properly, which is what NMS is moving to

[cyan kraken]

what's BC7

[steady niche]

A particular compression scheme for DDS image files

Apparently not important for the ARG though 🙂

[harsh vapor]

Could we establish a rule of no AI generated takes on things unless you have manually reviewed and can confirm it. No shade but I feel like it can introduce a ton of extra noise/confusion to the discussion imo

[cyan kraken]

yeah, i'm sorry for the AI thing. i am literally zoomed into the image to double check this right now

[mental saddle]

AI also sorta ruins the fun of arg's imho

[brazen prawn]

I was going to crowbar my eyes out last night on the other thread.

[cyan kraken]

true

[rose dust]

Quite a nice parallel to the NMS modding experience then 😛

Or moreso the Nexus Mods experience

[rain verge]

The upper right side of the image breaks the background pattern.

[harsh vapor]

it ruins the fun of a lot of things not that this is the time for that discussion 😆. But in terms of ARG if you wanna use it for yourself thats your own discretion, just if AI hallucination pollutes the discussion things then its just kinda destructive

[harsh vapor]

Yup, posted above, spells QSRSV

[steady niche]

I've done it, too, no worries 🙂

[brazen prawn]

Basically

[harsh vapor]

Doesn't mean anything using the school code either

Neither that or the school code version were the password

[cyan kraken]

does it look french?

[harsh vapor]

It looks like if I layed on my keyboard

[cyan kraken]

ah, it looks german

[harsh vapor]

(so not french 😆 )

[steady niche]

What are we looking at?

[brazen prawn]

Eating now then time to rip

[cyan kraken]

problem with decomposing is that the image has a nice little tint of blue everywhere, its showing up even in places where red is. i need to learn GIMP a bit more to properly figure this out

[brazen prawn]

@harsh vapor have you done a (non-background) to bitplane and seen if it alters or XORs into the background plane

[mental saddle]

counter-filter until red is #FF0000?

[cyan kraken]

i shalt attempt

[harsh vapor]

I have not no, it's a bit difficult to isolate the background just itself since it's not very cleanly separable and the tint in the blue channel makes it kinda annoying (unless I am vastly misunderstanding what you are saying 😆 )

[mental saddle]

Searching I don't see it mentioned anywhere but a small post from 2017 about WT, but fyi there's this site that's really useful in ARG's https://www.dcode.fr/cipher-identifier

mb if y'all already know about it lol

[steady niche]

So we're supposed to add a new memory in?

[rose dust]

seems like it

the clip linked is kinda interesting narratively

it talks about HALs memory being wiped by a program, and here we are trying to recover lost memory blocs

[harsh vapor]

What’s interesting is this image is timestamped to the same date as the tr4ce image/log which does not seem like a coincidence at all

[rose dust]

adding a memory is odd though. is it a false memory, or one we recover ourselves?

[steady niche]

The password page is for timestamp 094317. The latest sec-log is 094316

[brazen prawn]

Thought also before I hit the keyboard

Flatten to 3 color range

Bit flip with high(2)

Or XOR

[steady niche]

That's Jan 2, 1970, right after the first memory

[cyan kraken]

i think the process would be what we did for the poem post, but instead of tweeting our answers, we directly send them in, wherever we have to

[steady niche]

And: [30/5/2026 09:43:16 AM

[rain verge]

That QSRSV cell also breaks the cell to its right the 'O' is missing a bit.

[steady niche]

94316 is important, I think

[rain verge]

They specifically mention TEMPORAL memory.

[ember wyvern]

Maybe one of the memories that was out of order, we have to give the correct timestamps?

[steady niche]

94316 on a google search gets a timing belt part number. I doubt that's intentional, though 🙂

[harsh vapor]

I think it’d be worth just feeding in all the timestamps we have

[steady niche]

I think we are going to need the password before we can add the memory

[harsh vapor]

Agreed

[rose dust]

We might need the password to get the timestamp for the memory we're supposed to correct in the first place going by the title?

[steady niche]

Could be

[brazen prawn]

ok at my machine now, what HAS been tried so I'm not writing useless tests

[rose dust]

its weird that the fragment timestamp is for TR4CE though, when the reddit sec log is a few days later

[brazen prawn]

We've got the background bits thing, but what masks have been tried?

[rain verge]

Realistically, nothing substantial has been tried beyond decoding the background binary.

[cyan kraken]

why do i feel this image will change soon enough

[tranquil cave]

when was this log added?

i didnt see it a couple days ago

[cyan kraken]

i think each colour is enocding a seperate phrase

[steady niche]

A couple of days ago 🙂

[tranquil cave]

Ah

[cyan kraken]

like, a different one for cyan, for blue, for magenta

[tranquil cave]

anything in the picture that has been useful or

theres strings of letters

🤷

[harsh vapor]

I’ve just done a very superficial look at the individual channels

[steady niche]

Also, that memory timestamp is a sunday morning

[rose dust]

there are so many links between things atp that the evidence all looks like a conspiracy board 😅

[steady niche]

FYI, August 9th 2026 is a Sunday

[mental saddle]

Small run through brings up nothing with the random letters

[steady niche]

We need different colors of yarn now

[rose dust]

oh interesting...
The architect's background image on the image site was uploaded on <t:1778307123>, so the account's probablyy been active since then

[rain verge]

Rows compressed via bitwise OR.

Rows compressed via bitwise XOR

[rose dust]

Quick note to anyone in public, do NOT click anywhere else on that site. I got flashed trying to confirm that the background image names have timestamps corresponding to upload dates 🥲

[cyan kraken]

can you tell me how the OR mask is being applied here? i know the terminology but can't figure out how its applied to an image

[brazen prawn]

Building the 7 color bitmasking tests now.

[clear surge]

Seems like a fragment of something bigger (perhaps 'les')? Perhaps destabilisation will cause more to be revealed?

[rain verge]

It's not really a mask, it's literally taking the values of each individual pixel of the image and conducting an OR operation for each of the RGB values.

[cyan kraken]

ah

[brazen prawn]

OR/XOR etc are the operations but the bitmask is the pattern used for the bit fiddling in the op (for or you use the bits to mask for ON position), it gets more complicated from there

All basic ops with them in reduced produce garbage too

🤔 hm

Is the forums progressing more/equal to here, or best not looked at for now?

[dusky forge]

No progression

[brazen prawn]

Trying to give it a break for now 😅

[harsh vapor]

The red channel is really odd to me

[steady niche]

Looking at only the contrast patterns, it looks like only one block deviates from the background pattern, right 8, down 1

[harsh vapor]

Like why is it all just single pixels

unless its a red herring 😮

[steady niche]

Everything else is this

[rain verge]

The one to the right of it is different too.

[steady niche]

block I mention is this

[rain verge]

But only in the 'O' position (4 rows down from the top)

[brazen prawn]

yeah could be, the fact that there are a few value based near collapses on values is interesting from a bitplane perspective

[steady niche]

I don't see it, could you screenshot it?

[rose dust]

decodes to QSRSV

The others decode to ERROR

[mental saddle]

Quicksilver SRV :trollface:

[rose dust]

these two I believe. the one on the right of the one you sent is interesting bcz its missing a single value

[steady niche]

oh, in the vertical banding, I see it now

[rain verge]

Yeah, it's almost as if the errant cell overwrote that pixel.

[cyan kraken]

but guys, the green bits. are they actually green, or yellow bits under the blue making it green?

[rose dust]

that was my first thought too, does the overriden binary output readible ASCII for that character now btw?

[brazen prawn]

(to save time for some)

[harsh vapor]

green bits are actually green

[rain verge]

Technically, I think 00001111 is 'Shift' in ASCII

[harsh vapor]

yellow is R + G with RGB

[harsh vapor]

Sweet!

[rain verge]

I don't think we're mixing colors here. Or at the very least the background ERROR bits aren't interacting with the foreground.

[rose dust]

oh, that's super intentional then. Reading it as the QSRSV block "shifting" data in the adjacent block may be right

[rain verge]

Wait, do the foreground bits overlap at all with the ERROR message?

[steady niche]

Maybe that one block with the discrepancy in the background is what's causing the error, and we have to figure out how to correct it?

