Down the Tubes - Solved!!!

It haunted me for 21 years. A challenge so hard that even the most powerful AI/LLMs couldn't solve it.

And tonight, it's solved! 🔥🔥🔥

"Down the Tubes" on TheBlackSheep.

If you're old enough, to be called "uncle" by the new uber admin on WeChall - @rayaseiren, maybe you'll know this chall.

A chall created by BaRa, who was well known for his creative and unconventional stegano challenges. It was the only stegano chall on TBS that I couldn't solve for 21 years.

With the recent advances in AI, I have been able to solve many challs I couldn't solve or didn't have the patience to solve before. But Down the Tubes was so different.

I tried throwing the most powerful AI/LLMs I could at it: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok... Burned a ridiculous amount of tokens 🔥. Still nothing.

It was so crazy that I started wondering if it would keep haunting me for many more years. Or could be forever.

Then recently, an old buddy solved it. And he admitted something interesting: He couldn't fully understand how it worked.

So I stopped asking the machines. I went back to the challenge.

No AI. No LLM.

Just me, the clues, and 21 years of accumulated stubbornness.

And finally...

Solved!!!! 🏴‍☠️🔥🔥

The solution itself is just a string of characters. But after 21 years, it feels like something much bigger.

Some challenges test your technical skills. Some test your patience.

And some become part of your history.

"Down the Tubes" was one of those.

It haunted me for 21 years.

Tonight, the ghost is finally gone!!!

TBS == dead?

A few months ago, an old friend of mine, Chemi, returned to TBS, and suddenly asked me, "Hey, is TBS dead?". I answered, "Yeah, Inferno was being lazy"...

Actually although seeing the site dying, I was still waiting (or rather hoping) for some changes that would make the site alive again.

But that has yet to happen.

No new challenge has been added for like 8 months.

Many good users have gone into the shadow.

The forum has become a place for rhican to show off his 1337 h4x0r1ng skills.

An old CSRF bug that I found a few years ago has been exploited further that Inferno could do nothing but disabling the img tag and avatar feature.

And sadly most recent updates to the site were done by Erik, who officially declared retired a few years ago.

So I gotta admit TBS is pretty much dead now.

But maybe it's still not too late to revive the site once again?