Mira Modi + dice = safer passwords for all!

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Every time you sign up for a new website, email address, or social media account, you’re reminded of one of the most curious aspects of modern life for an Internet user: the increasing complexity of passwords.

Whether you’re being graded on the relative strength (or weakness) of your password based on its length or being required to include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, or other symbols along the way, passwords are getting more and more complicated in the name of Internet safety.

This modern form of cryptography often leads to one of three results:

  • you use the same password over and over for everything (not safe)
  • you have to write down different passwords to every site in order to keep them all straight (also not safe)
  • you opt for a password-management service to handle them for you (a bit unwieldy)

Well, as it turns out, an 11-year-old girl named Mira Modi might have the answers to all your password needs.

Mira started a company called DiceWARE to create passwords that are both secure and easy to remember!

From her website:

The DiceWARE method creates strong passwords that are easy to remember but extremely difficult for hackers to crack. Passwords contain random words from the dictionary, such as: alger klm curry blond puck horse.

For the very affordable price of $2, Mira will create a six-word password just for you, send it to you by mail, and then encourage you to customize it however you see fit — capitalized letters, number replacement, etc. — so even she won’t know your password when you’re done.

How does it work?

You roll a die 5 times and write down each number. Then you look up the resulting five-digit number in the DiceWARE dictionary, which contains a numbered list of short words.

So, essentially, the same randomness that can make Yahtzee a delight or a challenge will decide each of your six words. It’s ingeniously simple and designed to dissuade the usual hacking tricks.

Kudos to Mira for creating an affordable and immensely clever way to make our websurfing safer! This is puzzly thinking at its finest!

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Halloween Pun edition!

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Happy (almost) Halloween, puzzlers and PuzzleNationers!

For the last two years, we’ve marked the spookiest of holidays by posting some punny costumes for you to figure out, and it’s only appropriate that we celebrate Halloween AND Follow-Up Friday by bringing you our third edition of the PuzzleNation Punderful Costume Game!

It’s simple. I post a picture, and you guess what the costume is.

For example:

He’s Batman! (With Catwoman beside him!)

I’ve compiled ten costumes for you to figure out. Let’s see how many you can get!

PuzzleNation’s Punderful Halloween Costume Game, Volume 3!

#1

#2

#3

#4 (the gentleman next to Woody from Toy Story)

#5 (under the red arrow)

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

Special thanks to the folks at The Chive and The Thinking Closet for their assistance in compiling this year’s punny costumes!

How many did you get? Have you seen any great punny costumes we missed? Let us know! And Happy Halloween! (If any of them stumped you, don’t worry! I’ll be posting the answers next week!)

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The spooky app no one has solved!

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Do Not Believe His Lies.

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

It’s the name of an app that has baffled solvers for more than a year with increasingly complex riddles, puzzles, and challenges.

It starts out simply, with the messages “We were expecting you,” “Your journey begins now,” “We await you on the other side,” and “Good luck” in simple white text on an otherwise pitch black screen.

From the very start, it’s an evocative presentation. It sets the mood immediately.

Then the first puzzle starts. You have to find a code word or phrase hidden on the screen (which is easy if your phone or computer’s brightness is turned all the way up.) When you input the code “The first time,” you get the second puzzle, which is in Morse Code and reads “I saw him there.”

The next puzzle was a scrambled grid, similar to the tile-shifting games many puzzlers know. One player inverted the colors, printed out the puzzle, cut it into squares and solved it that way, leading to this solution:

“The first time I saw him there, I was just a child.”

Here’s where the Halloween-appropriate element emerges. Each solution to these puzzles provides part of an ongoing narrative. Later messages include “I have to go now” and “Be careful friend.”

Anagramming, braille, music theory, cryptography, chemistry… as the puzzles increase in difficulty and complexity, they require an ever-growing skill set, challenging users in impressive fashion.

A dedicated community of solvers has come together to tackle the challenge of Do Not Believe His Lies, and they have fought, clawed, collaborated, and ingeniously solved their way to Puzzle #48, which they believe they’ve cracked, but they’re unsure of where to proceed from here.

[Another DNBHL puzzle, apparently a constellation…]

In an update on October 1, one of these diehard solvers posted this:

Welp, as most of you who have stayed logged in to our IRC channel can attest…we are pretty much out of ideas. But I’ll give a quick update for those of you who don’t regularly sign in…

The newest activity we have noticed has been the “Puzzle Solved” counter on the official DNBHL website. It’s not automatically updated, so we know that the Dev has been lurking around still. But whether it’s just a sign of life, or an unintentional “push” to let us know we have everything we need to progress further…none can say.

He goes on to discuss some of the lingering clues they’ve uncovered, as well as the theory that they’ll have to leave “the app and the old puzzles behind,” meaning the game will venture into the real world and involve physical locations!

The general theory going forward seems to be that the next puzzle is somehow time-sensitive, and cannot be solved before December 31. This does support what the app’s designer said in an interview with IO9:

Matablewski says that he does expect people to beat the game…but not anytime soon. “Not this year though, it’s not how it has been designed,” he told me. “If they work together, and only then … they will find the answer and complete the whole riddle someday next year.”

