As a British taxpayer it’s reassuring to know that over in Cheltenham there’s a big round building full of people dedicated to keeping us safe. GCHQ is the nation’s electronic spying centre, and just to show what a bunch of good eggs they are they release a puzzler every year to titillate the nation’s geeks. 2024’s edition is out if you fancy trying it, so break out your proverbial thinking caps.
The puzzle comes in several stages each of which reveals a British landmark, and we’re told there’s a further set of puzzles hidden in the design of the card itself. We know that Hackaday readers possess fine minds, so you’ll all be raring to have a go.
Sadly GCHQ would for perfectly understandable reasons never let Hackaday in for a tour, but we’ve encountered some of their past work. First the Colossus replica codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park was the progenitor of the organisation, and then a few years ago when they had an exhibition from their archive in the London Science Museum.
NOT simple…and I cheated a bit. Lots of fun though.
Eh. You aren’t missing much.
I guarantee that classified information is so boring, the average person would quit the job.
Imagine being a forensic accountant, except instead of the “exciting” topic of your job being money related, you are instead making sure that all the proper boxes are filled out on a form requisitioning washing machines for a new dormitory.
But SOMETIMES it’s “thrilling”stuff like a form to order a box of screws to fix a plane! Well, probably, you won’t have need to know unless you are the one submitting the form. But the form came from the flightline, which is why it’s classified, so it MIGHT BE!
Even the “adventurous” jobs like the Defense Courier Service(DCS) are, in practice, mind numbingly boring.
Flying around all day delivering secret code keys? Awesome right?
In reality you spend all day alternating between trying to stay warm in the cargo hold of an uninsulated small plane for 1-3 hours and dripping with sweat for the 20-30 minutes you have to stand on the runway after you land. Sometimes there is time to run to a nearby building or a Porto potty to relive yourself. Did I mention the your seat is in the uninsulated cargo hold? Neither sound nor temperature insulated.
Funny, but people who are interested in forms of forensics (like digital forensics) are likely going to be interested in forensic accounting and other such forensics, even if less exciting than forensic accounting. Sure, government work usually has an overabundance of bureaucracy, but that is just par for the course.
Side note, I did pay my way through college (C.S. degree) by helping a forensic accounting/auditing company. We audited bank accounts on behalf of the client (bank customer), catching really large bank errors cough deliberate fraud cough which the bank would be liable for (we got a percentage of the settlement). So what do I know, I am biased (probably like most of the people who would be interested in this).
I think you overestimate how exciting everyone else’s job is.
People who work at GCHQ will usually say “I work for the Civil Service in Cheltenham” (they can’t really say “I’m a spy”), and yes, probably most of the job is exactly the same as any other Civil Service job, paperclip audits and all. But very occasionally they get to do fun stuff like inventing publick-key cryptography, they just can’t tell anyone about it.
Well, I managed to figure out puzzles 1-6, worked out the morse code, but the animals at the bottom have me stumped.
I’m not even going to bother with the binary in the background.
If it helps you can cut’n’paste the background to a file and process it there.
You can find anything on The Internet! Ta for that.
Yeah I nearly had a very tedious afternoon!
Well, at first glance that appears not very interesting.
Oops, that should have been 1-7.
If you want an even bigger challenge, the Dutch alternative to the GCHQ, the AIVD, also posted theirs.
It’s a bigger challenge because it’s in Dutch, not English.
It’s not just the language barrier, the AIVD puzzles are notoriously difficult. It’s a real achievement in crypto analysis to solve even a single puzzle. I’ve browsed the puzzles, but never got very far in to the solve.
“a big round building full of people dedicated to keeping us safe”
What possible reason could we have to suspect otherwise?
Shouldn’t they be busy oppressing old women who write unkind words on teh interwebs or some other Orwellian madness?
“Sadly GCHQ would for perfectly understandable reasons never let Hackaday in for a tour,”
Ask! Secretive tech-orientated government bodies like GCHQ, HOSDB, Dstl, etc, have and will provide tours to journalists and educational bodies. They take time to arrange, as background checks have to be completed, and there will be restrictions on what you are allowed to see, photograph or report on, but it is very enlightening and serves their purposes for PR and education.