The new cool page created by Ubuntu-adverts team http://www.thisisthecountdown.com/ displays a nice counter, and an Ubuntu logo followed by a short motto. It seems, however, that it's not counting down to the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot release. So what's the time zero, and what is expected to happen when the counter reaches zero?
Ubuntu – What does thisisthecountdown.com count down to
ubuntu-website
Related Solutions
Thank you for asking this question and I want to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you or other readers.
I’m the Ubuntu News Team Leader and Chief Editor of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.
However, as of the end of last October I had to take a less active roll in the producing UWN due to a house fire and all the fall out that comes with that. Other team members--Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2) and Nathan Handler (nhandler)--have worked hard to field questions and produce UWN in my absence, but it’s a lot of work as pleia2 even wrote about on her blog.
Prior to October though, the team has needed more volunteers to accomplish covering the scope of the Ubuntu Community. Many people want to help without realizing the time, energy, and effort that goes into making the publication work.
In the last year, we have moved the team into a public IRC channel on irc.freenode.net --#ubuntu-news-- so that we, the Ubuntu News Team, would be working in the open and allow for more “drive-by” contributors with the understanding that not every suggestion will make it into UWN, but stressing that each suggestion is appreciated and wanted.
We asked readers to answer a short survey so the format could be updated based on reader preference. We’ve looked at new ways to offer the news letter in addition to the wiki page and plain text email.
If the process stays the same then it takes upwards of 16+ hours to put the newsletter together and publish it. It is not an automated process nor should it be. It takes someone and or many people to make sure we link to the original stories, that the summaries capture the spirit and meaning of an article in 3 to 4 sentences.
We check spelling, grammar, format, links and more, but we won’t change the authors original writing.
In short, there hasn’t been a newsletter because there hasn’t been people willing to help. Asking the same 3 or 4 people to give up weekends for years is not acceptable either and that’s what was happening and because of that we are looking at ways to keep burn out from happening going forward.
The good news in all of this is a re-launch is being planned and will take place after UDS-O. However, more contributors are needed for every detail of the newsletter and without that UWN will not be a predictable and consistent publication.
Anyone wishing to help with UWN please can contact me or the news team and we can get UWN polished, perfected and reflecting the pulse of the community one week at a time again!
Ubuntu Hall of Fame has been unmaintained since 2011 and was planned to be rewritten entirely. While the plan seems to have been approved, the blueprint on Launchpad had noted that implementation is making slow progress.
The plan and progress
According to this dated Wiki, the codebase of Ubuntu Hall of Fame is not maintainable and the plan was to make it open source.
The codebase of the Hall of Fame is not open-source right now and is not really maitainable, also does it contain password and all kinds of other horrible things. The only good thing about it is the theming.
The plan is to rewrite it in Django and make it more easily extensible and modifiable. Also make it open source.
Given that the Wiki was created in mid-2010, the project may have been left unmaintained much earlier than the last snapshot in 2011 on Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
In early 2011, the blueprint was registered in Ubuntu Launchpad. While some features have already been implemented, most of the work items are noted as "postponed".
Supporting facts
In mid-2011, one Ubuntu member has published a blog post on "UDS-O Budapest: Day 5", which mentioned the state of Ubuntu Hall of Fame.
The Ubuntu Hall of Fame is a site hosted by Canonical but largely unmaintainable, and thus, unmaintained. They are working to moving it to Django and in this session they re-identified the current blockers and a new project lead took the helm [...]
Finally in late-2011, the designer of Ubuntu Hall of Fame has mentioned about the project on his blog in this post that is part of discussing the findings in the "Ubuntu Community Survey Report".
[...] Some will remember when we built the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame; this project was designed to highlight many of the great contributions to Ubuntu, but it had two unintended side effects:
It didn’t really achieve the goal of a community feeling a personal sense of thanks from someone who benefited from their contribution.
For those who did not make it to one of the Top 10 lists on the site, some felt like their contributions were not as valuable or appreciated.
So what happened and why
The reason Ubuntu Hall of Fame was being removed, is largely due to lack of maintenance. However, the last quoted source may suggest that the project implementation may have been improperly done for recognizing contributors' works. More relevant sources as follows.
From this dated Wiki on UDS Jaunty report (partially quoted):
Debian / Ubuntu Relations
- ...
- Why aren't Debian contributors on the Ubuntu Hall of Fame?
- ...
From the first post, a comment raised by one of the readers:
...on November 21, 2008 at 3:29 am
[...] see comment 3… how would you go about extending this to appropriately give credit to Debian contributors? Would the entirely of Debian’s community process have to be driven through Launchpad to be recorded for the HOF to list? Debian is just one of many upstream groups whose effort can’t be represented by a shallow dive into Launchpad’s data pool [...]
From the later post, another comment raised by one of the readers:
...on October 26, 2011 at 4:12 pm
[...] Singling out top contributors is exactly what Jono wants to avoid [...] What’s needed is a recognition framework that has the ability to scale beyond launchpad as a data source beyond Canonical as a source of windfall and beyond Ubuntu in scope [...]
From this related post on Community Leadership Forum:
[...] One thing I discovered years back when we ran the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame project (we aggregated the top performers in the community) is that the social recognition of some was seen as ignoring others. It ended up become rather demotivating for some.
