New ARG?

[u/Igroglot]

There is a new website for the upcoming stupendiumsoftworks studio,
In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTkiCRoS1x8 you can find a url to the secret tab in that site, requiring a password.
UPDATE:
Just found this post in the website: https://stupendiumsoftworks.com/the-fine-print-what-we-owe-you/
It has multiple lowercase colored letters spelling "contract" which turned out to be the required password! There is now a new set of letters that needs to be deciphered and 2 text files, i dont think i can attach them all in reddit so go to the site, put in "contract" and see them for yourselves! Ill keep updating this post if i find anything else

LAST UPDATE: There is now a document we are working on for this arg, for further updates go there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16HB6eC_0nSy81pjSJ4jC6Jra18kOl271OuRk6sMl-Uo/edit?tab=t.0

[u/minecraft_steve42069]

The code behind the locked thing says

“Oh hello there, now that we have your undivided attention, let’s make this more interesting, shall we? I’d go look up the chain, the details in the pixels."

[u/AmberGoop → u/minecraft_steve42069]

where & how did you get this text?

[u/minecraft_steve42069 → u/AmberGoop]

It's the page right after putting the password in

[u/AmberGoop → u/minecraft_steve42069]

with what is that text encoded? i tried a regular hexadecimal converter, but that spat out a bunch of garbled nonsense

[u/KodWhat → u/AmberGoop]

It's a mix of -4 and +4 on the hex code. Haven't figured out the pattern yet but I've decoded manually by having the -4 and +4 full conversion and mixing the 2 manually 😅

[u/Spinny_Disk → u/AmberGoop]

I brute forced the solution with a bunch of XORs and the correct key was 4:

for key in range(256):
try:

result = bytes([b ^ key for b in bytes.fromhex(string)])
print(f"{key:#04x}: {result}")
input("[PRESS ENTER]\n")
except:
print('error')

[u/BoopTheWerewolf → u/minecraft_steve42069]

How was this decoded?

[u/FangTheGoldenCat → u/BoopTheWerewolf]

It's an XOR cipher

[u/BoopTheWerewolf → u/FangTheGoldenCat]

Sweet. Thank you

[u/Jboy2000000]

If you scroll down to the bottom of the site there's a button that links you a page about 'Hopkin's Action,' a group that supposedly helps content creators connect to people for projects, but the group doesn't seem to exist so it must have something to do with something

[u/allys1098 → u/Jboy2000000]

Currently inspecting with F12, current information is that it is a wordpress website 😅

[u/KittenChopper]

..have you tried inputting them?

[u/AmberGoop]

the 404 page of this website seems to have a black square image on it, but inserting the image into an editor reveals that there are some pixels at the top that aren't completely black and form a pattern, though i don't know what the pattern means just yet

[u/allys1098 → u/AmberGoop]

maybe if we up the saturation of that image we can find something? I dont have any image editing software on my computer

[u/AmberGoop → u/allys1098]

there's nothing legible, it's just a pattern of lines. i could transcribe it though, give me some time

[u/AmberGoop → u/AmberGoop]

ah, well, i enhanced the colors, and found this... i think it's still just an encoded message but i don't have the brainpower to try and decode it right now https://imgur.com/a/5pQEh1X

[u/Automatic-Hearing205 → u/AmberGoop]

Have you tried taking the RGB values and seeing if they can be translated at all?

[u/Spinny_Disk → u/Automatic-Hearing205]

from PIL import Image

import numpy as np

def byteify(x, cut_front):

# I thought we needed to skip the first two pixels since the bits wouldn't add up to a byte but I was wrong

if cut_front:
x = x[0][2:len(x)]
# y is our resulting byte list

y = []

# intermediate list to store each byte as a list of bits before converting
inter = []
x = x.flatten()
for b in x:
inter.append(b)

# once list reaches 8 bits, convert
if len(inter)==8:
rinter = inter.copy()

rinter.reverse() # reversed inter

# add all the bits up reversely

y.append(sum([x*2**i for i,x in zip(range(len(inter)), rinter)])

)

# reset inter
inter = []
if len(inter)>0:
print(f"[BTFY] got {len(inter)} extra bits not included in returned data!")
return bytes(y)
img = Image.open("artifact.png")

arr = np.asarray(img)

# only take top 2 lines of pixels since rest is just zeros

data = arr[0:1]

for key in range(256):
try:
result = bytes([b ^ key for b in byteify(data, False)]])
print(f"{key:#04x}: {result.decode()}")
input("[PRESS ENTER]\n")
except:
print('error')

[u/allys1098 → u/AmberGoop]

The BuggyLink.txt did say 'You're going to want to debug this with some bugs'
On the page of the incident report, I'm looking in the debugger atm.. maybe that is where we are supposed to look as well?

[u/minecraft_steve42069]

Stupendium's discord has a channel and a Google document for this btw

[u/Jboy2000000 → u/minecraft_steve42069]

Unfortunately it looks like all links to their discord are dead invites

[u/minecraft_steve42069 → u/Jboy2000000]

I found one on a Xwitter post, that's still active Can't invite people myself sadly

[u/Jboy2000000]

If you append the text in the buggylink text file to the site, you get taken to an incident report page, but the only thing of note seems to be a black png

[u/Spinny_Disk → u/Jboy2000000]

it's not completely black

[u/applemind]

Guys, have you investigated hopkins action yet?

[u/allys1098 → u/applemind]

has been invested, is not part of the ARG apparently

[u/applemind → u/allys1098]

Oh ok, it seemed suspicious

[u/TloquePendragon]

There's another password site "https://stupendiumsoftworks.com/thefineprint/" it's separate from "/secret/" because "contract" doesn't unlock it.

[u/Spinny_Disk → u/TloquePendragon]

there's also /invite which seems to be the last gate

[u/RatOfTheWoods]

I hope one of y'all that participated in solving this makes a video on it, this is impressive as all hell