I found the LTR marker when I was writing a script to brute force the giveaway, then I just put the whole post through an analyzer and tried the 2 possibilities.
I wasn't familiar with this tool. It can definitely be useful, and for sure it's quicker in this case than the brute force approach. Any estimate as to how long it would take?
It only takes a few minutes to solve the puzzle with the tool, but only if people know to check.
Though after this puzzle, I guess people will start using it more until the Sniffer is updated.
You might want to take a stab at my puzzle based on Unicode (giveaway already expired, though) to see how easy it is to solve the puzzles with the tool:
I'm surprised the unicode doesn't show up in the page source (at least in Chrome, I'll have to check other browsers). That's interesting to note, and a very sneaky way of hiding things. Maybe even too sneaky for most purposes.
The character is encoded UTF-8 directly to the source and not HTML-encoded, and it's a control character, so for display purpose, it is not supposed to be shown.
My solution doesn't require one to actually see any code, but I don't know how many will use it (if any). In principle just copy the text to Notepad, and use the arrow key to scan each line. Whenever the cursor doesn't move with a key press, it's a hidden character.
Ha, that's an new one. Let me add another solve method too: I was trying to find the center characters in notepad++ and I thought my keyboard was glitching when the caret wouldn't move past a letter until I realized it was for exactly one letter on each line.
Interesting enough, the sniffer is setup to look for those combining unicode characters, just not the LTR one. Now I have no intention of ruining an open puzzle, but taking the first letter in a block of 5 lines was requested...
Gotcha! Tried googling the women and all the times it said "did you mean..." or "showing results for...", and I'm like "that what it says, tho" so I figured I'd better check the source.
I guess I'm first?
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Yes you are. Very nice! What did you find that you considered to be a clue?
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I found the LTR marker when I was writing a script to brute force the giveaway, then I just put the whole post through an analyzer and tried the 2 possibilities.
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I wasn't familiar with this tool. It can definitely be useful, and for sure it's quicker in this case than the brute force approach. Any estimate as to how long it would take?
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It only takes a few minutes to solve the puzzle with the tool, but only if people know to check.
Though after this puzzle, I guess people will start using it more until the Sniffer is updated.
You might want to take a stab at my puzzle based on Unicode (giveaway already expired, though) to see how easy it is to solve the puzzles with the tool:
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Looks interesting. I'll definitely give it a go :-)
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Pasted the text into Google and it showed results for a different search. I looked at the URL bar and saw the hidden unicode in the query field.
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That's an elegant solution. Nice!
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I'm surprised the unicode doesn't show up in the page source (at least in Chrome, I'll have to check other browsers). That's interesting to note, and a very sneaky way of hiding things. Maybe even too sneaky for most purposes.
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The character is encoded UTF-8 directly to the source and not HTML-encoded, and it's a control character, so for display purpose, it is not supposed to be shown.
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The LRM does appear in Chrome developer tools (credit to im0nit below).
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Oh, it actually shows the hidden characters as escapes in the inspector.
I originally found the LTR marker in the console of Chrome when I paste the text in it.
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My solution doesn't require one to actually see any code, but I don't know how many will use it (if any). In principle just copy the text to Notepad, and use the arrow key to scan each line. Whenever the cursor doesn't move with a key press, it's a hidden character.
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The LRM does appear in Chrome developer tools (credit to im0nit below).
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Woohoo! I just copied the text on a notepad and saw weird squares 8)
Pure luck. Thank you!
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You probably have, by default, a font that does not support Unicode bi-directional characters. Lucky you! ;-)
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That was almost too easy. 8^)
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What method did you use?
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Chrome's Developer Tools. :)
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Cool! This is the 6th method so far. Still more methods than solvers ;-)
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Ha, that's an new one. Let me add another solve method too: I was trying to find the center characters in notepad++ and I thought my keyboard was glitching when the caret wouldn't move past a letter until I realized it was for exactly one letter on each line.
Interesting enough, the sniffer is setup to look for those combining unicode characters, just not the LTR one. Now I have no intention of ruining an open puzzle, but taking the first letter in a block of 5 lines was requested...
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I posted the solution. You are welcome to enhance the script to support this ...and thanks for waiting! :-)
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I'm here and i've used Chrome's Developer Tools as other users have done.
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:3 Google dev tool
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Gotcha! Tried googling the women and all the times it said "did you mean..." or "showing results for...", and I'm like "that what it says, tho" so I figured I'd better check the source.
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I just saw your puzzle and solved it Chrome's Inspect, since there is nothing in page source :)
Also googling any of the lines leads to this :D
And the Sniffer is a great tool, but didn't help this time :D
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Thank you! Activated and marked as received :)
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