The Four Greatest Unsolved Mysteries On The Internet
Webdriver Torso was solved this week -- but the jury's still out on these other ones.
#1: The Markovian Parallax Denigrate
The oldest surviving Internet mystery is ominously called the Markovian Parallax Denigrate. It comes from a proto-Web chat community called Usenet, which was popular in the early 1990s.
In 1996, the Usenet community reported unusual spam emanating from the username Markovian Parallax Denigrate. The messages were random words and phrases strung together and distributed among the community, in a way that appeared to suggest the influence of a very human intelligence.
jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen
air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower
Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most
chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant
firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac
brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion
refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark
Hundreds of these messages flooded the Usenet discussion groups. Even though the community was filled with the most talented and intense computer minds of the age, no one could figure out what they meant, or how exactly they were generated and distributed. When the Usenet was eventually displaced by the World Wide Web, most people forgot about Parallax, and the majority of its garbled messages were not archived, disappearing in a trash heap of dead links.
But to this day, whenever something strange happens in the world, some former Usenet-er brings up the mystery again. In 2012, the Daily Dot reported a speculative link between the Parallax and Susan Lindauer, a former journalist who allegedly worked as a spy for Saddam Hussein. This piqued interest in Parallax again, particularly because of the pre-existing conspiracy theory that Lindauer somehow knew about 9/11 before it happened.
Maybe a Reddit user called A858DE45F56D9BC9 – who posts nothing but long, incomprehensible strings of numbers – is the offspring of the Parallax, somehow birthed from the Usenet to the World Wide Web?
Like Parallax did to the Usenet’s best computer minds, A858 has stumped the Reddit community, who infamously love solving mysteries.
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#2: Cicada 3301
Cicada 3301 is a mysterious organisation that posts complex puzzles on the Internet for the public to solve. It’s like an intense Internet scavenger hunt, which has so far occurred every January since 2012.
The first communication Cicada had with the Internet was via a poster on a 4Chan random board.
The poster claimed that it was somehow communicating a hidden message, and that it wanted people to decipher it in order to recruit “intelligent individuals” — although what these individuals were needed for was unknown.
Amateur cryptanalysts all over the world started working together towards an answer — but as they solved each puzzle, another was revealed, becoming more complex and individualised as the game went on. The hunt required a good deal of technical knowledge, but as it progressed contestants found they also needed an understanding of number theory, philosophy, classical music, cyberpunk literature, occult Victorian poetry, Mayan numerology, Kabbalah, and the life cycles of cicadas.
Nor were the clues confined to the Internet. Experienced hunters reported that they had to call phone numbers in Texas manned by automated voices. Some clues were posted in physical form on lampposts, from Warsaw to Sydney. Participants in the hunt claim that the clues were not randomly chosen, but told a story about the strange ideology of the Cicada 3301 group.
After three months, a handful of participants gained access to a certain website, at which point they were sent an email (which was leaked here.) Then the website was shut down, leaving only the message: “We want the best, not the followers.”
What happened next, no one really talks about.
Similarly, no one knows the purpose of the exercise. Some speculate that it is the CIA using a creative recruitment technique; the NSA recently started using a very watered-down version of the Cicada technique, tweeting cryptic messages advertising job openings. Others believe that the esoteric nature of many of the clues suggest that Cicada 3301 is an underground network of anarchistic poet/hackers. Because the Cicada challenge was repeated in 2013 and 2014, it appears to be an ongoing thing; there are murky reports that the Cicada alumni are growing into some elaborate underground super group of hackers and cryptanalysts.
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Up next: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, and what happens in the Deep Web?