The Portal Puzzle

[Foozy]

POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR EP3 OR PORTAL 2

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A large part of the portal fanbase has been truly puzzled since the 1st of March.

• On the 1st of March, Valve released an update to portal.
  
  Portal Update Released
  March 1, 2010, 2:33 pm - Valve - Product Update
  
  Updates to Portal have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted.
  
  Portal
  
      * Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations
  
  
  Along with this, Valve also released an achievement called Transmission Received. It has no description other than the cryptic "..?"

• A couple of observing fans found that the radio in the starting cell had a red light. While carrying it around, it got some strange interference in some places of the map and the light turned green. Finding all of them results in unlocking the achievement.

• The sound files were found in the portal directory, named dinosaur1-dinosaur26.wav.
  Four of them were morse.
  
      * Klusark decoded the first WAV file as “INTERIOR TRANSMISSION ACTIVE EXTERNAL DATA LINE ACTIVE MESSAGE DIGEST ACTIVE”.
      * SilverWolf decoded dinosaur12.wav as “SYSTEM DATA DUMP ACTIVE USER BACKUP ACTIVE PASSWORD BACKUP ACTIVE”
      * SilverWolf also decoded dinosaur17.wav as “BEEP BEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEP BEEEP BEEP BEEP”, which is in turn Morse Code for “LOL”.
      * Crazydog115 decoded dinosaur5.wav as “9E107D9D372BB6826BD81D3542A419D6″, which is the MD5 hash of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.
  
  
  Someone suggested the remaining sounds were SSTV. (information on SSTV: One, Two)
  The result of running them through an SSTV converter was this, though in separate images and larger size.
  
  

• From the numbers and letters in the images the following string was compiled: 9459C6CAC8C203B8128B7CC63068D4FD, which is an MD5 hash of (425) 822-5251, a number in Krikland, where Valve was founded.

• The number was connected through via a 56k modem. It asked for a username and a password. It was suggested from the translated morse (SYSTEM DATA DUMP ACTIVE USER BACKUP ACTIVE PASSWORD BACKUP ACTIVE) that the username and password could be "backup".

• Using the username and password backup, the number started printing portal ASCII art.
  
  http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2801/4402930118_98b95fd393_o.jpg
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/116597/Portal/human.png
  

This is as far as they got solving this riddle.

Discuss.

[Demon_Hunter]

I WANT EP3 NOW!

[Gridlock]

I just shat over 9000 bricks.

[brim4brim]

lol I wonder who has time to decode all this crap

[tom_armitage]

Its fun when dev's do this sort of stuff, Seems simalar to the i love bees used before halo 3.

Whats even more fun is when somone else solves it for you

[Demon_Hunter]

Portal 2 comming next holiday season.
Easter, summer? iunno...

[tom_armitage]

Anyone seen the new ending

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq9oKn-SJCU[/youtube]

:O Its all getting interesting

[Gridlock]

Nerve tingling ..

[Bizzie]

I'll just leave this here:

GameInformer's Portal 2 page

[asaguda]

Interesting. Only ever played through half of Portal on the 360 tho, so I don't think I'll be picking it up.

[Gridlock]

It was pretty decent and innovative, imo.