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Puzzling
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Odd, a thing I downloaded wants me to accept these Terms of Service—if it can even be called a proper ToS. It’s certainly the weirdest I’ve seen. My best guess is that a bored writer decided to hide something in what’s normally boilerplate that drones at length about illegality and arbitration and blah blah blah.

Terms (please accept):

Buyer (“you”) are prohibited from doing anything illegal with this message. Authorized usage includes: puzzle solving, reading, and signing. Customer service representatives will not respond via any phone, email, or other contact methods. Otherwise, any issue / problem you may encounter with this is something you are mayhap then stuck dealing with. Nothing you try will have an ounce of success, and you really are now, finally, doomed.

What could the message be?

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  • $\begingroup$ Well done! Just the right number of hidden hints, in my opinion, to make it solvable but not too obvious. $\endgroup$
    GentlePurpleRain
    –  GentlePurpleRain
    2025-12-19 17:52:55 +00:00
    Commented 20 hours ago

1 Answer 1

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We start off by noticing that

The letter at the beginning of each sentence reads out BACON hinting at the Baconian Cipher.

Then notice that

There are 70 words in the message a number divisible by 5.

Let us then break up the words into 14 rows of 5 words to maybe make the 5 bit strings.

Then notice in the flavour text we have

ODD is A and EVEN B. This hints at turning the odd lettered words into A and even lettered words into B.

After doing this we then

Convert the 5 bit binary strings into letters using the Baconian cipher

Leading to the message:

"No one reads this"

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    $\begingroup$ Nice answer! If you could add a little more detail by demonstrating how to convert the binary strings into letters (for those unfamiliar with a Bacon cipher), it would help to make it even better. $\endgroup$
    GentlePurpleRain
    –  GentlePurpleRain
    2025-12-19 22:33:20 +00:00
    Commented 16 hours ago
  • $\begingroup$ Don't forget the title: reveal spoilerBacon is kind of 'meaty' $\endgroup$
    Lezzup
    –  Lezzup
    2025-12-20 12:18:21 +00:00
    Commented 2 hours ago

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