Comments on: Puzzle #3 Answers

By: sherri

sherri — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:21:44 +0000

Winners are up! Sorry it took so long. You guys had great entries, and it was really tough to pick just one. Thank you all for making this so interesting and for building these fantastic tools for the community to use and play with.

By: Sébastien DAMAYE

Sébastien DAMAYE — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:46:31 +0000

I would say the right to post a new puzzle

By: sherri

sherri — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:26:07 +0000

Hi Sébastien,

That’s fair! We will make a big push this weekend and aim to get the winners published by your deadline of 2/28/10 (11:59:59PM UTC-11). Looking at all these great submissions, I think it’s going to be tight! (What do we win if we make it??

Sherri

By: Sébastien DAMAYE

Sébastien DAMAYE — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:48:48 +0000

We all know it is difficult to find a “universal” humor, something everyone would find funny. But I guess I found some kind of one (hope there is no copyright on that sentence)…

“Deadline for submmitting the winner is 2/28/10 (11:59:59PM UTC-11) (In other words, if it’s still 2/28/10 anywhere in the world, you can submit the name of the winner.)”

In case you havn’t understood, that was humor

By: sherri

sherri — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:02:36 +0000

Sébastien — Sorry for the wait! We’ve been building and testing the 50 netbooks for Orlando, so more hosed than usual on this end. We know you’re waiting and we’re excited to give away this shiny new AppleTV! Soon, we promise.

Sherri

By: Sébastien DAMAYE

Sébastien DAMAYE — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:52:23 +0000

@Sherri: still no result for puzzle #3? I guess you have much to do with all our answers

By: sherri

sherri — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:34:25 +0000

Hi TJS,

Yes, definitely! We will be announcing the winners in the same format as last time.

best,
Sherri

By: TJS

TJS — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:33:12 +0000

Are you going to list out the names of people that got the answers correct?

By: Wesley McGrew

Wesley McGrew — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:02:15 +0000

I’m not the one running the contest, but my opinion would be that if it were much longer period of time, I probably wouldn’t participate. A one-month time limit sort of caps the amount of time anyone can spend on their submission, making it more likely that someone like me that can only put in spare time here and there (evenings on travel, etc) can be competitive. Much more time than that and it winds up leaving “weekend-project” territory and becoming a more serious project, which I don’t really have time for.

I think that after that one-month limit, whatever scripts are considered for addition to the SANS course material and toolkit can be tweaked and added to outside the context of the contest. For example, my Puzzle 3 tool is nice in my opinion, but could benefit from a lot of further hacking with other samples of AppleTV traffic, which I probably wouldn’t bother doing within the scope of a contest anyway. If it turned out to be a tool folks would actually use though, it’d be worth it.

By: Lou

Lou — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:41:21 +0000

… fat fingered and sent that last msg before I was done…

XML parser.

To answer Sherri’s question, I think 6 weeks would be better for those of us who want to put some time into scripts, along with with hints like the ones given for puzzle 3 but earlier on in the contest. If the goal is to get some quality tools out of the solutions, then more time and some suggestions to get us thinking will really help. I’m sure you don’t want to squelch our creativity by giving too much direction. I thought the hints you gave last time gave me some good ideas for how I might have fine tuned my scripts.

Thanks for running the contest! I’ve been having a lot of fun with this.