White Rabbit 2009-10-23
As promised, I’m here to report more of the White Rabbit happenings. At the request of my friends, I’ve omitted the actual QR codes and their decoded text for the benefit of the game. However, I will tell the events as they were.
Friday morning, we reconnected to the slowhiterabbit.org SSH account that we had previously deduced. The lovable ASCII rabbit appeared along with a PEM-encoded certificate, a set of GPS coordinates, and the following message:
Bring a camera, the view is beautiful.
The GPS coordinates were in the forest right behind campus, so after class, we all hiked to the coordinates given. Naturally, I brought my camera, and took a couple pictures on the way up.
When we got to the coordinates, we found a tree with the rabbit hanging from a branch and a QR code on the opposite side:
The QR code decoded to the private key for the certificate. We thought about what the certificate could be for, I decided to try going to https://slowhiterabbit.org/ , which requires a client certificate. After some command-line hackery, we created a browser-usable certificate file which allowed us into the website—a forum board. I registered, but just as the confirmation page appeared, my username began to delete itself, as if someone was hitting the backspace key. I freaked out. However, the username then replaced itself with the word “Alpha”. In the rabbit hole, just like in Project Mayhem, no one has names.
The quest will (presumably) continue next Friday…