Amish teen charged for alcohol possession, overdriving an animal

An Amish teenager named Levi E. Detweiler was pursued by police after running a red light and refusing to stop when police warned him to. He was caught when his getaway vehicle — a horse and buggy — landed in a ditch; he was charged with alcohol possession and overdriving an animal.

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teufelsdroch

IMO, it’s related to the ‘color bars’ from the TRON Flynnlives alternate reality game. Maybe tied in with SDCC?
- nuclearWatchdog
  
  I like the TRON idea, but I’m wondering if anyone ran outguess or another steganography on the TRON/Flynn dot-matrix messages files.
  
  They’re at
  http://www.helloflynn.com/swfs/workserver/hires/ESOR830SYROB.jpg
  AND
  http://www.helloflynn.com/swfs/workserver/hires/BU7YREKD3HD5.jpg
  
  (jpeg is a lossy format, risky for steganography, but OK if the quality is high enough)
DaveX

After wasting some time on it, I doubt there’s anything more than that biohazard-like symbol in there. It is a 128 colors file converted to RGBA. I’d rather work with a true RGB file for steganography, that’s why I doubt there’s anything else.

What caught my attention was a spike in the frequency distribution in the blue channel at blue=2.

But basically you get almost the same distribution (including the strange spike) by creating a noise pattern in Photoshop (Filter->Noise->Add noise), overlaying a transparent & white image such as the biohazard-like symbol and setting its opacity at 1%. Then save the file as PNG, limit the color count to 128 colors (Save for Web dialog), reload it and save it as a RGB file.
- Anonymous
  
  The alpha channel is at full transparency, I think. So there’s no need to care about it.
  
  By looking at the histograms, I tried to separate the signal into an 8-color version and noise. (The 8-color version is easily obtained by raising contrast and saturation to max, and noise component is obtained by subtraction).
  
  The noise component looks like genuine noise, except for the biohazard pattern.
  The bit string is too long to paste here, but I’m sure there’s something encoded in there. There are too many clusters, and long strings of 1s and 0s.
Anonymous

The dark ring is Beschizzle!
Axx

Yeah if you don’t quit, yeah, If you don’t stop…I’ lettin’ my gat pop. Cuz’ it’s 1-8-7 on an undercover cop.
dculberson

I wish there was a way to promote a comment thread.
didymos

I can’t ride 55, English.
damianpeterson

After a little digging around in the broken script beside the image I’ve concluded it’s something to do with Cheetos. Nothing to see here folks. Just some latest wacky advertising campaign.
lasttide

Great, I’m going to have “Amish Paradise” stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
damianpeterson

Oh, and when I disable Adblock on the page the aforementioned ‘broken’ script shows the Cheetos advert. Doh.
Anonymous

Here’s a list of pixel counts by color, listed in order of appearance from left to right then top to bottom:
in hex: http://tooeasy.pastebin.com/uN6f1L2G
in dec: http://tooeasy.pastebin.com/JfmTPzq4
(that’s 128 different colors)

Perl script that produced it (needs the GD library, expects a “tooeasy.png” file in the working directory): http://tooeasy.pastebin.com/0bm1v7sK
(don’t take this as a style example, I’ve only been coding perl for two weeks)

The sixth line gives me the same colors as in Gimp if the second argument is true (i.e. pure green in the upper left pixel)
See the documentation for this function
I have no idea what this means though, I’m no expert in image formats!
Jon Agnew

I’m drinking my second 40oz, ’cause they make me MEAN. I’m attacking this cryptogram for the third straight evening.
This obscure BB post makes a good thread for discussion. Since the cryptogram is still up, I assume it hasn’t been broken.
I’m running Photoshop on an air-gapped laptop, with this second laptop connected to the Internet for research lulz.

I’m not a coder, gamer, or PS guru; I know a lot of you are, though. I’m a construction worker with a hefty electronics background, though, and I think fast.

I propose to all interested that we raid this thing tonight and find the big secret.
evilmonkeyslayer

Why is there an encoded image on this page?

http://boingboing.net/01100111011000100110001001110010011011100110011001101100.png

The file name when converted from binary to ascii it is: gbbrnfl which when put through rot13 is “tooeasy”.

