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Post by susb8383 on Jul 16, 2019 18:00:48 GMT -5
Just finished the book. Actually it seemed like an interesting plot, so I started at book 1. It's the Cradle series by Will Wight. I enjoyed the read, but it shed no light whatsoever on this stanza. All the other books with 'black flame' in their titles are not things I want to read, based on the plot summaries I found.
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Post by susb8383 on Jul 17, 2019 13:02:44 GMT -5
Anyone think it's a little coincidental that the letters in Flamel can be found in Black Flame?
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Post by mrpoirot on Jul 17, 2019 17:56:24 GMT -5
Anyone think it's a little coincidental that the letters in Flamel can be found in Black Flame? Cool observation. With regards to the black flame, do you think one could go here and ask them as alluded to in stanza 6: service.alibaba.com/buyer/contact_usOne could ask, do you know anything about black flames? If so, could you please assist me?
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Post by mrpoirot on Jul 17, 2019 18:27:59 GMT -5
However, I am more and more starting to think that looking for a hidden url, including the TLD, based on one or both keys might be wrong. Why? Well, imagine that the hidden url is: www.xxxx.com or something like that. Lukas would have to register it and pay a fee for having it. This would be a one time use page. Seems like a waste to me. What other ways does he have that does not mean forking out money? What if something is hidden on their own webpage? Perhaps the keys spell out: "home/youAreTheWinner" where "home" is the webpage for the treasure hunt itself? That would not cost a penny and it is also a zero waste solution... It could also be a youtube address to an unlisted video with a message in it. Two options to accomplish the same goal without forking out a penny. Just thinking out loud here...
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Post by susb8383 on Jul 17, 2019 18:59:26 GMT -5
I totally agree with that logic. He owns digitalburiedtreasure.com and lukasstanley.com.
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Post by efanton on Jul 17, 2019 21:37:47 GMT -5
However, I am more and more starting to think that looking for a hidden url, including the TLD, based on one or both keys might be wrong. Why? Well, imagine that the hidden url is: www.xxxx.com or something like that. Lukas would have to register it and pay a fee for having it. This would be a one time use page. Seems like a waste to me. What other ways does he have that does not mean forking out money? What if something is hidden on their own webpage? Perhaps the keys spell out: "home/youAreTheWinner" where "home" is the webpage for the treasure hunt itself? That would not cost a penny and it is also a zero waste solution... It could also be a youtube address to an unlisted video with a message in it. Two options to accomplish the same goal without forking out a penny. Just thinking out loud here... Registering a domain is relatively cheap and very very simple. As little as €10 to €15 for a year. The man is giving away $1000, I hardly think he is going to try avoid spending €10 I do have a background in IT server security, (I was on the application server side of things not the internet server side) so do have a very good general knowledge of how a server would be set up and commissioned. It is very easy indeed to register a domain without your name even appearing in the registry. Its done all the time. Basically, you name your server, your ISP will give you a public internet address, you assign that address to your server network settings and once that is done, you either setup your own DNS (domain name server) or contact your ISP giving them the name of your server who will offer this service at a very reasonable price. Less than €10 a year the last time I did it. There is a way to avoid this altogether by using a virtual dns server. I wont go into the details but essentially this is a much cheaper option, but you are not guaranteed 24/7 365 days a year service. From time to time there might be a short outage while server are updated etc. What DNS does is link your domain name to a actual IP address. When you use your browser all your trafic is going through your ISP's server. Computers in general haven't got a clue what WWW.GOOGLE.COM means, but it doesn't matter. Your internet traffic is directed directly to your ISP's gateway (fancy name for a server that solely directs traffic). The gateway has a list of multiple DNS server and will do a lookup to find out what IP address is associated to http://WWW.GOOGLE.COM. Once it has the IP address it will blindly forward all traffic to that IP address. DNS server lists and the DNS records are usually updated 3 or 4 times a day. With regards to hiding URL I am absolutely certain Lukas has taken steps to do this. You have to understand the basics of how a search engine works. Google and other search engine providers watch traffic to and from servers they already know about. When you add an external link to your website pointing to another server they record that link. Usually on a daily basis Google (or any other search engine provider) will connect to already known websites and scan the website looking for new links which it then records. They do this using a bot (software robot), sometimes called a spider. The clever bit is that EVERY web server has a file called ROBOT.TXT This tell the bot what links it is permitted to access and record from the webserver and all reputable search engine providers respect this. Simply telling the bot do not access or record anything makes your webserver totally and utterly invisible to any search engine, and only those people that already know the correct URL will be able to access the server. Of course for this to work you must ensure that no other web server has external links to your site. The external sites ROBOT.TXT might not have any limits on what can be seen. Obviously if you want you server to be number one in search engine rankings, you are not going to put any limits in your robot.txt, in fact you might provide additional information in this file to make it easier for search engines. this is what they call SEO (search engine optimisation).
