. HISTORY .
In 1997, Kurt Harland of Information Society released InSoc's last complete album to
date, "Don't Be
Afraid."
One song, "White Roses 1.0," never made it onto the album. In its
place, there was track 10.
Labelled "White Roses 1.0 300 8-N-1," it consisted of 55 seconds of modem
noise. The tones could be decoded by anyone who picked up on the hints in the track
title - 300 baud, 8 bits, No parity, 1 stop bit.
When played into the modem of a PC running terminal software set to the above
parameters, the tones translated into the following text:
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 - barbara
This 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. |
And so began the search.
The track was a CD-quality WAV file, totalling over 76 megabytes (still a large amount
of disk space back in 1997) with a runtime of 7:21. To make it more manageable, and
much more interesting, the file was split into 16 parts, each archived and scattered to
various sites, including InSoc's own official site, other websites, and even the data disc
which accompanied the album. The first segment was at the website referenced in the
secret message, as was the first clue to the next segment.
(Some day I hope to catalogue the clues and solutions on this page, so if anyone
remembers even one or two, please drop me a line...)
The search was by and large a smashing success, with the first round of fans to
successfully hack their way through all the puzzles and clues being christened members of
the "InSoc Internet Liberation Force," and having their photos and links added
to InSoc.org.
As instructed, fans who reassembled the entire track did their best to circulate
it. Since the file was so large, someone decided to try encoding it with an obscure
new compression scheme called MP3, which ended up catching on rather well...
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Internet, some of the sites hiding the parts of
the track eventually moved or vanished, making the puzzle impossible to solve. Since
nobody was willing to throw around the huge WAV in those days, the MP3 version (encoded at
a now-anemic 112 kps, and coming in at just over 6 megs) was all that was left.
Posted to various websites, and later swapped around the various filesharing services, the
track was and is freely made available to all who searched for it.
"White Roses" is the sole property of Kurt Harland, not any record label or
publishing company. As noted above, Kurt has always encouraged sharing this file by
all means available. Doing so will not get you in any sort of copyright trouble.
Since the readily available, but low-quality, MP3 really isn't up to modern standards,
I spent a while looking for the original WAV. Most people who had it at one time had
deleted it long ago, and were stuck with the MP3 themselves. Fortunately, Kurt
Harland happened upon a posting
by me in Livejournal's InSoc
community, and generously offered to share the WAV from his own archives. Many
thanks to Kurt!
True to the instructions, I'm still doing my best to spread it around. |
