Solution put in the post :-)
EDIT: Love the cat gif lol
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Any chance you'll share the solution now that the GA is over?
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Confused as I never saw a gif to look further into?
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Oh right, I should probably have mentioned that part too: You have to click "Inspect Element" on the post, and find the hidden link to a GIF. I'll write that too real quick, thanks for noticing! :-)
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Gotcha. Second time i got confused by someone using this tactic in the past month.
Thx for the "fun" :p
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This was a hard one. I found the first gif, but just tried looking at the exif data and opening it in a text editor. I didn't know anything about file signatures or magic bytes and have never used a hex editor.
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I extracted the 2nd GIF pretty easily. I tried scanning it as a QR code using an online scanner and failed so figured it must be something else. I didn't know about data matrix codes so I gave up on that approach fairly early and spent far too long looking for a pattern in that weird constellation of black and white squares.
Nice puzzle and congrats to the winner!
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Strange, I tried to crop these bytes into another file and the image won't open. Seems to me I did something wrong. Thanks for the puzzle.
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I was stuck on the same part. Copied the code.. pasted in notepad++ saved file as a gif. Couldn't open the file because Windows Photos said it was corrupted or unsupported. After the solution was posted, I knew I was on the right track. I copied the same code again and created a new file on hex editor and saved it as a gif, it worked.
I think we had the same issue.
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So do I created a new file in hex editor, but it doesn't work.
Upd. Okay, I found the issue. I copied the code with that white square, so dumb yet so crucial.
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Thanks again. I really enjoyed your puzzle in particular. I really liked how using the inception gif was a hint itself. I also do appreciate how generous the reward was. I hope the winner will enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed cracking this puzzle xD
Cheers!
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Thanks for posting the solution, this puzzle beat me, I was so close. I knew about the hexadecimal code but that's where I got stuck.
I would never have gotten to the second step because of my ignorance.
Congratulations to those who managed to solve it.
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I can really recommend Inception! Anyone have some movies they can recommend, where the plot is not predictable, yet everything in the story can seem believable?
This is a hard one. The prize is ELDEN RING. Hint will be given after a couple of days depending on amount of entries.
HINT:
Magic bytes
EDIT:
Now that the giveaway is over, here's the solution:
Right click and press "Inspect" on this post, and you'll find a hidden link to a GIF on Dropbox.
I chose a GIF of Inception, because I thought it could be perceived as "a GIF inside a GIF", for those who have watched the movie.
GIFs, like most files, have file signatures, aka. magic bytes. If you download the file and check it with a hex editor, you can see that beyond the file signature footer (00 3B) there is more data, which happens to be the header signature of another GIF (47 49 46 38 39 61, or "GIF89a"). Copying this data and saving it into another GIF file will yield an image of a data matrix code. Scanning this with your phone (online readers seem to have a bit of trouble with it) will yield the 5 characters needed for the giveaway URL.
NOTE: Copying the text data (instead of the hex data) through the means of notepad or the like will not work, because it will yield incomplete data. This is because the data contains what would be translated into ASCII's control characters, which are non-printable.
Congratz to the 29(+?) people who completely the puzzle!
EDIT 2:
Sorry guys, the giveaway has been deleted due to a region restriction... The puzzle will remain up for those who want to try. :-)
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