markchd Posted:

Thanks for the insight. I’ve been reading about how XOR works, and I can see why you’d use that before trying anything more complex. It seems almost useless in terms of breaking a “secure” encryption, but for an online puzzle it’s (demonstrably) adequate.

Apparently a shocking amount of commercial software relies on it for protection. F. ex: the CueCat tried to protect its scan data by XOR’ing it with the ASCII value for “C”, and the company got kinda ****y when people figured it out and started using the scanners without the corresponding software.

markchd Posted:

Just saw this, it’s quite a relief the puzzle wasn’t intended to require programming knowledge to solve.

I just did it as a program because I’m a jerk. 8)