Well if it makes you feel any better, Liber Primus isn't anywhere near solved yet, so, if you get the bug, you can certainly take a stab at it.
Or if you're looking to get into the CIA, get into airforce intel, do well, and behave yourself, and you too can file paperwork for the most illustrious of spy agencies.
My mom bought me a simple puzzle game subscription called "Finders Seekers". The puzzles are much, much simpler than this but still give you a great "that was clever" feeling.
I will be playing the next installment with her next weekend. If you like the escape room board games you should check it out. I also heard "Box One" is good and we'll pick that up in a couple months.
> The ‘get‘ word was chosen purposely and it referred to a http GET request.
This never would have occurred to me. What can one do for their brain to make this kind of lateral leap? Seems like it would be helpful in the debugging and comedy parts of my life.
It's probably experience in this case. Correlating clue texts and finding a common word that has an alternate meaning is not a new challenge in online riddles. And the author seems very aware of the usual tricks. Also not pictured: all the things he did try that were not the inteded meaning of the text.
I think this one is just about context. If you know about HTTP then it becomes clear, if that isn't on your mind it isn't. I have been following through a book on TLS and HTTPS so it is very on my mind.
NotPron is a classic of this genre, highly recommended for anyone how enjoyed reading that article! Neat that people are still doing these kinds of mysteries!
The "riffle shuffle" (dovetail) is presumably taken to be deterministic? I take the shuffling of a card-deck to be non-deterministic; but what do I know, I don't hang around in casinos or with card-sharps.
A good card shuffler can absolutely deterministically shuffle a deck of cards by making sure the shuffle alternates cards perfectly. Do this a few times and you get back to the original order.
Yeah, I get that; I wouldn't bet on a riffle-shuffle if it wasn't augmented by (a) my cut, and (b) an alternative shuffle. But I regard determinstically shuffling as cheating.
I am so impressed that you were able to figure so many things out in the puzzle! I feel like I would never be able to do that, but I feel like all that is needed is a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of deep thought.
