Data Challenge Winners
By Anna RohlederAnnaMetro. Tuesday, April 3, 2012 1:48:16 PM
Your participation in our April Fool's Day challenge made it much more than a one-day gag. Thanks to everyone who made an effort to crack the code. From those who tweeted the solution and/or sent me a private message, we chose 5 people at random to receive one of these stylish Opera bamboo 2GB thumb drives.
The list of winners follows below. If you are one of the lucky 5, please send me your postal address (NOT your e-mail address!) so that I can put your prize in the mail to you. Congrats!
- Thu Win
- benad
- DeXTeD64
- AdibMuhammad
- tyw7


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nidheeshrnidheeshroosevelt # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:01:21 PM
...pen drives looks cute...but 2gb??...hmmmmm
Saskatchewan # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:03:29 PM
dahulevogyre # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:04:37 PM
... Hmm I should've tweet multiple times too.
Martin PiatkaMaPisvk # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:04:53 PM
João Davidpiroxicam # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:05:07 PM
Tamil # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:05:10 PM
Thu Win is tyw7
MedMyKhoangKhac # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:08:57 PM
Diego Schild Smithstekonaza # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:09:29 PM
And the solution? The second part was very hard. =/
PS: the Bamboo thumb drives looks REALLY good.
quarkdrunkensurgeon # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:14:23 PM
Congratulations
Sam Van den VonderHuRRaCaNe # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:15:25 PM
I'd still love to have one either way
EDIT: What's all the racket in the comments below? Yea fine, the message said 'hard drive', but you're still getting something custom made for free. The winners should be thankful. Also, the "I don't have a twitter account"- statement is invalid because you can easily make a dummy one with 10minutemail or anything similar. You're getting free stuff, don't complain.
Though, I must agree that it's in fact quite simple to tweet the hashtag without actually solving the puzzle. The ones who did spend a lot of time searching for the solution didn't exactly get the reward (even just an 'oh yea!') because other people didn't have to do anything other than copy the hashtag from someone else.
I hope these comments (and everyone else's) don't affect future contests negatively, though they should be taken note of to make sure this doesn't happen again. You know how people are
Alexodius PrimeAleksOD # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:15:28 PM
dżekdzek69 # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:17:48 PM
"Thank you for helping us out! Your participation is crucial for this April fools joke to work. To show our appreciation, and continue down the data savings road, we're giving away five external hard drives to some of the people solving this code. To prove that you solved the code, and to be qualified for receiving a hard drive, please tweet #operaaprilfools before April 2nd. Again, thank you for being awesome and participating! The Opera Team"
Second solution was bzip2 file, after extracting the file from archive there was a text file saying:
"Wow, you're persistent and good! Tweet hashtag #operaaprilfoolleet to participate in the next level of l33thaxx0rs competition. Hurry up! Tweet must be out by April 3rd 2012 CET."
Too bad I didn't win anything
Arif hossainarifbd009 # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:20:34 PM
nemetroid # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:21:25 PM
The solution to the second part was to parse the ones and zeroes into a binary string (the same way as part one), recognize the first few letters as a file type header (namely bzip2), and use some tool to unpack it (7Zip, Winrar, bunzip2, etc.).
The main problem you'll run into is if you use some method which requires you to copy and paste the binary string. It seems to me that doing this will corrupt the string.
Here are two programs that solve part 2 (in Javascript and Haskell):
JS (HTML, rather): https://gist.github.com/2292349
(requires https://github.com/antimatter15/bzip2.js )
Haskell: https://gist.github.com/2292365
Writes the bzipped content to foo.bz2 in your current directory.
Saskatchewan # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:33:03 PM
Martin PiatkaMaPisvk # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:34:19 PM
SanyaZol # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:44:26 PM
Anyways, i was first who decoded second part, and 4th who decoded 1st part.
Tweetable php decoder source for second part (pure solution is 95 bytes long):
<?php
$a='0100...';
while(@$l<strlen($a)){@$o.=chr(base_convert(substr(@$a,@$l,8),2,10));@$l+=8;}echo bzdecompress($o);
twitter hashtags:
https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23operaaprilfoolleet
https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23operaaprilfools
Nikola Sivkovnsivkov # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:45:43 PM
Tip to Opera: Next time please give away bigger drives 8 or 16 gigs , those 2gb drives are just going to end up in a drawer.
Originally posted by MaPisvk:
Me too , here is detailed explanation : http://bit.ly/HdlRu8
Marek Nowickifaramir2 # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:48:09 PM
Congratulations to the winners and all that solve those problems!
Saskatchewan - nice solution!
võ minh mẫnvominhmanit # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:54:05 PM
winner.
Saskatchewan # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 2:57:25 PM
Thu Winwikipedian # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:03:19 PM
Thu Winwikipedian # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:07:25 PM
How to solve it. Now made public.