[harsh vapor]

Given it is one bit off from being the correct O, I'm inclined to say it was an oversight when creating the image

[brazen prawn]

same

Or intentional "oops" flavour

[steady niche]

I'll trust you two 🙂

[rain verge]

QSRSV is definitely intentional. It's almost reminding me of the /code page though. Although it doesn't work for a simple substitution and we only have 5 letters.

[brazen prawn]

As in treat B1 G7 and B1 G8 as shared regions?

[steady niche]

My gut says that discrepancy is intentional

[rain verge]

They're almost completely clear of colored pixels except for that one blue one. It's one of the cleanest areas in the image, save for the cell in the top left.

[harsh vapor]

the green here looks suspiciously like morse code (not nearly structured enough tho)

[cyan kraken]

vertically?

like, the morse is encoded vertically

wait i'm confusing with cyan

sorry

[steady niche]

How dare you!

[mental saddle]

R I E E ?? E I I T E, yea no

[brazen prawn]

I am still thinking these are masked in a way to get us the fiddled output

Gravitino balls to the wall I am getting nothing useful out of normal ops with them though

[harsh vapor]

Like it feels like there is definitely some pattern happening on the green/blue channels

[brazen prawn]

Maybe there is a mixer we are missing?

[rose dust]

Hmm maight work? Not sure if that'd give a working output though

[brazen prawn]

What other hints does it snake out to

[harsh vapor]

One would think, especially given the colors we are working on

[iron crest]

🛰️ Project Skyscraper — 1 change detected

🏠 Homepage changed (structure/text, ignoring the live counter) (+['SECURITY']) (-['System Filtering Platform'])
https://project-skyscraper.com/

skyscraper_watch • 2026-05-30 09:16 UTC

[rose dust]

I'm convinced that the image will give us the password, but on the off chance that it's for a seperate puzzle, I made a tracking sheet for password attempts so far:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_3dKZrJ7IDcUWqYDTHTWJjS0hFwNEKpDxcItedFde24/edit?usp=drivesdk

[harsh vapor]

How can this connect back to trace is what I keep coming back to

[steady niche]

Wait, what is this text at the bottom?
v=xPG-VM__mwU

[harsh vapor]

youtube video tag

[dusky forge]

The YT video

[somber vigil]

Slightly late - I just woke up

[mental saddle]

hmmm..

[steady niche]

Ahh, thanks

[rose dust]

Isnt this from an hour ago? Or am I blind?

[somber vigil]

It is

[rose dust]

Ah gotcha

[brazen prawn]

Produces junk under most ops too this way

[rain verge]

Maybe we need to XOR the ERROR and QSRSV binary pattern and only look at colored pixels that fall either inside or outside that pattern?

[rose dust]

Gotcha, didn't think it'd go far but I'm glad you thought it was worth checking in the first place 😅

[mental saddle]

Any reason why XOR-ing and OR-ing is something y'all've been doing?

[brazen prawn]

Math / Cryptography

Oh! wait a tick (I am wrong for sure) - DQT had the stepping and shuffled 1/2/3

With the reduction to 3, maybe that gives the base + mask

Geknip theory lmao

[rose dust]

I feel like I'm tripping spaceballs half the time I hear ya describe your processes anyway haha 😅

Makes me more glad we have ya working on it with us haha

[rain verge]

XOR to ABBCB but looks susiciously letter-like

But, that white space may be the acceptable pattern space for the colored pixel data.

[steady niche]

Looking over video, haven't seen the movie in forever. Things that stand out to me: Discovery, launch window in 31 days, HAL thinks it is functioning perfectly, 28 months, 9000 series, virus that destroys desired memories, monolith, Bowman and Poole = Architect and Ghost?, 34223, 30 Jan 2001, Mobius

[brazen prawn]

All inverse sequences produce garbage as well

[brazen prawn]

No go, nor for TR4CE

[mental saddle]

NOR on TR4CE? :trollface:

[brazen prawn]

Writing a really funky "3D stack" idea to test

Had me thinking about the original tower quote

Which had me thiking about panopticon, then the hat problem

One parity bit who can see the other, etc etc

[harsh vapor]

I just tried all ~40 UTC timestamps we have as passwords and all came back as invalid

[rose dust]

Took one for the team 🫡

I'll document that on the sheet so no one else has to go through the annoyance

[devout oracle]

I read that as you came back as an invalid

[compact python]

" ! " is missing in the chart

[steady niche]

Wait!

That looks like the block in the image I saw

one sec

on the when we were 17 image

[brazen prawn]

Tenuous

[steady niche]

Yeah probably. Just strongly reminded me of it

[harsh vapor]

Interestingly, the latest security log has WP ids 288/291 (vs like 1700/1800), these ones have been cooking for a while...

Hmm, the background 1s are never obstructed by the colored noise

what is up with the weird #151515 dots scattered throughout?

[rose dust]

@brazen prawn is your arg word list on the repo? Heading out for a bit so I can't work the image, thought about running through our candidate passwords.

[brazen prawn]

I think it is in there somewhere

Older one: https://github.com/vectorcmdr/project_skyscraper_junk/blob/main/img_combined/brute_tests/reports/steghide_brute_report.txt

Missing a lot of the newer words

Maybe it's something we ought to crowdsource for future use though to have a central wordlist

I am holding off pointing a cluster at the page like a dog with a steak infront of it

[harsh vapor]

Like there are a small number of gray dots of all the same color that only show up on the darker gray background lines

[brazen prawn]

Yeah

[harsh vapor]

They only showed up next to the colored pixels, so I thought it might be some aliasing, but it doesn't appear on the other background color

[brazen prawn]

They're in that upload before

[harsh vapor]

Ah ok

[brazen prawn]

They're curious

3D stack parity holder idea was fundamentally flawed and produced jack all - same issue, data is too sparce even if the parity holder passes through or flips

[compact python]

So simliar

[rose dust]

Probably an unusable version of the image

Maybe sent as a teaser or hint to keep shadowcheck in mind while solving this

[rain verge]

Ooh, flipped vertically?

[compact python]

They have diffrent orygial orientation

[rose dust]

Oh interesting

[compact python]

What if take 2nd pic and stack them

[rose dust]

Would the read order for the bits change if the image was read in shadowcheck's orientation?

Meaningfully that is

[half ibex]

I just woke up and now there's a password to enter??? Have you guys figured it out yet?

[rain verge]

Shadowcheck matches the current image's orientation, I just checked.

[brazen prawn]

Yeah.

[rose dust]

Ah, just misinformation then

[half ibex]

already try the RGB method with that img?

[rain verge]

Hmm, architect seems to be checking in on ETARC every 15 minutes or so. Lingering for a bit, but not actively lurking like previously.

[rose dust]

What's the grid size again? Accounting for any cutoffs?

[rain verge]

10x10 cells of 8x5 large pixels.

[rose dust]

And the coloured pixels are are 1/4th the original pixel size correct? Or do they vary?

[rain verge]

Correct, the colored pixels a 1/4 the size of the ERROR pixels.

[brazen prawn]

Worth noting it lines up with the 10x10 bitplane voids in the CDAD image as well as the 50 potential data segments (no, I don't think it's part of this puzzle)

[compact python]

Can da vinci or golden ratio have something to do with this ?

[harsh vapor]

unsure if this is helpful, but here is the image without background/properly saturated/brightened, makes the individual color channels much cleaner

[brazen prawn]

Tried running it through but still garbo

[harsh vapor]

Gonna try and extract all the bitstrings from those and see if anything comes up

[clear surge]

Could the different colour channels act as a check for each other? Blue seems to have individual rows where a pixel is filled if the one to its right is filled, which is not present in the green layer.

[brazen prawn]

Per colour or in the combination?

[harsh vapor]

Starting with per color

[brazen prawn]

Just to save time if matches what you meant

[harsh vapor]

Ahh ty, that is pretty much what I meant

[brazen prawn]

Perhaps the 'damaged' blocks are to be isolated?

Or LSB/MSB towered?

[modest marlin]

Where is the original of this image?

