mech hotwiring 101

so you're standing in front of "your" DynaMechs Mk-8 Mechanical Exoskeleton, you've "locked yourself out", and are trying to figure out how to get it going. well, there's good news and bad news.

the good news: the Mk-8 has a universal activation sequence, and you can download it from https://zrpugursg.eff.org/mk8_uas.gpg

the bad news: it's encrypted

luckily for you, we've obtained a couple internal docs from DynaMechs Ltd claiming that the password can be "naturally derived" from the answers to a couple puzzles they made for the QA team. so something like:

puzzle 1, puzzle 2, gpg password

to keep our hands clean we can't just hand out the password, but chances are if you got ahold of this doc, you'll have no trouble working these out -- good luck!

puzzle 1: classical gas

classical_gas.wav

for those who are hard of hearing, the wav file just sounds like a bunch of weird clicking followed by a series of tones, and listening to it isn't crucial to solving this puzzle.

PSST:

if you poke around using a program like Audacity, you'll see a couple interesting features in the spectrogram

puzzle #2: alpha + omega

Last of this unorthodox technology chain's stores closed down 2021
Last issue of this influential computer magazine after 23 years of publication, known for publishing DIY articles and source code for projects 1998
First English-like programming language released by this person 1955
First Internet Standard for this major TCP/IP protocol was ratified 2017
Last day of this renowned technology company, responsible for developing ZFS 2010
First release of this object-oriented operating system 1989
First known computer virus to spread in the wild 1982
Last of this unorthodox technology chain's stores closed down 2021
Last issue of this influential computer magazine after 23 years of publication, known for publishing DIY articles and source code for projects 1998
First English-like programming language released by this person 1955
First Internet Standard for this major TCP/IP protocol was ratified 2017
Last day of this renowned technology company, responsible for developing ZFS 2010
First release of this object-oriented operating system 1989
First known computer virus to spread in the wild 1982