Hi again, Fellows! :)

A couple of days ago I was looking for something on the internet and, as pretty often happens, I ended up reading of a completely different subject.
A journey that started probably in the ancient Greece, passing through Caesar and Vigenère, and led me to ENIGMA.

And so, this very idea was born.

Thus I decided to do this ONE-TIME experiment 1st, to know if I can re-use it in the future.

You have about 9 days to, hopefully, give me some feedback on the difficulty level.
Everyone can try. Again, everyone. For sure, noone is excluded.
Of course there's a bundled game waiting for you at the end, so don't quit if you don't succeed at first :)

So here we go, hope you have fun solving it.

Check the remaining time here


HINT TIME!

First of all, if you have absolutely no idea of what's going on here, take a look at zelghadis magic guide to basic sg puzzling, it will help you find something in this message (only above the line) that will take you to somewhere in/on the internet.
After you solve the first step, you should have something that makes no sense to you - but worry not! you don't have to do any hard cracking or similar.. look at the image it's almost impossible to do by hand but you have a computer in front of you, use it!
I'd say a 3rd part software is required (once you find that something, their extensions should clearly tell you which type of software you need) but almost all the solvers so far did it another way (read: by accident) so I won't say that =P


SOLUTION

I've been requested to post the solution, so here it is.

  • Hidden in the post there are two codes, one obtained from all the characters in italic and the other one from those in bold.
  • Those code do not lead to ItsTooHard as many of you thought but to imgur. So not itstoohard.com/puzzle/code-here but http://imgur.com/code-here.
    zelghadis' magic guide says that not every code is for ITH and also mention imgur as an alternative; I've given even bolder hints for this in the comments below.
  • Those links give you two images. Both work only when together, can't be used on their own.
    This was the real experiment, as I had taken for grant that people knew what to do with the codes.
    The ancient Greece, Caesar, Vigenère and ENIGMA were hints about what to do to crack it and so was the word στεγανός, which reads "steganos", can be translated with "covered/hidden" and it's the first part of the word "steganography".
    Another hint was the image itself, which shows two parts merging in one.
  • Open both images into a graphic editor as layers, put one onto the other and select an option to see through the top layer.
    I thought this was a required step but, as already stated, many players solved it "by accident", like having both images open and quickly switching between them. So you could do it even without external program (btw, there's GIMP which is free, and some even solved it with Paint).
    Or you could have printed both images on transparent sheets to see the results =P
  • The mix shows the 5 chars needed to land you on the GA's page: steamgifts.com/giveaway/code-here

tl;dr

  • Find imgur codes
  • Get images
  • Mix them
  • Get GA code
  • ???
  • Profit!
View attached image.
8 years ago*

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B4S! and thx for the interesting puzzle!

8 years ago
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Bump for another (half)unintended solution :)

8 years ago
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bump!

8 years ago
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I'm commenting here because there's a Greek word in the picture and I'm Greek. :B

8 years ago
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Bump for 'Hurry! You still have some time left!'

8 years ago
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Closed 7 years ago by malabagaa.