My friend sent me this message and is offering $10 if I can solve it. I’ve never done this sort of thing before. What I have done so far is look up word frequency, note doubles in the message, and frequency in the message, but I can’t seem to get anywhere.
Help? Maybe this will be fun for someone.
My first thought was, it looks upside down whatever it is.
It’s too late for me to tinker right now. Might be a case of steganography, though.
It’s a jpeg image, so whatever is the meaning cannot be hidden in the very fine detail, or the exact relationship of colours, as there’s no guarantee of preservation of these.
No idea. It would be easier if your friend would tell you where each character began and ended; a lot of them it’s hard to tell whether any certain group of strokes is one or two characters.
It means 14 k of g in a f p d.
An actual “LOL”!
Don’t have time to play with it right now. Maybe fold it in some way so that when viewed against a lightsource letters become clear?
I like that idea. Doesn’t seem to work, but it’s a good idea.
I think it might just be a letter substitution thing, but there’s the puzzle of what, if anything other than chaff, is the purpose of the background colour splodges.
My first thought was that the first word on the left, since it’s followed by a comma, is your name, either three or four letters. But since no one here knows your name, we can’t really follow up on that…
ETA: or possibly the word on the far right is your name, and the message is backwards.
I read the title as “Crypotzoology” and opened the link expecting a pic of Bigfoot…
I agree. I opened in up in Photoshop and rotated it 180 degrees and the strokes look much more natural. I’d start with the assumption that it’s been flipped.
I agree with the first word being a four letter name with double letters in the middle. If your name is Anne, for example. It looks like a replacement code. There are 12 distinct characters with / being the most prevalent with 4.
I have tried flipping it every which way, but it doesn’t look like anything. :dubious:
Looking at the requency it looks like a substitution code, most likely a font type:
Backwards “C” with the dot: 4 occurrences
“/”: 4 occurrences
Sideways “T”: 2 occurrences
Sideways “Y”: 2 occurrences
“S”: 2 occurrences
All other symbols occur once, including the “,” which might just be a comma. So overall 13 unique characters occurring 22 times.
This might seem like a strange thing to notice, but every character has either a plane of symmetry or an axis of symmetry. I doubt it’s a simple cipher.
I think the best way to solve this problem is to repost it on another forum and offer $5 to anyone who can solve it. For all we know, the OP was offered $20 to solve it himself. 
I noticed that as well, though not necessarily exactly symmetrical. Let me stare at it a while…
Do you and your friend both speak only English, or could we be looking for something in another language?
Is the second character a single “II” or two “I”? Hmmmm…
The steganography program I just got off download.com doesn’t think there’s any data hiding in it…