[brazen prawn]

Spinning up another box, need more windows lmao

[clear surge]

https://project-skyscraper.com/sec-log-094316-full/ On this page, the "ERROR" link

[harsh vapor]

Actually my plan was to isolate into the smaller subpixel grid instead of still working with the 10x10 grid

[brazen prawn]

Maybe yeah

[brazen prawn]

Yeah as midi they are funny as hell btw

For a giggle

Operators theme song

[half ibex]

thats interesting..

[compact python]

Yeah Sounds like actual melody of something.

[half ibex]

how did you make that?

[steady niche]

I hear notes, but I wouldn't call it a melody

[brazen prawn]

Yeah

[steady niche]

More like just things that are significant

[brazen prawn]

It's essentially a cleaner version of the "burst" sounds in the CDAD image

[compact python]

https://nsspot.herokuapp.com/imagetoaudio/
With online tool

[harsh vapor]

I think it's the auditory version of you can see that there is some pattern on the image

Alright yeah, analyzing the individual bitstrings extracted from the image didn't really seem fruitful

[brazen prawn]

Yeah, they produced garbage in all my runs as well

I am looking into this as freq band bursts atm

Timing for "on" runs are always multiples of 10 pixels (10 = 6291x, 20 = 2822x, 30 = 1558x, 40 = 1000x). quantized like a baud rate

Seems convincing, but so far producing garbage also

mYfReAkInEaRs

[ember wyvern]

Keep in mind the french quote about simplicity.

[brazen prawn]

I am simple though

[harsh vapor]

I think the closest to anything out of the noise has been Vau1t's gifs. There is certainly a pattern in the adjacent blocks, the shapes seem to morph "frame-by-frame"

[ember wyvern]

That you are. I meant the decryption.

[rain verge]

The GIFs almost remind me of the Bad Apple video that kind of became a meme.

[brazen prawn]

That would be gold

[rain verge]

The GIFs kind of feel like we're missing data. Like there's more color or pixel data that we just don't have.

[brazen prawn]

I am losing faith too, we may just have the keyhole at present

[harsh vapor]

QSRSV is the closest we have to anything atm

[clear surge]

The shadowcheck is making me think: Blue ghosts (is cloned across the image). Green has gaps(?). Red acts as some sort of control.
One image, fragmented. Together they are whole (or can be made so).

[steady niche]

I think 94316 is important as well

[rain verge]

It may be

ERROR
-----
QSRSV

[steady niche]

No wait, that's 3 Rs

[brazen prawn]

Don't forget about ERVOR 😂

[rain verge]

Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but it could be a vignere key. We just don't have any obvious ciphertext.

[harsh vapor]

I am of the opinion that this solvable now though

The repeating "ERRORERROR..." is vigenere-esque

[brazen prawn]

true

[rain verge]

Is it possible there's something more to be gained from TR4CE? That's where this image points to via the timestamp.

[harsh vapor]

I do think so, just not sure what

[rain verge]

Is there any record of the May 10 log before it was updated?

[rose dust]

Probably difficult to find, we didn't really pay much attention to the ARG before the system unbanning on ETARC

Some leaders on the forums might have an idea though

[harsh vapor]

The more I look into the noise I'm thinking it's less and less important

[brazen prawn]

Gonna bruteforce against redacted bits in a few chunks as if error is itself the redaction and go for a shower while it runs

[copper harbor]

It still looks like an NMS alphabet

[compact python]

Or numbers

[brazen prawn]

Output was sadly what I figured, bit space is still too sparse, so 1070 odd lines of garbage string permutes

[ember sundial]

What happens if you lay each "layer" of the image over the other?

Is there a clear break in each row?

[compact python]

I suggested layering pictures before.

[ember sundial]

Anything yielded?

[brazen prawn]

Many bitwise operations on many combinations, orientations, colour spaces and bit planes - so far nada

Operator Crew status request

[steady niche]

Other than just being geometric pixel patterns, I'm not seeing a similarity

[brazen prawn]

[compiling new wordlist]

[rose dust]

Gonna be out for a bit still, but i'll use your new wordlist and throw it at the POST form automatically once back, then clean up the password attempts spreadsheet.

have been trying a few manually rn though

[brazen prawn]

I already got burned trying it haha, ensure your POST times are ~>5, I flew too close to the sun with usual ~5

Will chuck onto repo in a tick with some other stuff like the color splits etc

[rose dust]

Haha, architect's probably got a smaller limit for ya, looking at that history 😛

[turbid eagle]

wow

tell me you haven't solved the password yet

🙏

[brazen prawn]

We kind of got stuck on the 20x20px blocks per bit idea - but we didn't think about them being a nibble block of 10x10px bits

Not yet

[cyan kraken]

goddemn

[harsh vapor]

I interpreted it as such and didn't get anywhere

[brazen prawn]

I was going to ping you before I started but didn't want to disturb

Yeah so far useless also

[harsh vapor]

All channels, all combinations of mixing RGB with bitwise AND,OR,XOR, interpreting it row by row, and column by column

[brazen prawn]

Gives a few more possible "ERROR" abstractions, but that's about it (and no useful decodes)

[rose dust]

Come get in on the fun! (of staring at strange pixels for 4 hours straight)

[clear surge]

I think I just stumbled onto some random babble that gave me a clue.

• In 1912, Carl Jung published the theory of The Shadow (an unconscious aspect of the personality that does not correspond with the ego ideal).
• In the 2010 clip on YouTube, the same idea is covered when talking about HAL 9000 (it had to lie)

We had the clue of "shadowcheck-1912" wrt the reddit post, which appears it could be a distorted version of this image - perhaps a literal version of shadows is something we could consider for this image (remember the tesseract thing?).

[turbid eagle]

we already connected this with memory fragment 1778433240 right?
edit: yes we did

[harsh vapor]

Like it's possible that the binary digests include something more (like a file or some other binary data) but that's going a step deeper than I am willing to investigate if all of them start with a ton of 0 bytes

Just seems very unlikely

[cyan kraken]

i would like to bring up the quote again, simplicity is the best form of sophistication

us diving into it too much could just be hiding the answer from us

which seems to be a running gag with the architect

[brazen prawn]

Yeah, it maps out to a hell of a lot of dead space in the same way - the image has an overwhelming data sparseness issue

[turbid eagle]

@rose dust I attempted all variations of ROYAL, SAGE, WEAVER (caps, proper nouns, individual, all together)

[iron crest]

🛰️ Project Skyscraper — 1 change detected

🦋 New Bluesky post (2026-05-30T09:31:39.467Z): “Operator_Auth_Level: MB-A”
https://bsky.app/profile/skyscraper-prj.bsky.social

skyscraper_watch • 2026-05-30 09:32 UTC

[rose dust]

So far the password page is linked to shadow check but the image, TR4CE by the fragment timestamp, potentially atlas passes by the BSky response to the galactic hub and the HAL clip from 2010 so far right? Any other connections?

[brazen prawn]

I hope we get some kind of operator merch at the end of this. I am infatuated with this ARGs theme so far.

[cyan kraken]

we need a figma page for this

[steady niche]

We could always make our own if whomever this is doesn't make any

[brazen prawn]

Don't give me more projects! I'm already drowning lmao

[rose dust]

Isn't this outdated?

[cyan kraken]

what's a shadow check

[somber vigil]

I think someone was testing a notification in my server

That was from hours ago

[steady niche]

I don't think we know for sure. There was a shadow ban check that showed a second post on Reddit by Architect

[rose dust]

The sec log about the Reddit post

[cyan kraken]

ah

[steady niche]

I think Pixy found that. But I don't think 1912 connected to it

Without negative timestamps, it's going to be hard to connect 1912 to anything, though

[somber vigil]

Oh btw I’m working on an auto cypher - trying to keep up with the latest things but you’ll be able to input a coded cypher and it’ll pop out the correct layout (used through the bot hopefully)

[rose dust]

I'll add that to the sheet!

