Ari E-B
April 29, 2013 at 10:18 pm
Some friends and I were also doing the puzzle and made it as far as the book cipher but didn’t recognize what it was. I also followed up on a few more dead end leads you might find interesting:
- The good colonel appears to have a login for a dead website here: http://www.bugmenot.com/view/flinside.com – I don’t know if this was seeded by Verizon or if someone else decided to poison the well. flinside is a domain squatter, so I assumed he had used that password elsewhere (like the godaddy page) and tried using that. I also tried operating under the assumption that flinside was a typo and tried to figure out what else it could have meant.
- I took the phone number from the cofthem.ca whois info and tried to track that down. Calling the number turned up a VZ employee who apparently worked on the puzzle, and I did spend some time cyber stalking him thinking it was part of the puzzle till I realized I had accidentally drifted across the line from “puzzle” to “real life” and backed off.
- The address of cofthem.ca is a museum in Quebec. I spent time trying to find anything interesting there too.
Anyway, I enjoyed myself. Thanks for posting the solution so I can see the last step we missed.