Slashdot editors: I understand you need ads. I understand you need sponsors, but if you are going to post them, please mark them as paid content. Seriously. If you don't you will loose your core readership, and maybe you already are, but this isn't going to help things. Was Rob Malda the only person keeping this from happening? Yes, Slashdot readers have valuable eyeballs, but treat us with respect, otherwise you will loose us. One of the key reasons geeks still defend Google and Gmail is that they set a precedent for tasteful and obvious ads with Adwords. Please hold yourselves to the same standards.

Well I hope Mike D shuts them down because we all know that "like Ma 'Bell he's got the Ill Communication". Since you know he can't, and he won't and he don't stop.

I wish I knew what that would really mean...

Grr...now I'm mad I didn't recognize the byte swapped DEADBEEF.

I didn't realize that reversing IA-32 excutables was the modern meaning of cracking a code. I figured it would be difficult and possibly even rely on dictonary attack of a cryptographic hash, but IA-32 machine code? This sounds like they are more interested in recruiting people to analyze stuff like Stuxnet than to attract people with cryptography, information theory, and signals backgrounds. I don't claim to be crypto expert (I've took an abstract algebra class that is a requirement for all cryptography classes at a university) but my first instinct was to assume that each byte was either an xor'd (as a first pass, to get it out of signed byte space) or residue of some modular division operation. When that didn't work I started analyzing the frequency of the bytes and map them to the letter frequency distribution for English. When I realized that most symbols only appeared once I gave up. If nothing else it was an excuse to brush up on my Python iterators.

I haven't looked at the video yet, because I still want to see how far I can get with just the spoilers in the comments.