[clear surge]

I'm going to repeat that I think it's about psychology, and how it relates to AIs going insane due to unresolvable conflicts

[cyan kraken]

reminds me of rampancy from halo

[steady niche]

My intuition says it wouldn't use those three, but it doesn't hurt to add it to the list. I think it's fan-made, commissioned but not perfectly coordinated, or they are avoiding really obvious connects to official HG stuff

[rose dust]

Oh I'm keeping a list of invalid attempts so we don't work too hard on guessing haha

So these failing is good groundwork for others to follow

[cyan kraken]

what all passwords have been tried so far?

[turbid eagle]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_3dKZrJ7IDcUWqYDTHTWJjS0hFwNEKpDxcItedFde24/edit?gid=0#gid=0

[steady niche]

I'm also curious about the whole "French" thing. I think if a Frenchman were trying to make an ARG for NMS, they would consciously realize most players are native English speakers and make it English. It being in French seems something intentional and significant to me. Wasn't the WT corporation French, or something like that?

[brazen prawn]

@rose dust it's in the repo root and yes some of it is wacko - have been mixing it with the usual suspects (https://github.com/kkrypt0nn/wordlists/tree/main/wordlists)

[cyan kraken]

i tried leonardo da vinci, caps and small and sentence case

and in french

nada

[brazen prawn]

The split colors, gifs, reports, dumps, and blah blah are also there for the new image

[rose dust]

Thanks! I'll hook up my requests with this as soon as I'm back!

If nothing else, it'll knock off a good chunk of attempts hopefully 😅

[clear surge]

The password is probably passed through the cipher

[steady niche]

Since they just recently gave us the cipher, yeah, I think it's connected

[cyan kraken]

should we wait for any communication in the inbox then?

[rose dust]

Oh absolutely. I'm sure the french bit is in character, and not precisely (though could be) indicative of region

[cyan kraken]

do we have any indication that the password is 20 characters?

or was that some bit of code that doesn't actually confirm it?

[brazen prawn]

Once I am done with this instance I'm gonna kill it and roll over the IP and join in again as well (will go bottom up + common wordlists mixers)

[cyan kraken]

are we using this to brute force it?

[rose dust]

Mostly just using it to knock most likely candidates out. I doubt it'll be any one of these

[brazen prawn]

Same

[cyan kraken]

is it trying the same in french?

[brazen prawn]

It's just the visual char limit for the input field

[cyan kraken]

ah

[torpid linden]

Hi there. Was randomly looking at solutions regarding "MB-A". I found a reference to Azure -used by HG- and MB-A might be something like Memory Bandwith Allocation. Don't have any network admin knowledge so just throwing that under the bus

I know that in some cases you add suffix to cmd at the end to give authorization to a user

[steady niche]

I do think that MB-A might have a clue in it. Memory Bandwidth Allocation doesn't seem quite right, but a good track. Would need to be a two word MB, followed by a one word A subset/specific (I think, personally)

[torpid linden]

I've just tried (unsuccesfully) admin

[rose dust]

Memory Bloc - Addition? As in, our access level is restricted towards only adding memories at this point (if we can get in)

[steady niche]

That makes sense, yeah

[brazen prawn]

Yeah I think that tracks

[hard spoke]

Well I woke up to a lot happening

[turbid eagle]

same

haven't even had coffee yet

[half ibex]

I just realized that the particle page is no longer there...🤣

[compact python]

v=xPG-VM__mwU
This is the yt url for hal 9000 yes?

Gunter confirms 👀

[steady niche]

Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPG-VM__mwU

[brazen prawn]

HIM

MB-A

[steady niche]

#project-skyscraper message

[brazen prawn]

(but not really)

[summer orbit]

Does anyone know what these dates mean when you go to the main page of project skyscraper?

[clear surge]

They're log entries

[turbid eagle]

welcome

to Jurassic Park

sorry I mean Project Skyscraper

[summer orbit]

Interesting

[turbid eagle]

feel free to peruse all known pages if you're new: https://project-skyscraper.com/sitemap-1.xml

we have a lot of documentation on our investigation here too: https://forums.atlas-65.com/c/project-skyscraper/54

[torpid linden]

Did someone scan the comments section of the YT video already ? I've tried as well but no luck till yet...

[grizzled yacht]

in this clip the scientist mentions "mobius strip" and now all i can think is...

ITS MORBIN' TIME

[torpid linden]

😂

[brazen prawn]

Gave it a shot, but a lazy one

[turbid eagle]

that's where I'm at tbh 😂

[rose dust]

It's already been tried as a password funnily enough 😅

[compact python]

I still think code could be time stamp numbers

[rose dust]

All of the memory bloc timestamps from the site have been tried already

None of those ones worked

[compact python]

Maybe that ine is not on the site

Yt vid might be the hint about the dates

[rose dust]

The ones mentioned in the clip were tried too

Thought directly from the french subtitles

Doubt they'd want us to guess 24 hours worth of timestamps for several dates though

[compact python]

I said . Hint not the direct date.

[brazen prawn]

I really hope they are logging the attempts for a smile later

[steady niche]

I tried 94316 because I think it's important, but that didn't work

[rose dust]

Yea that's good, I'm just mentioning that the actual dates were tried already, in case anyone was planning on going through those again 🙂

[rose dust]

Oo wait I saw this mentioned before too, but why do we think it's important? I think I missed the train if thought for that

[steady niche]

I also tried 093416, 94317, and 094317, fyi

[steady niche]

It's in two or three places

[rose dust]

Has anyone tried the sleep mode excel numbers yet?

[rose dust]

Is it the one the latest log?

[steady niche]

https://project-skyscraper.com/request-memory-timestamp-094317/
And it's Jan 2 1970, just after the first memory

I think there's another reference that I forgot right now

[rose dust]

Ah treating it as a unix timestamp?

[steady niche]

Yeah, as a timestamp it's that

Not conclusive in any way, just that it's in a few places that were just posted yesterday, so probably important

[compact python]

Tried imput in reverse ?

[rose dust]

All good! I think it's worth keeping in mind, I was just confused about the date bcz I haven't seen such small Unix timestamps in a while 😅

[turbid eagle]

you're the goat for this
doing a deep dive on this image due to patterns

[high stump]

glad to see people still at work on this

[brazen prawn]

ARG wordlist is no go (no surprise lol)

[rose dust]

Havant seen that tried yet. You could give it a go if you'd like

[turbid eagle]

feels like a game of pixel sudoku or something lmao

[brazen prawn]

I also temporarily forgot I needed to log out for the sheet

[rose dust]

Oh nice(Maybe not in the best way)!

At least this lets us ignore most of the other ARG clues so far

[brazen prawn]

For sure

[rose dust]

Saw someone convert it to a gif too, if nothing else, it looked really cool haha

[turbid eagle]

that was sick tbh

[brazen prawn]

There's a few runs in the repo for the gif (diff, clean, with/without resolve, etc)

Currently looking at some split frame overlap decodes but not hopeful

[clear surge]

Am I right that only one of the segments has a different-shaped background?

They all seem to have the first pattern except one empty cell which has the second

[brazen prawn]

There are a few "wrong" ones corruption nonwithstanding

[turbid eagle]

wellp.
I divided the image evenly into 160x160 squares (the bottom remaining 40px left out), then combined them into one, and nothing really sticks out

[clear surge]

Ah, yeah, I was seeing the QSRSV one, but I see the ERR.R one next to it now

[turbid eagle]

I have variations and still not seeing it

but I want to highlight that each little "pixel" is 10px wide, so these squares are 16x16

not 16px by 16px, but 16 squares by 16 squares

[brazen prawn]

20×20 dot R channel LSB decode always resolves to ERROR so all you get is a shifted ERROR output at 16x16 like: ERRORERR ERRORERR unless I am misunderstanding what you mean

[turbid eagle]

I'm just saying each colored square is 10px by 10px
so in the 160px by 160px images I just shared, there are 16 by 16 squares

[brazen prawn]

Ah, right

~7000 frame mixers pushed 🤮

[sturdy sierra]

I have tried major events timestamps that happened in the movies 2001 & 2010 as utc format using gemini .nothing worked
Event Date and UTC Unix Timestamp :
First Monolith found on the Moon 1999 915148800,
Discovery Mission to Jupiter 2001 978307200,
HAL 9000 malfunction and deactivation 2001 978307200,
Dave Bowman enters the Monolith 2001 978307200,
Leonov Mission to Jupiter 2010 1262304000,
HAL 9000 reactivated 2010 1262304000,
Discovery and Leonov leave Jupiter 2010 1262304000,
Jupiter becomes a second sun (Lucifer) 2010 1262304000

[brazen prawn]

Decanting the 2010 script into a wordlist 🙃

[clear surge]

2001, not 2010?