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Post by mrpoirot on Jul 17, 2019 21:56:38 GMT -5
I was not talking about the act of hiding the url as far as networks go, that would be a no-brainer; the hiding I was talking about is that the riddle spells out, one way or another, xxx.yy.com or something like that. I don't think that is what we are up against. Time will tell.
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Post by efanton on Jul 18, 2019 10:22:04 GMT -5
I was not talking about the act of hiding the url as far as networks go, that would be a no-brainer; the hiding I was talking about is that the riddle spells out, one way or another, xxx.yy.com or something like that. I don't think that is what we are up against. Time will tell. let me try understand you You are suggesting that the puzzle is hidden in a already existing site, webpage, twitter, youtube, facebook, or whatever. Have I not just explained why this is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, to be the case? Does the already existing site, webpage, twitter, youtube, facebook, or what ever already appear in google or search engine searches? If yes then why bother solving the riddles at all. I can use the advanced search engine features to search for key words in the URL only, as long as a bot has hit the page voilla the game is over. Dont forget that if you use an existing site that you do not personally own it in its entirety you have no control over the robot.txt and therefore no way to prevent a search engine finding it. You add a new page to youtube, facebook, twitter, a publicly available website and within a day or two that page will appear in search engine results. It would be very easy to search for all URLs that contain Dearborn for instance with the advanced search, assuming Dearborn was the answer to one of the stanzas. Yes there will be thousands of results, but I bet it would be quicker to go through all those results and find the website eventually, than it would to solve all three stanzas. It would be completely pointless to create three puzzles to find a webpage when in reality I could find the webpage by only solving one of the puzzles. . It is for this very reason that we can be almost certain that we are looking for a relatively new website created by Lukas, that has no external links, or links to it from other websites. The idea that it could be a hidden page on an existing website simply cannot be a solution. If you think he has simply added a page to his existing website that he owns and has control over, then there are other problems. 1. You simply cant upload a page to your website, as you add it a search engine bot could be scanning your site before you update the robot.txt file. Game over immediately, complete fail. are you going to take that risk no matter how small after putting considerable time and effort into creating this treasure hunt and creating a website? If you update the robot.txt file first, you have to wait before uploading you new web page. Effectively when you update a website you upload an image that your ISP will apply to your websbite usually once a day, to reduce loads on their servers. Their web hosting servers could be hosting hundreds of websites, and they have to manage network traffic loads so that your update doesnt affect other peoples website performance. You would have to upload the robot.txt, wait a day or so to see that this has been applied to your site before uploading your new web pages, and then waiting for that to become live. Far too messy for my liking or anyone one else involved in managing servers on a regular basis. 2. You could take your server offline by unplugging the network cable, post your page, update your robot.txt and then plug the cable back in. That would work, but only if you were hosting your own server and had easy physical access to it. I doubt that Lukas would host his own server, power cut, temporary loss of internet connection, hardware failure, still having to pay a ISP for DNS. plus the cost of dedicating an entire PC to the site. A lot more cost and risk there than simply having the site hosted for you, but if you have the site hosted by an ISP you dont have physical access to the network cable. To much to go wrong with this scenario 3. You could take you website completely off line, possibly rename the server so that existing search engine results dont match, create your web page, modify your robot.txt to prevent the hidden treasure page from being accessed by a search engine bot, and then put your server back online. This means his entire website could be offline for a day or two, and still means having to pay for an update to his DNS because he renamed his server. He runs a business teaching music, maybe he wouldn't mind his site being unavailable for a day or so and having to update his links on his already existing site, but I doubt it. Still think he has used an existing site? Or can you see why it would be cheaper, and far more convenient, to create a brand new site dedicated to this treasure hunt?