Ide StoutjesdijkCrimi # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:09:28 PM
mistressEVILmissevilat # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:09:44 PM
- It requires a Twitter account. Some people out of personal reasons don't want to create one so they're "disqualified" at start. Fine.
Decoded text clearly said: "to be qualified for receiving a hard drive, please tweet #operaaprilfools" in which case "those who tweeted the solution and/or sent me a private message" is not valid.
- I didn't decrypt the code myself, yet tweeted both of required hashtags. I did so just to prove how ridiculous this is.
Could go on but meh.
Emoryy # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:16:23 PM
Originally posted by dzek69:
External hard drives =/= 2Gb thumb drivesmistressEVILmissevilat # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:19:26 PM
Thu Winwikipedian # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:20:14 PM
Thu Winwikipedian # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:21:18 PM
nidheeshrnidheeshroosevelt # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:27:50 PM
stupid_cat # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:52:59 PM
Although I couldn't decode the 2nd phrase, but it was really fun :3
XenoAntaresXAntares # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:55:41 PM
Congrats to all the winners!
S a msamfresco # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:59:06 PM
At first, I thought the second one was garbage bytes, then I thought it could be a JPG.
Benoit Nadeaubenad # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 4:10:27 PM
Sam Van den VonderHuRRaCaNe # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 4:44:45 PM
Originally posted by benad:
Ubuntu. Boots the fastest. You'll need that with these (presumably slow) thumb drives
Sanwar Singh Bangarwasanwarsinghbangarwa # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 5:25:18 PM
pepkin88 # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 6:17:06 PM
I saved file binary file with Node.js and opened in WinRAR. The code:
var code = '010000100101101001101000001110010011000101000001010110010010011001010011010110011101110001011111011110101000111000000000000000000001100101011111100000000000000000010000011010001000010101111000000000000010101001000000000001001000000000111111111001111101111111100000001000000000000010001001000100010100111111010100001000011000010000011001000000110100001101000000011010000110100000110101010100111111000100011010000001001001100100011010001100100000001101101010011000001111010100100101000011111100011101011001010101110011101001001010001100110100011010010011011010110000001100010001100101000011101000011101001000011000111001001111011011011111001111101101100101001110100100111111001101001011010001101000000010100000001101100000010110100011011101100100110011111010111011000100010010000011011100100101111010011110011000101011101100111111101110001011101110000101101000001111011111001000100111010011100110011111001110110000010000000111110100101010000001000011011001110001110111010100011111000100100100100100000011001100111001001000111101010111001000010100010101110011101011101001111110100000110101010011100001001000111110000110101101101101111110001101100000001001110101011110101110000000001000100111010110011000111000101000101111001000001010000010011001111010101011010101101011101001001110110100010010011100011101000000100010010101010001110110011011101011010101111110001011101110010010001010011100001010000100100001101110001011111011110101000111000000', i, buffer = new Buffer(code.length / 8); for (i = 0; i < code.length; i += 8) { buffer[i / 8] = parseInt(code.substr(i, 8), 2); } require('fs').writeFileSync('answer.bz', buffer);Thu Winwikipedian # Tuesday, April 3, 2012 11:54:29 PM
Originally posted by Tamil:
.Yup.
Didn't they see the name on the Twitter account?
Originally posted by dahulevogyre:
I did not tweet multiple time... Perhaps I was new on Twitter and the Opera guys did not know me so well or I use a Twitter handle that does not contain my name in it (they could have checked the Twitter profile though... plus my sigs in the forum all link to the Twitter profile Tyw7).
K. Walkergreatkasper # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 2:09:51 AM
Congrats, code slueths.
suleiman abdulrahmanabsuleh # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 7:08:33 AM
Congratulation to all my fellow members and partcipants together with opera it self as i say OPERA IS A GIANT OF ALL AND LIGHT TO US....
suleiman abdulrahmanabsuleh # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 7:14:29 AM
Congratulation to all my fellow members and partcipants together with opera it self as i say OPERA IS A GIANT OF ALL AND LIGHT TO US....
Anna RohlederAnnaMetro # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 9:09:05 AM
Originally posted by wikipedian:
We will be re-drawing the 5th winner.
Having read everyone else's comments about this contest, I would just like to say that this was all purely for fun, so please take everything in that spirit, from the "rules" of the game to the prizes.
Thu Winwikipedian # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 10:38:24 AM
Alexislexiz08 # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:44:51 PM
D1sasterp1ece # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 2:50:56 PM
Coyotee # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 5:35:43 PM
mishkafireman18 # Wednesday, April 4, 2012 9:05:32 PM
juan gilaljund # Thursday, April 5, 2012 5:19:34 PM
D1sasterp1ece # Thursday, April 5, 2012 7:38:32 PM
Originally posted by aljund:
I don't think that the people at Opera that usually give away stuff on contests would want to sell it, even if many people would buy some. Guess why.
Alicehealthgroup # Friday, April 6, 2012 5:41:04 AM