Does Internet still care looking onto steganographed/enciphered data?
As far as I remember the old Web, riddles and puzzles were quite common, everywhere from old social media and bulletin boards to blogs and their webrings.
Y'all may remember things such as Cicada 3301 and that 11b x 1371 cryptic YouTube video; of course, unless you're not a millennial or zennial as I am.
How could these puzzles and riddles, useful for learning a plethora of things such as Math and ciphers and steganography, messages hiding in plain sight, are seemingly gone, nowhere to be found across the so-called modern Web of nowadays?
You're currently facing one of those puzzles, except I'm just another dust in the wind so, to which extent it's still a thing nowadays?
---
Letting aside any attempt to fit a text into a steganography (it's not easy to decipher a hidden message, but it's definitely harder to craft one; yes, both the title and the previous text conceal three hidden messages), what truly happened, what is happening? It's been a while since I stopped seeing and spotting such puzzles and riddles online.
I expected to find it the most across Fediverse and Geminispace, said to be places where humans are supposed to enjoy content with layers of depth and meaning... but, since I've been wandering around, even long-form content without hidden messages seems to be met with (seems like humans can't trust lengthy texts such as this one, believing it's AI-generated), as I observe my attempts on "being the change I crave for" being met with this... void... from the cold Web of nowadays.
Given how Web is essentially defined by human users (although Dead Internet has been a thing for some time), does this have something to do with the collective tiredness going on in the world, with humans too tired to try and focus on reading beyond the visible portion of a text they see online?
Perhaps it's just the online analogous manifestation of "Dark Forest Hypothesis" (i.e. there are humans who'd engage with said content, but they're hidden and keeping absolute silence, afraid of the possibility I'd be one of the ones they're hiding from)?
Perhaps I've been just an unemployed and pedantic guy in a world where humans are too busy with mundaneness so they can't afford the time to deal with all the effort required to read online content (textual or artistic) with all the depth it requires?
Or is it just my neurodivergence being unable to find meaningful connection with this neurotypical world?
Maybe the concept and practice of "hidden messages" are somehow associated with evil things or groups of people so humans refrain from dealing with something which would (in their minds) be potentially "dangerous" or "illegal"? (I once asked about the recent deactivation of the global live feed from mastodon.social and I got a reply explicitly conflating my interest in digitally-guided spiritual gnosis with "unsafe content", two things completely unrelated).
@hendrik@palaver.p3x.de @asklemmy@lemmy.world
I recognize some of it. I heard about Geocaching (boxes and pen-drives hidden in forests and public places), code wars (is it code golfing? It's something I often catch myself doing in a lonely manner) and vaguely about the other two.
Oh, yeah, UVB-76 and similar! I used to listen to these. Also, part of my journey involves amateur radio, as well as tinkering with methods such as voice inversion, modulations and protocols (I once implemented from scratch the encoding method from "EAS broadcasts").
As I replied to RoidingOldMan, AIs fail when it comes to uncommon ciphers. They can parse acrostics and, especially, poetically coded language, but they can only get so far with ciphers involving different ways of spelling letters or doing nested layers of calculation (they famously struggle with "how many r's are in strawberry?" kinds of prompt). And, as I said to RoidingOldMan, ciphers and coded language seems to be a perfect weapon against the indiscriminate scrapping from clankers.
Yes. Unfortunately, it feels to me like this kind of community became unreachable, and your next sentence perfectly explains why:
... and I'd add another aspect as well: algorithms. Back when I still used Youtube, I noticed how the "algorithm" was somehow programmed to shadowban ciphered content.
For example, I used to post videos involving ciphering/steganography and, when I tried to look up for my own content using a whole other IP as a guest (as if I were another person), my videos and comments were simply invisible (thus, a shadow-ban).
A similar thing seemed to happen for Facebook and TikTok. Those platforms weren't removing the content, they were actually limiting the reach, and, well, there's no purpose on publishing a content that won't make it to anyone. There's an unknowable amount of content right now lurking on social media platforms, but unreachable due to shadow-banning.
I kind of do both. In Lemmy, I often doomscroll and consume. But I also creating things sometimes (even though I end up creating to the void). That's why I don't have a Lemmy account, but a Sharkey, because it offers both worlds: I can interact with Lemmy (as I'm doing right now) while I got a personal microblogging feed where I post the things I make.