Based on above findings, we may understand why Ubuntu Hall of Fame was being removed and has been making slow progress for the past few years.
Disclaimer: This answer was written based on information that were found via Google Search, Internet Archive and few other sites. As such, the original post author was not in a position to give a conclusive answer.
Best Answer
It was created by the Ubuntu Adverts team to build up some hype in advance of the 11.10 release. The counter expires at midnight 11th October in the UTC-5 timezone (US Central time). This is 6am on the 12th October in the UK. However, the release of 11.10 is expected on the 13th in the afternoon UK time.
This page seems to have been an entrance for an Alternative-Reality Game, that was played by seeking for information on a bunch of fake websites, deciphering messages, etc. The game was synced with the real time, and it progressed through many days. As of Oct 11, the game is still in progress, but considering the amount of information that has been already presented, it is unlikely that one might easily join the players and continue from that point. The game is played cooperatively with many other players, by discussing puzzles at an IRC channel - #awholenewworld (you can find logs at this answer's end)
There was a number of clues released and puzzles to solve between now and then. I think at time zero a new website, possibly with more information about Oneiric will be released, there might be a more intensive phase of the game at that point, or it might be the end of the game.
The first clue is the class of the tag which may be decoded by base64 decoding then hex to ascii to reveal "world space agency org" http://worldspaceagency.org which is a website that was labeled as under construction.
The background image at worldspaceagency.org was also an MP3 file (stereo, 22.5 Khz)
Many clues have been released through a twitter account. http://twitter.com/#!/thisisthe
As of 10/5, the GIF at worldspaceagency.org has changed. There is now text near the bottom that says
CynOnoceiomemdRhlnnpctiDisssunr1tooaLdoatsRgurrdsedeemaiiifiseornp&Ournlo:cotsOta:tetentr:amengYncuv
There is also a pastebin of the appended data. There is pure HEX data here There is also a permutation before the codetext:
241563
Here is the wikipedia for transposition ciphers. There is some stuff about a German cipher called übchi.pinwake
has used some German before. A clue, perhaps?After deciphering using this tool with the key
2 4 1 5 6 3
:codenameCORDOROY:instructions:donotattemptanythinguntilserversarecompromised&signalsourcefound
On 10/6 the worldspaceagency.org page changed completely and now features a simple menu, WSA logo and some news. One can access a fake console at http://worldspaceagency.org/console/ which displays some chirped messages, and play morse code message (which after deciphering is
ariss/ibm/a22p
).The Morse code used to decoded to
contact/ibm/a22p
. The earlier version was just a red herring. The page http://worldspaceagency.org/contact/ibm/a22p is blank, with "Nice try" as the title.ARISS is the amateur radio link to the ISS, it was running on an IBM A22P thinkpad left behind by Mark Shuttleworth in the ISS (yes, really) there is some kind of problem with it's power supply unit. http://www.rac.ca/ariss/faqariss2.htm (That might be the why the audio file was all scrambled.)
The hacker console displays what appears to be an IRC log with some random office chit chat and the message:
Possible clue: Pine Lake, GA on Wikipedia.
Full decryption of the console text is available here.
As of late 10/6 or early 10/7, http://thisisthecountdown.com has changed. The background is now different, and the bar above the countdown appears to move.
If you click the twitter link in the site, it auto-fills your tweet with the following:
0x575341 UNIDENTIFIED TRANSMISSION INTERFERENCE http://www.thisisthecountdown.com
Update 10/9: Turns out the 404 page at http://worldspaceagency.org/ariss/ibm/a22p/ was a fake. Some text at the bottom was changed. The first characters of the text in question ended up being a phone number: '404-9 CONTAC', or '404-926-6822'. Another transmission was found upon phoning the number. Here is a digital recording.
The recording was used to decode the transmission in the console at the WSA website. The decoded transmission is here: http://paste.ubuntu.com/704729/ The transmission references Chi Sagittarii, a group of star systems, along with the Wow! Signal, which was emitted from said star systems and is considered evidence of potential extraterrestrial life.
The security link on the home page requests a username and password. The credentials are below:
From that point, the game gained speed, and both the plot and the puzzles thickened, but the number of them makes it difficult to discuss them all in that answer.
Note: here's a big plot gap - please add some information on the following points
finalfrontier
) the file's password)The counter changed once more and we found a barcode like thing below the numbers (transmission.gif). It turned out to be a sliced QR code where each red dot marks the cut point. After inverting and encoding the result, it brought us to another archive file (EXTRACTED-CASEFILES-r2.7z) via this link The file again contains updates to the three case files. The password for the protected ZIP file (
eventhorizon
) was found by analyzing the HTTP headers of thisisthecountdown.com. This followed after a hint given by the @ThisIsThe Twitter account, which obviously is back under pinwake's control:Where RFC 2616 deals with HTTP standards. The headers contain the following:
→ point of no return → event horizon.
In the meantime the counter was updated (the estimated time for decryption has been recalculated) and now shows only a few hours left until the decryption of the transmission will be finished (which likely will be the end of the game).
Final Result - It turned out that the countdown was indeed for Ubuntu 11.10 .
IRC logs from
#awholenewworld
on freenode are avaliable below, most recent at top.