[jagged sonnet]

@turbid eagle

No gifs in this channel please

[turbid eagle]

wow spicy

nvm

it's prob nothin anyway lmao

[brazen prawn]

2010 yeah, edited

[clear surge]

Oh well, the password is not kcmaufc (neuf ans, 9 years, run through the cipher)

[hard spoke]

We still don’t know it right?

[turbid eagle]

correct

[brazen prawn]

Well, hopefully we get the key drop soon so we can stop doing loopy stuff lol, gonna get some sleep

[dusky forge]

Trying to catch up. HAL was turned off due to malfunction. When it was turned on again, a time worm was used to selectively delete the files that caused the malfunction, correct? Sounds like what is happening to the System..

[hard spoke]

True

[idle remnant]

Sorry 😅 How did you get "ERROR" from the image?

[vast stump]

the first things i thought of were:
conway's game of life
the NMS alphabet
the Arecibo message
and those videos where someone puts like mspaint through audio and video converters

[brazen prawn]

We were looking at the 'background' of the image, the light grey / dark grey (20x20px) and encoding those blocks to bits in a 8x5 block region

[vast stump]

oh the website changed

[idle remnant]

Okay, thanks, that's interesting 👀

[vast stump]

[brazen prawn]

Some quick and dirty marked up explainer images (one is ERROR, the other is QSRSV):

[vast stump]

also just to be clear i'm absolutely terrible at ARG's lol

[idle remnant]

Okay, got it! So logically, we should be looking on the "QSRSV" side

[clear surge]

Don't worry, I've never done one before!

[brazen prawn]

I'll leave the others to explain further, I've gotta get some sleep

[idle remnant]

thanks 😉 Good night !

[vast stump]

is the thing at the bottom a url?

oh it's HAL

[covert temple]

Does anyone have the SM pics of "When the sky stops being the limit and becomes the threat"

i'm looking for it on the forum and cannot find it

nvm i found them

[turbid eagle]

each square being treated as a binary 1 or 0 (in rows of 8 digits) result in binary to text conversion: ERROR

try it out: 01000101 01010010 01010010 01001111 01010010

I'm going through every iteration to see if there are any other words

(there aren't) lol

01000101 01010010 01010010 01001111 01010010 ERROR
01010001 01010011 01010010 01010011 01010110 QSRSV
01000101 01010010 01010010 00001111 01010010 ERRR

[rose dust]

its not confirmed to be Sean btw

That account WAS mentioned by Sean to be his back in 2020, but ever since 2025 they've had a new instagram page which is linked everywhere

[covert temple]

i see

[rose dust]

And now the old account (where the posts come from) is in a weird status of not being confirmed as either still run by Sean or not.

[covert temple]

Would it hurt anything to try and ask HG

[rose dust]

Since nothing official from HG points to it anymore

[rose dust]

I dmed the account about it but I highly doubt we'll get a response. You could try contacting HG (maybe try reaching out to Tim Woodley directly?) though be prepared to be ghosted harder than by the architect.

I guess you could frame the question like "I think someone's impersonating y'all" to try n get a response but that's still an iffy thing to pull

[covert temple]

do you have a link to the IG account? when I email them I'll link to it for reference

[steady niche]

It wouldn't hurt to ask, but don't expect a response. They don't even answer when people knock on their physical door bearing gifts

[covert temple]

i do the same thing ordering a pizza tbh

i leave instructions to leave it on a table near the door

[steady niche]

That's what we do, but it's more common in Korea

[rose dust]

https://www.instagram.com/nomansskyvoyagers?igsh=ZzNjbzgxeXp3NjZt

[covert temple]

thanks bomber

[steady niche]

Not knocking or anything

Leave the food and go, lest we realize you are there

[copper harbor]

Have you looked at the filename of the pixel image? It seems very password-like. C3q5NYF

??

[covert temple]

here in the US I dont think its common practice at all, I feel like a raccoon waiting for the delivery guy to leave before i grab it

[rose dust]

yep, it didnt work

[covert temple]

to me it's just convenient

ANYWAY

i'll get that email written up

[steady niche]

I couldn't find any translation of that image suffix. Maybe try it without any transformation as the password?

[rose dust]

Oh damn

[steady niche]

That seems too easy, but worth trying

[rose dust]

I just found out that HG "poached" Tim Woodley from 505 after getting them to publish the Xbox port

No wonder i havent heard of them in a while in relation to NMS

[steady niche]

I'm not aware of the context. I feel like a minor nerd now

[copper harbor]

I tried C3q5NYF itself, yes, but it could be base64 code or something else

this filename is strange

[steady niche]

I figure whatever the password is will look like something significant and recognizable. I tried (and I'm sure many others did) to convert that into something and couldn't find anything

[rose dust]

505 Games used to handle publishing for NMS on Xbox iirc, at least on launch. They've been self publishing on other platforms since, but it turns out that Tim Woodley (their current head of publishing) used to work at 505 Games immediately before joining HG, so he likely worked with them for the Xbox port too?
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tim-woodley-0870242_publishing-developer-activity-6518735806666985472-TvLZ

completely not relevant to the channel though my bad 😅

[steady niche]

But still cool, particularly with their breadth of publishing and also publishing for at least one other indie. Thanks for the details

[rose dust]

The Architect is lurking on ETARC again rn

[turbid eagle]

"what's taking them so long"

[covert temple]

well i sent the email to HG

we'll see if they respond

probably wont be until tomorrow sometime since it's after-hours in the UK now

[rose dust]

plus a weekend

[steady niche]

Probably won't be ever 😉

[covert temple]

oh yeah i forgot

[covert temple]

yeah that's possible too

[rose dust]

I sent one in too just in case. Might make the "impersonation" seem more concerning?

[covert temple]

but it only took like five minutes to draft and send

in return for a possible breakthrough of how we see this ARG

[rose dust]

Which, at the rate of misinformation, it definitely could be if people start taking a potential fan account as HG's recognition of the ARG

[covert temple]

I didn't mention the ARG or anything when I sent the email

[rose dust]

oh same, just that there's a lil confusion over accounts and / or a possible imposter

[steady niche]

What impersonation is going on? Maybe I missed something

[covert temple]

It's not so much impersonation as it is confusion around who's controlling the thing

and that misconception Could theoretically be seen as impersonation

if people start thinking the acc is official when/if it's not

[rose dust]

there's an intstagram account (linked above), which used to be run by Sean (linked in 2020) which posted the ARG's tagline

[steady niche]

If I were them, confusion is fine and completely different from impersonation

[covert temple]

yeah

[steady niche]

Gotcha thanks

[covert temple]

idk how you'd even hand-off an IG account so my personal thoughts are that Sean still runs it

[rose dust]

The issue is, ever since they launched their latest bsky / instagram accounts, we have no clue if the old one is still run by HG or not since they scrubbed any links to it.

[covert temple]

but maybe they made an arrangement sometime idk

[steady niche]

With or without "the"?

Sky is not the limit or the sky is not the limit?

[rose dust]

They still post trailers and such on that account and have a mostly "official" looking bio, and actually have more followers than the real account, so if it is fan made its definitely superseding the real one in people's feeds

[rose dust]

I think they posted two images of the expedition with the captions When the sky stops being the limit and and becomes a threat respectively

theres a screenshot on ETARC by Sheral

[steady niche]

Thanks, 4am for me so I'm not going to dig too much 🙂

[rose dust]

haha, glad im not the only one going through this ARG sleepless

[idle remnant]

🤔
Okay, thanks

[bright tusk]

Wait there’s a new arg?

[turbid eagle]

yes, welcome! unconfirmed if official

[bright tusk]

Sweet what’s the basics so far?

