Hacking the IT Crowd Season 3 DVD

by Kyle on Mar.15, 2009, under General

Hey guys!

I’ve gotten on board this time after having missed out on the Season 2 competition. I will post my progress as and when I make it!

Lets get started.

1) A reference to http://www.itcrowd.com/clue is made in the ‘Credits’ video. This website asks you for your e-mail address, and upon entering redirects to a YouTube page. The channel was ‘unavailable’ at the time of writing this post.

2) During the ‘cuke can’ game – a website is revealled; “http://cuke.me“. This redirects to the Reynholm Industries access denied page we’ve seen / decyphered before.

3) Also during the ‘cuke can’ game – a password is given: “TXgwQuMq2v0″. Upon Googling this password; a YouTube video was found (the video ID matches the password). The video can be found here. The video is a Fremantle Media title card. As to where this password can be used is unknown as of now..

4) The ‘geek/1337′ subtitles are based upon the standard subtitles but with letters replaced. My guess is that steganography is used and that by compiling a list of all the capital letters a message can be found. More on that soon – I’m supposed to be working on a university assignment so this is low priority at the moment . Will have to get ripping the subtitles and OCR’ing the text – use a filter to display capitals only and see what comes up.

This is just a basic knowledge of what I managed to interpret after 20 mins of general poking around the disc and it’s contents.

Hopefully I shall find more soon and keep you posted!

If you haven’t already – go ahead and grab your copy of the IT Crowd Season 3 over at Play. If you don’t have any of the preceding seasons, I highly recommend the 1-3 boxset. At £17.99 – it’s a steal.

Don’t forget, if you engage in piracy – be prepared to face the consequences.

Update: The ITCrowd.com/clue now links to the official YouTube page for The IT Crowd. The quest continues..

:easter eggs it crowd hacking season 3 moss maurice roy jen reynholm industries

79 Comments for this entry

Stuart
June 4th, 2009 on 2:00 pm
Thanks for clearing that up. So.. There must be something, I mean they went to so much trouble moaning about how poor we all were with season 2`s Egg hunt, that they made this one easier… but I am completely stumped.
nadj
June 5th, 2009 on 1:56 am
Maybe something is “Coming soon…”.

I know the guys who put the egg hunt together read this, and I bet they’re shouting at their monitors!
Paul Cox
June 5th, 2009 on 9:02 am
Thanks Chris, superb site by the way, it’s provided me with much entertainment.

Hackers post says he’s got it?!?

Other than the obvious clue of the Ask search engine… Care to share anymore for the good of my rapidly declining social life?
Coxie
June 6th, 2009 on 8:28 pm
Hi Folks,

Has anyone got the all the subtitles transcribed yet, I’m working on it but don’t have a lot of time so if anyone has it I’d appreciate a copy I have an idea though check it against Leet there might be something in it.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/leet

Let me know if anything pops up.
Edgar
June 7th, 2009 on 12:42 pm
Interestingly enough, besides the well-known
http://www.reynholmindustries.co.uk/images/blocked.gif
there’s also
http://www.reynholmindustries.co.uk/images/blocked.png
which looks very much the same, only the cabbage passage reads
,,draped in economic meal”.

Also, in both the GIF and PNG versions, the first line reads
Dear value employee
while in the left-to-right funny language it reads
Dear valued employee

Has anyone checked the whole text for other discrepancies?
Coxie
June 7th, 2009 on 5:19 pm
I noticed the additional d too and nothing else but I haven’t seen the png version until now so not sure about that one.
Coxie
June 7th, 2009 on 5:29 pm
The png version is interesting…

I looked at the blurring on the well known GIF and thought that the “hurt raisins, cabbage and oatmeal sentiments of our” didn’t quite fit the spacings properly.

I think “draped in economic meal and sentiments of our” is the real clue, or a combintaion of both the first parts possibly?
st jude
June 7th, 2009 on 5:40 pm
in the clip you get directed to on the email thing, at 0:10 can anyone read the wristband or the magazine?
Cubegirl
June 28th, 2009 on 9:12 pm
Hey, just to let everyone know in case no-one else has tried it yet or it’s just too obvious to mention, the Friendface website leads to the GIF version of the Reynholm Industries blocked picture, but the decyphered passage is still about raisins and cabbages.
Hacker
July 10th, 2009 on 2:13 pm
No, no i was wrong, sorry Jude but it was a hopeless cause.
Daisy
July 21st, 2009 on 2:56 pm
It may be nothing but I typed jennywenny@friendface on the internet and came up with this :
http://www.friendface.org/pg/friends/aic008?view=opendd

then it lead to this :
http://www.friendface.org/pg/profile/steves

help me I don’t understand what to do from here !?
By the way I’m only thirteen….
Matthew
July 28th, 2009 on 3:03 pm
I’ve been fiddling about with the capital letters for the “Are We Not Men?” episode.

