"What hath God wrought", the official first Morse code message transmitted in the US on May 24, 1844, to officially open the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line -- Wikipedia
First official message transmitted from the Supreme Court chambers, then located inside the Capitol. I took a handful of footnotes with pico this year because of interesting cipher text or flags. Very fun!
No time wasted! I like your approach to trying several different avenues or "nerd out" as you say, lol because it helps us noobs get a realistic view of CTFs. That we're not always going to just sit down get it the first try. Thanks so much John!!
This is an interesting example of the value of a diverse knowledge base. Technical knowledge is essential, but knowledge of history and linguistics are extremely helpful for identifying the flag. It seemed like John, a HIGHLY educated security pro, was thrown by the use of an archaic past participle in that historical quote.
i did this one a bit more "manual" and opened the file in an audio editor and looking at the "spikes" small spike == . long spike == _ long silence was a space, and then put the result into a normal text morse decoder, didn't think of finding a audio morse decoder. kinda glad i didnt, felt like more of a proper challenge this way :P
Tried the decoders... Didn't get great results. Just did it manual. Was honestly a lot more rewarding. It's hard to know sometimes what the best solution is in terms of learning/experience. A lot of the writeups wind up just jumping straight to the easy solve. Which a lot of the time frustrates me because it doesn't explain anything. Idk of they know it, but if I'm there, I probably don't. At the same time, working out that there's a script in this challenge somewhere is great and saves a lot of work.
I'd like too point out that mplayer did recognize this as a 1 channel pulse, 2 bytes per sample. I didn't get into it but there's probably a way to do this with a hex editor or something similar, just analyzing the bytes figuring out the dots, dashes and pauses. Just a thought :)
haha I actually went ahead and translated the sound by looking at the graphs in Audacity to dots and lines using my eyes. Threw that into cyberchef "from morse code" and I got the right flag.