[turbid eagle]

I'd start here: https://forums.atlas-65.com/t/project-skyscraper-welcome-info/9206

But it's called Project Skyscraper, and something is waking up and missing its memories which will likely need to be restored. We're currently in the process of trying to find a password

[bright tusk]

Sweet can’t wait til we get bob back

[turbid eagle]

lol saaaaame, bob is the goat

[harsh vapor]

I don't wanna know the amount of time I've spent staring at these pixels today 😆

[turbid eagle]

hey did y'all notice the subtitles of this 2010 clip are in French?

I'm slow, so forgive me

[harsh vapor]

The thing that is sticking out to me after taking a decent break is, why is there such a clean break in the noise at the bottom, then nearly every bottom pixel is covered

There seems to be some patternish with the rest of the nosie, that just is really sticking out to me for some reason

[clear surge]

Yes, the characters "The Architect" and "Ghost" have communicated in French (https://project-skyscraper.com/inbox/) and the timezone of the site is GMT+1

[turbid eagle]

right which is why it stood out to me that the 2010 clip also contains French subtitles

possible suggestion of a French password

[steady niche]

Yeah the French angle is being played up quite a bit

[harsh vapor]

Guys I think the architect…. he may be French 😨

[steady niche]

A Frenchman\woman wouldn't be working until Monday at 10am

[copper harbor]

😅 And that's when we're not on strike.

[bright tusk]

Oh no

[harsh vapor]

Running through all caesar ciphers of QSRSV, with shift amount 22 you get MONOR. It's the closest thing I've gotten to anything, it's the name of some town in Budapest (and the name of some French travel vlogger 😂)

The issue with having this little text is it can be very easily be massaged into looking like some real text with ciphers

[thorn coyote]

I'm not allowed to share pics, but the glitched image is Fragment 1778433240, and wouldn't it belong in memory bloc 1778433240? https://project-skyscraper.com/2026/05/10/sec-log-171452/

I think we get closer to the password by using our current "Status: Memory bloc addition authorized" to get the image in the correct memory bloc and maybe it will update or progress?

[harsh vapor]

That's an interesting point, I haven't thought about it in that way specifically. I think if there is anything major we are missing with how we've been looking at it so far is the connection to the previous log/TRACE security log

[clear surge]

Hmm, could we try adding the new pic to the reddit one? 🤔

[covert temple]

Has "Memory_bloc_verification" always been here?

[harsh vapor]

I'm pretty sure that started showing up today

It was on one of the previous security logs on the footer, but now it shows as the footer on the main page

[clear surge]

It's always been on some pages, but I don't recall if it was on the index

[earnest yarrow]

Did anyone figure out anything about the image in the Jan 1970 entry?

[clear surge]

The skyscraper pic? We know it's the Atlas tower, but not if there's any meaning to the modifications

[earnest yarrow]

hm

it is trying to restore another years worth of memory blocs?

[clear surge]

We don't really know, yet

[earnest yarrow]

question, how were the letters QSRSV taken from the fragment image, I mean this one

[turbid eagle]

it was a process.
Step 1 was to adjust the color levels so that the blue, cyan, magenta, green were basically gone, then enhance the contrast of the darker background layer

Step 2 was to divide it evenly into a 10 by 10 grid of 160x100px squares.
Each of those squares contained 8-column, 5-row grids of light/dark squares.

Step 3 was converting those light/dark squares into binary (light=0, dark=1)

Step 4 was converting binary to ASCII text, which, for 98 of the 100 squares, resulted in "ERROR" (literally, that was the binary translation), and for two of the squares on row 2, columns 8 and 9, "QSRSV" and "ERRR"

the result was this
white = 0
black = 1

repeating grid of the binary message, "ERROR"

[earnest yarrow]

ah interesting

[turbid eagle]

@brazen prawn did the grunt work while we watched in awe

[ember sundial]

Always glad to be in the presence of people much smarter than me

Where does this leave us for the day, then? We'll see some activity about 8 hours from now, if the last couple days are anything to go off of

[earnest yarrow]

im just working through the stuff myself, seeing if there's anything that hasn't been considered

So, I'm pretty sure this image is just a blurred out version of the fragment image but before I knew about that, I thought it might be one of those optical illusion type of images where you can cross your eye to see a hidden image

probably tried already idk

[turbid eagle]

It's either the new image, blurred (like you said) or it's a less corrupted version of whatever we're trying to restore. Maybe both lol

there sure seems to be a lot more green in this one than there is in the new pixellated version

[earnest yarrow]

yeah the magenta is also in different spots

[brazen prawn]

Pre coffee thought but what if the QSRSV blocks "loss" bit fiddle is actually the important operation and needs to be marched?

[turbid eagle]

I want to help
can you elaborate on what marching entails?

I'm also puzzled by the "ERRR" block where "" is ASCII 15, the non-print "shift-in" command

context:

It was historically used in teletype systems to signal a switch from the upper character set (often defined by a hardware switch or paper tape) to the lower character set.

I guess it's from a 7-bit ASCII character set

in Unicode if it displayed properly, we'd see, "ERR␏OR"

[brazen prawn]

Gonna have my coffee and breakie and clunk away at it - but what I mean is maybe if we look at the word block as a set and the "bit flips" as result of a movement operation not a flip, the movement patterns can be used to attempt to march/move other main blocks or sub blocks (bit or nibble). Whatever the answer is it needs to be a significant varied shift to move away from the low entropy read

[turbid eagle]

I think I understand (I probably don't), I'll try to take a look
Either way I'm stoked you're back on!

[brazen prawn]

The problem is in isolation it can't be a simple movement, the window has to open to include neighbouring blocks etc.

[clear surge]

I'm currently thinking it might be a purposefully-mangled set of glyphs from the Hyper Light Drifter alphabet. HLD was one of the games in the book from the /Code entry, the artistic style matches, and it has monoliths in common with 2010. We also had "DR1FTING" in the CSS.

[turbid eagle]

well we do have two blocks, so we get to witness the movement twice if there is one, which could give clues into how to continue it forward

[brazen prawn]

The problem is stuff like this seems way too over-engineered and simple ops like internal block op -> blocks as an op doesn't change the entropy enough

Maybe it was truly a pre-coffee thought 😅

Gonna write some tests anyway

[brazen prawn]

Are the HLD glyphs all 4x3?

[brazen prawn]

Ah, bummer

[clear surge]

I could be on the wrong track, but I feel like we're missing a clue, and there must be something in the pile of stuff we have already. I might have leaped to the wrong one, but I did go through every game in the book.

[rain verge]

Probably important to keep in mind that the Da Vinci quote was about simplicity.

[brazen prawn]

Also kinda my point yeah, we're entering severe over-engineered territory and it needs to be kind of approachable by the majority of people

[clear surge]

Approachable but not obvious, yeah

[brazen prawn]

Maybe a rewatch of 2010 is on the books for the day

[rain verge]

I think we're still in a phase where it might even be somewhat obvious.

Have we bruteforced the password input with NMS-themed wordlists? (Not advocating for this but it's an idea)

[clear surge]

These are 3 high by 4 wide, right?

[turbid eagle]

yeah

looks that way

[brazen prawn]

yeah 4 x 3

[brazen prawn]

A little yeah

[turbid eagle]

I've momentarily abandoned the image in favor of 2010

[brazen prawn]

Taking a step back and a new angle: 7 bit punched tape

[turbid eagle]

I was hoping you'd look into that

[ember wyvern]

Here's an odd idea: do we have to give the timestamps for future memory blocks/past memory blocks from before we started seeing them using the standard cadence we've identified?

But also in what format do we have to give memory blocks/timestamps anyway?

Or the accurate timestamps for the last ones which were not accurate?

[turbid eagle]

I'm in the process of actually reviewing all sleep/sec-log timestamps.

