The party is over :) Thanks everyone for participating!


SOLUTION

1. The first puzzle was hidden in the ugly dogs pictures. You had to look for watermarks and hard-to-see symbols that formed the itstoohard puzzle code when combined together.

Q1 was a substitution cipher. Whether you solved it manually or used an online automatic solver, the result was an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" sonnet. Both the sonnet's title and the author's name were valid answers to this question.
Q2 required you to input numbers corresponding to letters on the phone's keypad. CALL ME MAYBE resulted in 2255 63 62923.
Q3 listed five Scorpions albums. Answering with the order in which they were released (5 1 7 2 8) or listing their years of release (1977 1972 1980 1974 1982) was required to successfully solve this puzzle.

2. The second puzzle was hidden as an invisible link in the announcement's source code. You had to view the page source (via right-clicking on the page and clicking view source or whatever works for your browser) in order to find the hidden link that led to a QR code. Decoding it with your phone or with the help of an online decoder led you to the itstoohard puzzle.

Q1 offered a password-protected RAR archive. Viewing the contents of the RAR revealed the file that accused you of killing the cat. A simple google search revealed that it was actually 'curiosity' that killed the cat, which in turn was the password to the archive. The next step required you to extract the pic from the archive and study it closely. Hidden in lower-right corner of the image was the password that finally helped solve Q1: tunaftw
Q2 was a secret message hidden in an audio file. The picture was placed there to help you find the decoding method. The Cube and the writing on the wall hinted at the game called Portal. Adding the ham and the radio and as a result googling for "portal ham radio secret message" revealed the method which Portal developers used to hide easter eggs in their game. The audio file then could be decoded using any SSTV decoding software (MMSSTV, for example), which revealed an image with a password to answer this part of the puzzle: farcat

3. The final itstoohard puzzle link was split between the two previous giveaways. The Hitman giveaway had half of the link hidden in the period in the GA description. The Far Cry 3 giveaway had the second half hidden in the source of the GA description, which was hinted at by the italicized part of the word "resourceful". The puzzle offered two questions that asked for code words from the two previous puzzles. The code words were hidden in the puzzle descriptions - the first letters of each line spelled SILENT in puzzle #1 and SNEAKY in puzzle #2. Solving the third puzzle led to a giveaway of Dishonored.


ORIGINAL POST
Yes-yes-yes, it's Kitty's birthday today! Let's eat grass and barf on the carpet! Let's catch mice and bring them to our humans! Let's celebrate! Bring tuna and lots of catnip (my avatar is high on catnip nao!). Oh wait :( I wanted to get you some presents, but the evil dogs ambushed me and stole them all! D:
Can somebody assume the role of the brave Corporal Mrow and save the day? Search for tracks and hunt those dogs down. I've got some suspects here, but they refuse to bark!
Good luck, Corporal!
EDIT: Since people have been asking about the games - the giveaways are Hitman: Absolution, Dishonored and FarCry 3. All giveaways require a contribution value of $31.
11 years ago*

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Поздновато, конечно, но всё ж: С днём рождения!

Хороший паззл, прям детектив настоящий. =)

11 years ago
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Спасибо :)

11 years ago
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Bump for color me impressed! Happy birthday!

Corporal Mrow

signing out

11 years ago
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Thanks Corporal! ^_^

11 years ago
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Shameless bump for solved!This was awesome,kudos to you my good feline sir

11 years ago
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Thanks for solving :)

11 years ago
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Great giveaway. Thank you!

11 years ago
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Thank you :)

11 years ago
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Mew~

11 years ago
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Mrow! <3

11 years ago
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Reow? :o

11 years ago
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Rawr!

11 years ago
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11 years ago
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Haha ^_^

11 years ago
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I already have all three games....:(

11 years ago
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:)

11 years ago
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Bump for incredibly fun (and still fair) puzzle!

11 years ago
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Thanks for solving :)

11 years ago
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Happy b-day happy cat :D

11 years ago
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Thank you :)

11 years ago
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Bump for the last hour. Hints posted.

11 years ago
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Damn. I suck at audio decrypting. Please reveal the algorithm:)

11 years ago
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Solution coming soon :)

11 years ago
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Those giveaways have ended! I want answers!

11 years ago
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Solution posted! Thanks everyone!

11 years ago
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yeah... i only saw the second giveaway and couldn't figure it out because i kept on thinking about Schrödinger's cat because i looked in the rar file and saw that it died.

11 years ago
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Haha, interesting interpretation ^_^

11 years ago
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LOL and Schrondinger's cat reminds me of The Big Band Theory :)

11 years ago
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hmm i saw the symbols in the first dog picture pretty easily but really did not look hard enough for the other ones even tho i looked at them before, the code in the fourth one i saw instantly after seeing you posted the solution lol

11 years ago
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Aww, sorry you did not notice them sooner!

11 years ago
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Yeah, there was no way I would have solved that! Very clever puzzle Sleepy! Oh, and thanks for listing the games being given away in the post so I didn't waste too much time <3

11 years ago
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Haha, well, I'm having trouble with the 'easy' girly puzzle now, too! ^_^

11 years ago
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Yeah no way haha. Nice though and Grats to the winners!

11 years ago
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Yeah, not the easiest of puzzles :) But I hope I gave enough clues to help people solve it.

11 years ago
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Sleepy can you tell me the encryption method used for 1 Q1?

I mean complete.

11 years ago
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It would be difficult for me to just type each letter pair here :) Here's how it could be solved manually:

Substitution cipher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher
Manual decoding helper: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/cryptogram.php
Letter frequency analyzer: http://www.richkni.co.uk/php/crypta/freq.php
Auto-solver based on word guessing is available at that site, too.

11 years ago
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Tried Caesar shifts none of them make sense :(

11 years ago
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Caesar's cipher shifts the whole alphabet by a preset amount of letters. Substitution cipher replaces a character with a different one.

11 years ago
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My god that will take forever trying all the possibilities! Guess I'm too stupid for this :/

btw, the link to second puzzle is removed? All I see is a itstoohard link with X#Xx____

11 years ago
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Not really. Look at the text and notice the patterns (you can use the letter frequency analyzer posted above for this). For example, you might have noticed that the word "qtc" appears five times in the encoded text. What popular three-letter words do you know? "the", "and", "for", "are" would be my first guess. Next, you might have noticed that the letter "q" appears 16 times in the text. I'd assume that "q" is a vowel. So we could try to discard "the" and "for" as our candidates for that popular 3-letter word and go for either "and" or "are". The next step would be proving our guess to be right or wrong by substituting all "q" for "a", "t" for "n", "c" for "d" and looking for patterns again.

It would take a bit of time and effort, but it would be possible to decipher the text manually. Of course, there are automatic decoding systems available now that do all the guesswork for you and are able to crack most simple substitution ciphers like this one. Try decoding my text here: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/cryptogram-solver.php

11 years ago
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The link to the second puzzle is in the QR code hidden in page source. It's intact and working.

11 years ago
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I don't really think I understand it even now o.O

11 years ago
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Sorry about that, I guess the puzzle was indeed too hard :)

11 years ago
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Closed 11 years ago by SleepyCat.