For the clip linked from the itcrowd.com/clue The capital letters and what letters they should be are as follows

BK6BALM62NIUKYUM2KZQU8DQGY
KBMPKPPPGKBCLKKBMGKKGMXTFB

Its the same letters that keep on being switched so I though maybe just listing in order what appears for
each letter. This gave me the following

B KIMY
F G
G 2KU
K BANYUZQ
L K
M 628
P BLM6
T Q
X D

Not tried it for the full episode yet but as far as I can see its always B’s M’s K’s G’ and P’s
michael
August 31st, 2009 on 8:31 pm
I have just noticed the number at the bottom of the first clue on the credits page is the phone number for the police in season 2, I have tried putting it into the email address on the first clue but no luck. any ideas
James
September 14th, 2009 on 2:00 pm
Has anyone else looked at the 2 search results for Senna? One being a link to Ayrton Senna and the other being a link to medication called ‘Senna’ which helps to promote a healthy bowel.
James
September 14th, 2009 on 2:03 pm
Actually, additional to that, the website regarding ‘Senna’ medication suggests eating ‘cereals, bran, fruit and green leafy vegetables’…. any relation to the “hurt raisins, cabbage and oatmeal sentiments of our” quote??
harve14
November 3rd, 2009 on 3:12 pm
i turned on the ‘geek’ subtitles and began watching from the first episode. obviously i don’t have the kind of time to sit all the way through 3 hours of substitles writing down letter and numbers, but for the first part of the first episode, I wrote down every number or letter that was in the wrong place.. so far i have ’syrcosaurus1iebmhddgr3qosxkc3lu4t0′ that was up to the point just after Moss was confronted in the park by the bullies. any ideas? thanks
yea g
November 23rd, 2009 on 9:27 am
I found a rather interesting clue. Upon zooming in on the terms and agreements at the start of the friendface episode, I found some parts of it that I could read. So I googled them and came up with this:
http://www.ltlf.co.uk/forest/2008/12/01/match-report-forest-v-barnsley/
and they just copied and pasted the terms from there.
hmm…
Charis
December 5th, 2009 on 9:31 pm
Unlike harve14, Im just about sad enough to have transcribed all the geek subtitles for all 6 episodes (although I did enlist the help of a dvd subtitle ripper which should go some way to restoring my cool?) but now I’m just left with a page of gibberish that I don’t know what to do with… To be honest, I’m leaning towards the notion that cake really is a lie!
Dangerous Dave
December 30th, 2009 on 4:21 pm
I have ripped all the subtitles for the six episodes, just need to go through them and remove all the normal letters.
Benno
December 30th, 2009 on 10:51 pm
hi i think i might of found something usefull

when you enter cuke.co.uk you get the rehnolm industries blocked page. at the top there is some
strange curly text with the title on the right

when i rotate the curly text in mspaint it starts to
make sense….

the first line reads something like: ???? before of the..
Liam...
January 9th, 2010 on 1:40 pm
‘The cake is a lie’ is a reference to the puzzle video game Portal created by Valve, where a you are ‘abducted’ by the Aperture Science Laboratories as a guinea pig in their tests to create a gun that can shoot portals to get from one place to another. In the end you are supposed to be rewarded by cake, but instead they try to kill you. Also, the sentence ‘the cake is a lie’ is written a lot around the game.

This involves The IT Crowd by the t-shirt Roy is wearing in the episode ‘From Hell’ where he is trying to get a £20 note that is stuck on the outside of the building. The t-shirt shows a picture of a cake that is in the a same style of a picture of a cake from Portal.

From how ‘the cake is a lie’ is a connection to the competition, I don’t know.
AndyfromAustria
January 24th, 2010 on 8:36 pm
Through Friendface i found Jen:
http://www.friendface.org/pg/profile/jennywenny

she’s in a group of reyholm industries:
http://www.friendface.org/pg/groups/2925/reynholm-industries-staff-network/

someone in this group posted this link going to moss’ directory on the reynolm homepage
http://www.reynholm.co.uk/~moss/files/
Andyfromaustria
January 25th, 2010 on 9:54 pm
Watch this site:

heres a secret access to an intranet
http://www.reynholm.co.uk/disclaimer.php

together with the name and password provided here:
http://www.reynholm.co.uk/~moss/files/pw.store/77258149.pw

you can access a secret site !

cheers
David
February 19th, 2010 on 12:51 pm
I thought maybe stenography had been used to hide a message in the gif from cuke.me and the website password was the reveal password… but I wasn’t successful in revealing anything and a hex editor showed that the file appears un-compromised.
Stephen
March 27th, 2010 on 2:09 pm
Could there be a clue on http://bluffball.co.uk/ ?
Check the html source code, whats with the weird string of characters at the end
Benno
March 28th, 2010 on 10:34 pm
remeber 01189998819991197253 from the credits

Its the new emergancy number 0118 999 88199 9119 725 3
Emily
April 3rd, 2010 on 2:24 pm
i could be completely on the wrong track, but on the reynholm industries website, on the FAQs, it says:

How do I access the Staff Intranet?
You can’t, it’s an empty folder with no username/password (sorry hackers!)(crossed out)
The answer is out there, you just need to look for it!

i guess this means that the original message was crossed out because they have actually created a valid login now. has anyone got any info to help me out?

thanks
Emily
April 3rd, 2010 on 4:33 pm
ignore my last comment, i got it. i am busy trying to decipher the message in the subtitles, but im only about 7 minutes through the episode, will post if i get anything
Dangerous Dave
May 16th, 2010 on 1:16 am
Right, now I have all the letters from all 6 episodes all together without spaces. Now the problem is I’m not sure how to convert it all. Base64 decoders are not really working unless I’m getting the filenames wrong.

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