Some of them are literally hundreds of years off

[mental saddle]

I will say an ARG i worked on a while ago almost got closed because people were trying to brute force a password (too much on the server or something)

Can also ruin the fun

[brazen prawn]

I can't see a significant read path via the tape idea either with the 'base' layers, but that is to be expected. You just get the same shifted pattern data (obviously) but the outputs are all nonsense. Same with the 'content' layers masking the 'base' layers, the output is just stuff like Band 0: P""s" p""s6 p""s2 p""{w p""{[7F] |""{r x""{2 p""q" p""q" P""q"

Same goes for sprocket alignment as is (wrong) and corrected 4/s/3 layout

[turbid eagle]

well done checking though, that was outside my wheelhouse

[rain verge]

Also not obvious how it might apply, but /code had all the text on grid paper. I guess it feels like it might be good to overlay something on our grid, but I don't really know what we have.

[harsh vapor]

I did have a thought that the stray gray dots could overlay onto something to select characters or something like that

What were the dimensions of the code image?

[turbid eagle]

entire image: 1600 by 1000px
split up image: ten by ten grid of 160x100px
individual binary squares: 20px by 20px

[mental saddle]

the graph paper looks to be about 30 columns and 39 rows but I could've counted wrong

[rain verge]

Supposedly 1212×742, but the grid paper itself isn't nearly that large.

[mental saddle]

Ight no the graph paper has 25 columns before turning into one more long row(s)

[rain verge]

The bottom almost looks like long cells too.

[mental saddle]

Yea

too much glitch at the top for a perfect count, might need to go by pixels

[rain verge]

I have a feeling that image is a hint and might not contain any actual information beyond that.

[mental saddle]

yea fair enough

do we know the cipher for this yet?

[steady niche]

I think we're trying to go way too deep with a lot of things

Yeah, I have it, one sec

[turbid eagle]

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Substitute('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ','MINDFAGEBJRLHCVPQSKYUWOXTZ',true)Reverse('Line')&input=TUItQQ&oenc=65001&ieol=CRLF

[brazen prawn]

The background bytes are the signpost

[rain verge]

La simplicité est la sophistication suprême

[steady niche]

One of my top 5 people of all time

[turbid eagle]

one of the people of all time

[steady niche]

That, too'

Socrates, Leonardo, Einstein, Tesla, MLK

Top five people of all time

[harsh vapor]

We don’t exactly have a reference on puzzles yet to know how deep we should go tbf. But I 100% agree that we are probably looking too deep tho

[steady niche]

I mean, they even made a post about how we were being too complicated

[harsh vapor]

I don’t think it’s gonna be some crazy technical solution tho

[brazen prawn]

"Strange loops" are definitely a theme here and we're in one 😅

[turbid eagle]

judging by the way we over-complicated the poem, chances are high we're doing the same now lmao

[harsh vapor]

Most definitely 😂

[steady niche]

I'm still on 094316, but I have no idea what to do with it

[harsh vapor]

I know it’s been posted before, but why is the url for the password page 094317, not 094316

[steady niche]

I tried it

oh, misread, yeah

I'd say maybe there's a page with the right timestamp, but we know all the pages all the time 😄

[turbid eagle]

as a timestamp, it goes to March 23rd, 2158 😂

sorry, March 24th

[steady niche]

Hmm? I thought it went to January 2 1970

[harsh vapor]

? Is it not just the time of the security log

[harsh vapor]

09:43:16 AM

[steady niche]

It's in 3 places

#project-skyscraper message

[turbid eagle]

the thing about that is, the actual memory bloc for that post is 5939823600 which is May 30th, 2026

And from what we've seen, usually the slugs contain the timestamp format for excel. So when using that same format, we get the year 2158

[steady niche]

Oh, I see

[turbid eagle]

and a TON of dates are like this, way off in the future for the sec-logs

[steady niche]

They're usually unix epoch timestamps I thought

[turbid eagle]

the funny thing is, the sleep logs contain the correct date in excel format

which establishes the baseline

once we get into sec-log world, all the excel dates are way in the future

[harsh vapor]

where does that number come from?

[turbid eagle]

I've been updating the posts spreadsheet with a new tab for tracking this insanity:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mUOrEQqj5SqazYnwB9yjaRHICkJJVo0lJHHPSd9DbV4/edit?gid=1085556499#gid=1085556499

[turbid eagle]

sorry that was a mistake actually lol

I was going off the date listed on the post itself, and in the full security log

[mental saddle]

1780134180 instead then?

[turbid eagle]

correct

[steady niche]

Ahh, it's the memory bloc numbers that are unix timestamps

[turbid eagle]

yes

and the slug numbers appear to be excel timestamps

which is what all the sleep logs established

as for what to do with these discrepancies
no idea lmao
but it's there and we're tracking it

[harsh vapor]

what is meant by excel timestamp?

[steady niche]

I would recommend adding a column for unix conversions just in case a pattern comes out

[turbid eagle]

I have two unix conversion columns
unless I misunderstand

[harsh vapor]

The numbers after the security log is the time it was posted with a small error generally, but it matches the HH:MM:SS of the post?

unless im misunderstanding

[brazen prawn]

I assume it's conflated from the excel standard dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss

[steady niche]

A column for "what would this be if it were a unix timestamp, not an excel timestamp"

[brazen prawn]

I haven't understood the purpose either

[turbid eagle]

HH:MM:SS appear to be omitted since all the times evaluate to 00:00:00

[turbid eagle]

yeah I have that, it's the first Unix Epoch column

[steady niche]

Where is Jan 2 1970 in this?

[turbid eagle]

didn't include, since there's no excel timestamp in the URL

[steady niche]

That's what I mean. There's a number that you convert into all kinds of things, but you don't convert to unix

[turbid eagle]

I guess I'm not following what you mean haha

[steady niche]

You convert what the excel version of that timestamp would be in unix, but not what it would be without the excel step

This

[turbid eagle]

gotttttcha

thanks for your patience lmao

I can add that

[steady niche]

No worries at all

[harsh vapor]

Unix is seconds past Jan 1, 1970 btw

[steady niche]

Yes

[harsh vapor]

So low number will always be in 1970

[steady niche]

But just in case there is some sort of pattern. The first post is jan 1, 1970 in text, so maybe that matters

But it could just be a unix system resetting

[harsh vapor]

because it has timestamp 0?

[mental saddle]

we might be reading a lil too much into this lol

more data the better tho ig

[harsh vapor]

If we are thinking the interpretation of these damn pixels is simple, I can't stop thinking of how much this bottom row looks like an A

[turbid eagle]

Jan 1, 2 and 3, 1970 lol

[steady niche]

I think the whole image looks like galaga

[brazen prawn]

Steering away from this for a second, we know our current cipher doesn't support diacritics (without extra hops)

[mental saddle]

I saw you say that, but how?

[steady niche]

Just the multicolor kind of pyramid shape

I guess they are too high up in Galaga

I don't think that's the intent, FYI, just reminds me of Galaga

[brazen prawn]

If we are placing stock in the words of the clip, perhaps we have a subtle indication to not be concerned about input using diacritics (just a side thought)

[steady niche]

Maybe more Maybe Space Invaders?

[steady niche]

Good thought, as the cipher ignores them

[harsh vapor]

Like I could just be losing my mind at this point, but what if its as simple as just what letter do these pixels look like (not that it'd be easy/clean to interpret) but would be simple

[steady niche]

I think anything that is an actual intended answer will be clear when we see it, not just a guess

Objective, not subjective

[turbid eagle]

i had to stop looking at that image

it started looking back at me

[harsh vapor]

I'm definitely reaching that point

I think I see what you mean 😬

[steady niche]

That's it! When you look too deeply into the Void...Void Mother...GLASSSSSSS

[brazen prawn]

It was a restless sleep last night

[steady niche]

Those are some weirdly shaped boobies

[mental saddle]

what ARG's will do to you:

[steady niche]

@turbid eagle Thanks for the column. Now that I see it, it's probably pointless 😄

[turbid eagle]

blue footed boobies

[turbid eagle]

you never know...
wouldn't it be wild if all this occurred over the span of a few days in the 1970s, and was somehow broadcasted 56 years into the future?

[steady niche]

Emails between french people in the 1970s would be a bit wild 😄

[turbid eagle]

or would it

no, yeah it would be wild lol

[mental saddle]

Wild shout, do we know of any passwords/passkeys in-game with relation to the atlas?

