Late Thursday evening/Friday morning of last week, some players noticed strange, garbled text in-game, and we also noticed that the links to the COGG website were changed to redirect us to two different URLs. I'll discuss each one below and state the facts known about them.
The first URL was
http://192.40.56.156/4.6.21.
This file turned out to be an MP3 that played a distorted song. The song is "Forever Dancing Under a Fallen Sky" by the band Au4. Here's a link to the song on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJXDIu7oQe8 The album cover art is a painting of a giant crow flying over a city with a cloudy sky in the background. The crow has the face of a human being and is carrying a bell in one of its talons. In the bottom left of the painting, at the top of a hill, dwarfed in size by the crow-thing, are a boy and a dog, who are looking up at the crow-thing.
In the file details for this MP3, there's a message hidden in the metadata, written in binary:
Code: Select all
01000110 01001111 01010010 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000101 01001100 01001111 01010110 01000101 01000100 00100000 01001001 00100111 01001100 01001100 00100000 01001110 01000101 01010110 01000101 01010010 00100000 01010011 01010100 01001111 01010000 00100000 01010011 01000101 01000001 01010010 01000011 01001000 01001001 01001110 01000111
When translated, the code reads:
Code: Select all
FOR MY BELOVED I'LL NEVER STOP SEARCHING
The second URL was
http://192.40.56.156/10.3.
This file is an audio clip of a slow-scan television signal, which is used primarily by ham radio operators to transmit still image over radio waves. When decoded using Scottie 1 mode, the result is a black and white image of the
Yr rune, a vertical line with two branches emerging from either side near the bottom. This is the same shape that keeps appearing in all of these strange messages. Here's a copy of the decoded image:
https://i.imgur.com/StUG373.png
To my knowledge, there is no metadata hidden in the second file.