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Post by susb8383 on Jul 18, 2019 11:59:04 GMT -5
1. You simply cant upload a page to your website, as you add it a search engine bot could be scanning your site before you update the robot.txt file. Why couldn't you add it to robots.txt first (even though the page technically doesn't exist yet) and then upload the page?
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Post by efanton on Jul 18, 2019 12:14:25 GMT -5
1. You simply cant upload a page to your website, as you add it a search engine bot could be scanning your site before you update the robot.txt file. Why couldn't you add it to robots.txt first (even though the page technically doesn't exist yet) and then upload the page? Because when you upload your website, you simply do not know which files are going to be written first to the live website. What if the website pages were updated before the robot.txt? As I have said already when you upload updates to your website this is not done in real time, its done later by the ISP's server during their daily scheduled maintenance cycle. Because you uploaded one file first, does not mean that the maintenance servers are going to update that file first. They will just see a bunch of files that need updating that day and apply them, most likely not in the order you uploaded, but alphabetically, or in order of folders. You could upload the robot.txt first and wait for that to apply, and then apply the updates to the rest of the site. But this will no be in real time, there would have to be a delay between to the two to ensure that the new robot.txt is live before the new web pages are live. The problem here is you dont know how the ISP is going to do their updates, when they do there updates, or how frequently they do their updates.
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Post by mrpoirot on Jul 18, 2019 12:19:01 GMT -5
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Post by susb8383 on Jul 18, 2019 12:20:56 GMT -5
Ok, so why couldn't you add it to robots.txt, wait a week, and then update the new page?
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Post by efanton on Jul 18, 2019 12:31:44 GMT -5
Yes that would work for Goggles search engine bot. Not all bots search the metatags as far as I am aware. Different standards, different methods used by different search engines. If they all worked the same way then the search results from google would be exactly the same as the search results from bing, but we know thats is not the case. Its possible Lukas has simply played fast and loose and updated his site all at the same time, or used the metatag method, Im not saying it is totally impossible. I am saying it is very improbable that he has used an existing site rather than just pay €15-€20 to create a brand new site and be totally guaranteed that the site is completely hidden unless the correct and full URL is entered
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Post by efanton on Jul 18, 2019 13:09:35 GMT -5
Ok, so why couldn't you add it to robots.txt, wait a week, and then update the new page? That would work as long as you knew the name of the web page in advance and had planned in advance to do it that way. The other issue I have with an existing website being used is that Lukas has been very clear, everything we need to know is in the stanzas posted. To me, and we may disagree on this. stanza's 3, 4, and 5, appear to be leading to the three parts of a web address. Stanza3.stanza4.stanza5 If we take the view that we need to start at an existing website, then where do you see that in the stanzas. Remember we cant assume anything, everything required is supposed to be in the stanzas. But lets play along with the idea. Essential what you would be looking at is a web address in the format WWW.MyWebSite.com/hiddentreasure.htmlI see nothing in the stanzas that could point us to an answer of HTML. We jump to the assumption that the HTML is a given outside of the stanzas if we go down that route. Essentially we would need at least two clues, a clue or clues giving us the 'Hiddentreasure' and a further clue or clues telling us the HTML or that it is a webpage on a certain site, along with a clue to tell us which website to start on. I cant see that at all in the stanzas, no indication to use a particular website to start from nor a clue or clues telling us to enter a particular page. If you can see that then great I haven't a problem with this, but I would love to know how you are seeing that without using clues or information from outside the stanzas written.
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Post by susb8383 on Sept 9, 2019 22:52:31 GMT -5
I'm still going on the assumption that this stanza is what gets us the web address since he said the location is alluded to in the riddle and the keys are pieces of information needed to unlock the chest.
One thing I was playing with: "the place where alchemy's best is found" refers to the periodic table, with "alchemy's best" being gold.
I can *almost* spell out black flame: B Boron LA Lanthanum C Carbon K potassium
FL Flerovium AM Americium
but there's no element E.
Might be a direction, might be nothing...
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