I’m guessing the image itself the colours probably represent hex codes for ascii characters or something. I’m too lazy to bother. At first I thought it was a magic eye image.

I suppose someone with more time and patience than I can work at it.
- schmod
  
  Because the Amish shun the use of modern inventions like ASCII and Unicode.
- Anonymous
  
  Maybe Boing Boing’s recruiting cryptographers?
  
  Anyway, the image appears on every page since the start of this week, not counting those which don’t usually have ads. Hence, no relation to Cheetos.
  
  The three/four circles are too good to be a coincidence, and rules out the possibility of it being random or generated from something else. However, this does not mean that there isn’t hidden data.
  
  @jacob_ewing (#14) I landed here via google. The biohazard thing was quite a good guess, but the middle hole of the biohazard symbol is missing.
  
  @mello clello (#19) I got something similar by using solarize.
- damianpeterson
  
  When I adjust the colour curves (in GIMP) on that image I see three circles with an intersecting, darker ring.
  - certron
    
    Isn’t it obvious? The circus is coming to town!
    
    I want to know how you manage to fail to stop a horse and buggy with a car, but I’ve never tried it so it is probably harder than I think.
  - elix
    
    Look closer. I’m pretty sure those circles are the whitespace in a biohazard symbol.
    
    Consider: http://twitpic.com/27586a
Jon Agnew

I think of the hidden circles as “proof of life”; color values were sufficiently manipulated in a non-critical value to give an easily readable confirmation that you’re on the right track.

However – consider this: the matrix is 125×125, too large and time-consuming for individual pixel manipulation by a human being. I thought about cracking it pixel-by-pixel and quickly thought better of it – I have work in the AM, after all.

Someone made this with a program, and that program was very likely not told to throw so much random crap into an image. If someone out there has a neat utility to parse this image by the pixel (in all possible reading orders) and render the output as a binary file, I’ll take a shot at that binary file with the utilities I have on hand.

REMEMBER: the file renders best as a 24 bit BMP, but it looks like parts were desaturated to give the “proof of life.” Try a 256-color. Does anyone have the color count for this thing, as an absolute?

I think this can be broken quite quickly if we put our heads together.
Teller

Overdriving an animal. Great, now all the animals have read that.
Ugly Canuck

Oh that’s the sign from the space colony.
Ugly Canuck

Oh, I meant the old space colony, not the new one.
teufelsdroch

Now that the image is gone (for everyone?) I’ve put up a thread on the unfiction forum. I’m convinced that the timing with SDCC is intentional.
- Anonymous
  
  The image is still there at its url (see #4), it’s just not being used as a banner/ad anymore. I’m not sure it’s meant to coincide with SDCC though.
EeyoreX

Sounds like the plot for “GTA: Pennsylvania”
mello clello

Traced for clarity’s sake:

http://imgur.com/CzoRo.png

Anybody recognise this?
- Axx
  
  Reverse image searches don’t turn up anything useful: http://www.gazopa.com/similar?file=687844
  
  This puzzle HAS to be an advert…right?
mello clello

And this is the image with the most common colours (the peaks in the histogram at 100% red, green, black, white et al) deleted.

http://imgur.com/RA2Qb.png

(transparent PNG)
Anonymous

Steganography, perhaps? Password…
social_maladroit

At least the police didn’t tase him.

(Obligatory joke:
Q) What goes “clip clop, clip clop, bang! bang! clip, clop, clip clop”?
A) An Amish drive-by shooting.)
Anonymous

If you save the image as a gif then it will be rendered into a pixel by pixel bitstream ;)
Jon Agnew

Invert the colors with your program of choice. The symbol becomes very obvious. Mask?
Jon Agnew

ok, now I think it’s noise.
dr_awkward

This is nothing new to me, having grown up in NE Ohio and read about things of this sort often in local newspapers.
jacob_ewing

Hah – just hours after comment #4, Google already has this page indexed as search results for “gbbrnfl”.

I don’t think it’s a biohazard symbol though. When I bend the colours in GIMP, I see three solid equidistant circles, with a ring in the middle that passes through the others: http://weirdly.net/moddedPuzzle.png
- elix
  
  Also entirely possible. I saw that, but decided to go the slightly more interesting result.