The band Information Society hides quite a lot of things in their records, and even though it’s not vinyl, I still find it interesting to include it with the rest. And this time, I (again) was a little disappointed. Because while I found what was hidden on the CD… the continuation is unachievable in 2021.
Instead of repeating all the previous articles each time, I’ll refer you to the dedicated page, which explains what I do with vinyl records and lists all the pages containing programs, explanations, etc.
In Peace and love, inc., there was hidden text in a track. In Hack, there was no text (even though it looked like text). In Don’t Be Afraid, there is text, but it’s only a first step.
The tracklist
The 10th track is named White Roses 1.0 300 8-N-1 with a bonus little explanation: Terminal mode or ASCII download. The decoding is obvious, thus, as with Peace and love, inc., a passage through Minimodem with the correct parameters allows obtaining the decoded text. In fact, the only thing to do once the CD is encoded is to switch to mono.
For reasons that will become obvious when you hear it, the song
« White Roses » is not found on this disc. This is just an audio
recording of a modem spitting out this text. « White Roses » is,
however, an actual InSoc song, and you CAN obtain it. It will not be
easy. You must use your web browser to access the following document:http://InSoc.org/rose.htm
When it asks you for a user ID and password, enter the following:
userid – roses
password – barbaraThis will bring you to the next step.
When and if you ever succeed in obtaining this 10th InSoc song, it
will be YOUR responsibility to make copies of the song and distribute
it to other people. Feel free to charge money for it, if you can.
Spread the song around as much as you can.Good luck.
ˇ)
Trouble begins. The page in question no longer exists (it dates back to 1997). There’s a copy on archive.org, fortunately, but it doesn’t help much. In summary, it was a treasure hunt on the nineties Internet, with a bonus track – White Roses – split into several files. A sign that it’s from a distant time, the whole thing was compressed in ARJ (do you remember ARJ?), with apparently 16 steps. But we’re in 2021, so the treasure hunt ends at the first step: the first file of the archive and the text file no longer exist (and are not archived). Is this really the end? Yes… and no.
The first reason is that the album has been updated. Don’t Be Afraid 1.3 contains the track White Roses, in an (almost) identical version to that of the treasure hunt. And you can listen to it on Apple Music (or in recent editions of the album). The second reason is that I’m not the only one who has searched. A fan searched for the track in 2004, got a response from Kurt Larson (like me with Hack, by the way), and put online a page explaining the problem… with a copy of the track. And this 2004 page is still online. Unfortunately, the puzzles are not there, but the original file – 76 MB after all, quite heavy for 1997 – is. And the track is a bit shorter (and a bit different) from that of album 1.3.