[steady niche]

16? Can't think of anything that has a password

[compact python]

Im more space invaders type

[turbid eagle]

there are those little puzzles at the outposts and what-not, but that's about as password-y as things get I think

[steady niche]

oh yeah, shifting left or right

[mental saddle]

those are always just a 123 - 231 -??? tho

[turbid eagle]

(the answer is 312)

[mental saddle]

good job! 🎉

[rose dust]

I tried a few things related to em like Atlas, Hive, Glass etc, as well as Emily, loop16 and even the phoenix hex on the atlas passes, nothing worked

[rose dust]

I discover a set of coordinates within the stars

[turbid eagle]

literally 15 minutes over that hill

[cyan kraken]

we gonna be crossing a lot of hills in this

i can feel it

[rose dust]

Regarding this, the timestamp links to TR4CE's original post. This one's got the missing 2 anomaly. Did anyone check if the full sequence of those missing bits works as a password?

[rose dust]

Oh the pm is absolutely banging their head watching us all break out DQT tables and whatnot if the solution is intended to be simple 😅

[steady niche]

They're probably like "what the fuck? I didn't even know you could do that!"

[mental saddle]

"breach attempts" caught my eye, but none of the language here's looking promising

[brazen prawn]

They know because they did it, but yeah

Unknown had the 2 byte overflow from manual editing

BUT that doesn't mean it's worth jack

Because it all isn't lmao

Just means they're messing about with them

It's why I am starting to be sceptical of this image even being a part of the puzzle versus the video

[steady niche]

The problem is that have we gotten anything from the image? They didn't post it just for aesthetic purposes

[brazen prawn]

They did with the others though (location aside)

[rose dust]

Yea it'd super weird to have a straight up teaser for this image half a month back and then have the actual image be useless

[steady niche]

Which? There are a couple I think still have clues we didn't get

[turbid eagle]

I think the one thing this image does tell us, is that it's not the memory we need to add when we do get the opportunity (due to looping ERROR)

[harsh vapor]

Why is it posted on another platform instead of Wordpress itself? unless Wordpress doesn’t allow png hosting and that was necessary for this image

[turbid eagle]

this might be an even more corrupted version of the teaser version

[steady niche]

Is it the same image? I thought the RGB didn't match up

[turbid eagle]

sort of like the way the poem became more and more corrupted until we finally figured out what the PM wanted lmao

[rose dust]

Oh that's a fair point. They've had this account set up since may 9th, so they planned this out, but we've had images hosted directly on the site before too iirc.

[turbid eagle]

the aspect ratio matches perfectly though, scales 1:1

[harsh vapor]

Yeah it is def the Reddit image

[rose dust]

I'm pretty sure TR4CE originally only had the image, before it was turned into a full page

[turbid eagle]

maybe they didn't add it to wordpress so we couldn't track any changes it undergoes

[brazen prawn]

That too

[rose dust]

Can the uploaded image be changed? I thought they'd have to delete and reupload on the new site.

It's definitely weird especially since it's not like we had to solve a cipher or look deeper to find the link to the image

[thorn coyote]

What if it's just as simple as assigning it the correct placement in the memory blocs to clear up the image?

[turbid eagle]

also does anyone know if the string (C3q5NYF) at the end of the URL is auto-generated by freeimage.host? or if the uploader had to do that to their file?

fragment-1778433240.C3q5NYF

[steady niche]

looking now in photoshop. Yeah, these are meant to be either the same image or very similar

The original had more data though

[harsh vapor]

It’s the original image name according to the metadata (unless free image host overrides that)

[steady niche]

There's a lot of red missing in the newest image

[rose dust]

Ah, so this isn't the real version yet either

[steady niche]

And the red is slightly offset

[thorn coyote]

But it is the same? They look so different to me lol

[turbid eagle]

and green

[harsh vapor]

C3q5NYF.png i mean

[brazen prawn]

It's the same yes

[steady niche]

I'm just doing ctrl+tab back and forth and comparing 😄

[turbid eagle]

that's why I am led to believe this newest image is an even more corrupted version of the initial one

[thorn coyote]

Wild y'all .. absolutely wild. Lol

[steady niche]

A lot of the green is now cyan

But the original didn't have this clear ERROR background

[thorn coyote]

So how would you propose cleaning up the original?

[steady niche]

What if the extra detail was added by the corruption and it's supposed to be lower res like the new one?

[thorn coyote]

(not being snarky genuinely curious as I don't know squat about fixing images and what not)

[steady niche]

Here's the two layered, if it helps anyone

[mental saddle]

just tried it and yea, it's random

[brazen prawn]

I think we've already dug into this no?

[steady niche]

They don't match up, but they are very close

[harsh vapor]

Cycle continues

[steady niche]

Looks like a smear to the right

[brazen prawn]

The CDAD/shadowcheck/whatever doesn't quant down to the same colour space due to edge artifacts and other things

[steady niche]

Meh, I'm trusting vector to notice anything in images before I do 😉

[brazen prawn]

If you exclude edges via thresholding the only seemingly signifacnt thing is the red

But a reconstruction path seems unlikely

It's probably better to think of them as sibling images

[steady niche]

Yeah, they really look like two different images, just extremely similar

[brazen prawn]

They're "the same"

[harsh vapor]

The image we have is the original, the one that was posted to reddit was after it's been tossed in the microwave for a bit

[steady niche]

Then the freezer, then the air fryer

[brazen prawn]

They're a game of phone kind of idea

[harsh vapor]

But you can see the binary background in the reddit image

[mental saddle]

then freeze dryer :p

[brazen prawn]

They also harken to the hat problem/panopticon theme (loosely)

[steady niche]

I assume the new image was attempted in audio? The original we got some things that were kind of like numbers but not quite. Maybe more clear in this version?

[brazen prawn]

Got a whole bunch of samples in the repo

[steady niche]

Hat Problem? Is that where I wake up with sleep paralysis and see a shadow problem in the corner wearing a hat and trenchcoat?

[brazen prawn]

Still stand firm on that being auditory pareidolia

[steady niche]

Of course he does 😄

When my paranormal/horror hobby crosses over with an ARG

[harsh vapor]

Its possible that the password is separate from the image, and whatever is in there is what helps us decode the info from the image

[brazen prawn]

Yeah

We've exhausted the bitspace pretty damn thoroughly at this point

[mental saddle]

where else could the password come from I wonder..

[steady niche]

Yeah, I think the image is a clue, not the source of the password

[compact python]

Nothing on my end

Yet

[steady niche]

A lot of green, at least

[rose dust]

ive tried every interesting looking word in the trace sec log and full log, no dice so far

I'm guessing TR4CE is moreso tied to the image than the password rn

[steady niche]

I don't think it would just be "use this word that is listed, verbatim". I think we have to figure out the right thing and then transform it, possibly with the cipher

[mental saddle]

watch the final password require rot 16 for no reason :trollface:

[compact python]

Or fibonacci sequence typed in reverse order

[steady niche]

It's just the last 10 digits of pi, yall

[mental saddle]

completely* unrelated, any of y'all read qntm's stuff before?

[mental saddle]

this made me think of this: https://qntm.org/responsibilit

[turbid eagle]

man

sometimes I type a password in
and my browser takes an extra couple seconds to load
and my heart skips a beat

like CONGRATULATIONS on another attempt

something that cracks me up about this ARG story line

is how we got access granted
only to be hit with a password page we can't get past 😂

I'm in.
Now I just need a password.

[steady niche]

I was complaining previously that having DMs be the interaction meant it was not professional. They solved that problem!

[rose dust]

They got fed up with us filling up their feeds and DM with attempts and dumped a password page on us lol

[compact python]

Time to do my waver part. Then i will go back to head wall smashing

[mental saddle]

one hour fyi

[compact python]

Ez

[steady niche]

It would be funny if the password page didn't actually do anything other than log attempts and the PM is just going through the logs manually to see if anyone gets it right

[mental saddle]

or just logging to see what we're trying

[steady niche]

Hah, they don't have an answer set, they are just watching our responses and picking what seems like the best answer 😄

[turbid eagle]

"how did they come up with BobIsTheGOAT?"

[rose dust]

The requests forward to wp-login, so there's definitely a solution set already