[These wavy words, upon closer inspection, are mathematical formulas. But to what end?]

Although solvers of this diabolical horror-fueled puzzle app are frustrated, they aren’t disheartened. The same diehard solver quoted above concluded his post with this:

So…until we get something a little better to work with, I think we’re all just taking a break…waiting for a Eureka moment to strike. Don’t get too disheartened though…I’m sure all the friends you’ve made on here will jump right back in to the fray as soon as things get busy again.

You can try Do Not Believe His Lies for yourself here. (For other stories on immersive online puzzle experiences, check out my previous posts on Cicada 3301 and the Portal ARG.)

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Penny Dell Crosswords App Update: Now Available!

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It’s a PuzzleNation News exclusive! (If only we had James Earl Jones introducing our PNN broadcasts…)

I love announcing new puzzle sets for the Penny Dell Crosswords app, because I’m immensely proud of the quality puzzles available to the PuzzleNation audience.

But today, I’m not only announcing a new puzzle set… I’m announcing a new update for the Penny Dell Crosswords app itself!

Not only does the app now offer a brand-new animated home screen tutorial to walk you through the solving experience, but there’s an animated screen tour for our daily puzzle and new animations in our in-app store!

Heck, even the October Deluxe puzzle set has an animated cover!

But that’s not all! We’re also introducing Mega Pack Plus collections! Just look for the + sign in the App Store, and you’ll find these awesome new collections, complete with alternate clues for all puzzles!

PuzzleNation is dedicated to bringing you the best mobile puzzle experience available today, and our new app updates and Mega Pack Plus collections are two more terrific reasons to download the app and check it out today!

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A Costume That’s Off the Depp End!

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Halloween is this Saturday, and one of the best things about the holiday is how creative people get with their costumes.

This creativity can come in several forms. Sometimes, it’s the costume itself, an idea that wows you as ambitious or clever or totally unexpected. Other times, it’s the execution of the costume, either in how impressive the effort involved is OR how ingeniously they’ve kept their budget reasonable.

In college one year, I was short on funds for a costume. But one thing never in short supply around Halloween are empty candy wrappers. So I took an old shirt, glued candy wrappers to it (along with some stray kernels of popcorn and an old cell phone) and I went to a costume party as the floor of a movie theater.

It’s one of my favorite costumes to this day, because it required me to think outside the box.

Today’s post is also about a costume that’s outside the box. Many people dress up as celebrities or famous fictional characters for Halloween, but rarely do they dress up as many characters simultaneously.

Check out the photo below! Our costumed gentleman has decked himself out in the trappings of numerous Johnny Depp films. Can you name them all?

This is a great costume, not only because it’s ambitious and meticulously put together, but because there’s clearly a great deal of thought behind it. Terrific stuff!

Oh, and if you’re looking for more puzzly costume fun, check out our Follow-Up Friday post this week, as we celebrate our Third Annual PuzzleNation Punderful Costume Game!

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Kickstart Halloween edition!

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By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And in today’s post, I’m returning to the subject of puzzly crowdfunding campaigns!

Two weeks ago, I spread the word about several puzzly Kickstarter campaigns that I thought might interest my fellow PuzzleNationers!

But with Halloween fast approaching, two more campaigns with a more humorously macabre style caught my eye.

The first is Kill Doctor Lucky, by our friends at Cheapass Games.

In this relaunch of the original board game, players compete to dispatch Doctor Lucky before the other competitors, but to do so, you must sneak around Lucky Mansion, acquiring weapons and securing a solid hiding place.

You see, not only are your fellow players conspiring to ruin your plans, but Doctor Lucky is surprisingly difficult to kill. (They don’t call him Doctor Lucky for nothing, after all!)

This is a delightfully tongue-in-cheek take on whodunit games like Clue, and 19 years of playtesting since the original release have resulted in tighter rules, more flexible gameplay, and a wickedly fun puzzle experience.

And Kill Doctor Lucky has already blasted past its initial goal, so if you support it, you’re guaranteed to get the game!

The second game is Don’t Die, the card game where death isn’t the end of the world, it’s just inconvenient.

Players in Don’t Die take turns pulling from a deck of hazard cards that could easily kill them, and try to avoid dying by passing cards to the other players or rolling the dice to escape that particular demise.

The game is over when one player has died ten times, and whichever “surviving” player has the fewest deaths is the winner!

I am a huge fan of games that play with established conventions, and a game where dying is just part of the play experience is a terrific twist. (It reminds me a bit of Gloom that way, both in some of its mechanics and in its lighthearted take on a grim subject.)

Don’t Die is more than a third of the way toward being funded, so it could definitely use your support.

Both of these games look like great fun, and represent the board game and card game crowdfunding renaissance we’re experiencing right now. I highly recommend taking a little time to surf the puzzle and game pages of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, because you never know what terrific and unexpected products you might help bring to life.

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