Aperture Science Website Details

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All the things found in the www.aperturescience.com website

As you enter the website it will bring you to a command prompt just like the style found in MSDOS. From there you are given the choice of typing "help" which will inform you that a Crisis team is coming to aid you (it will also list a bunch of random reasons for your plea for help) or "login" which will then bring you to enter in your "username" and "password". For your "username" anything is applicable as long as it's more than 2 characters long and for your "password" you will have to put in either "portal" or "portals". Either way you'll be brought to another command prompt, and as of now the only commands that are applicable are the ones present below:

Commands

* "thecakeisalie" Brings you to a message with some video feed of a "relaxation chamber"
* "help" "lib" Gives you the list of commands
* "append" "attrib" "copy" "format" "erase" "rename" Gives you an error about the disk being write protected
* "dir" "catalog" "directory" "list" "ls" "cat" Shows you "Apply.exe" as the only application available
* "ip" Shows your UID(+L) code
* "interrogate" Gives an error if no parameter is provided, otherwise gives an error about 'illegally initiating diciplinary action'
* "tapedisk" Gives an error about the user not being authorized to transfer system tapes
* "logout" "bye" "logoff" "valve" Someone says "Bye" and you are sent either to your homepage if you have one or to www.Steampowered.com
* "apply" Executes the registration application

Entering in "apply" will bring you to some instructions giving you the choice of typing "continue" or "quit" and if you enter "continue" a message giving your "(UID(+L)" (Unique Identity Number Plus Letters) will appear and you are told to memorize it, but if you notice carefully at the numbers/letters displayed blinking. Every fews seconds a random assortment of characters are being altered so remembering it is pointless. After typing "continue" it will bring you to 50
questions mostly multiple choice. Some of the things you will notice as you answer the questions: in some questions a letter will be flashing which if you record them will spell out "thecakeisalie", and at random moments you will notice a flashing cake which looks like this: thecakeisalie

After answering all the questions you will finally be told to enter in your "UID(+L)" which is CASE SENSITIVE even if you do enter it successfully you are still given the failure message, and you are neither given the choice to make lower case letters, so it really doesn't matter. After the failure message you use to be able to see a message along with some video feed of a "relaxation chamber" but now you are just told to wait for a Crisis team to come aid you. Instead, You can just
type "thecakeisalie" after you log in and it will bring you straight to the message with the video feed. And if you hit the enter key it will toggle you between the video feed and something that looks like a bill.

As far as we can tell, the site has already been decompiled and there doesn't seem to be any further information to be leaked unless we get some kind of hint from valve or more material is added on to the site. So if your curious at all go check it out yourself.

For further information and more of an in depth analysis visit this link: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/User:AndrewNeo/Analyzing_ApertureScience.com
 
Stickied.

If you want reply, please add factual information regarding the site.
 
The IP that added the link (www.aperturescience.com) to Wikipedia has only ever made one other edit on Wikipedia, done 7 minutes earlier the same day as the Portal update: it editted the article "Marc Laidlaw" (Valve's fiction writer), updating who he currently shares an office with.

That IP is provided by the ISP Comcast, and traces back to Minneapolis, MN.

12:34:37 August 31, 2006 - The flash file was last modified
13:08:?? September 1, 2006 - Wikipedia was updated to have a link to that site
04:43:07 September 2, 2006 - Google crawled the site

So whoever put it on Wikipedia put it up fast and is close enough to Valve to know who shares Laidlaw's office. I wasn't able to find a reason for a Valve employee to be in Minneapolis.
 
During the original thread, they updated the .swf file from ApertureScience16.swf to ApertureScience17.swf to fix a typo they had made in the scripting.

It stands to reason that if they make any other changes, then they will change the filename again to perhaps ApertureScience18.swf. Every few days I go to the site and look at the HTML source to see if the filename has changed or not.
 
Well from that feed, here is a high resolution shot of the 'relaxation chamber' we can see.

1159402405_portal1.jpg


They make the comment. 'There isn't even a door', and the screenshot shows that there is indeed no doors, however there is a portal within the chamber allowing access. You can even see the CCTV camera on the wall through the glass.
 
I wonder how portals work on glass...
 
Doesn't that countdown look like from the show Lost?

*mumbles 4 8 15 16 23 42 repeatedly*
 
the only command it accept for me is help.... im doomed

EDIT: oops i forgot to login, me bad
 
has anyone tried going to "http://ep2.half-life2.com/" and tried entering things at the end of the URL? might get the next clue from there if we can figure out to put...

its possible, remember the "tests" before hl2 came out.
 
Woah thats cool, maybe this is the next step... anyone know how to see whats in that file?
 
It's the same video that you get when you login and write "thecakeisalie".
 
flv

I just got in on this whole thing today, and I've read as much as i can so far, all i can say is, this is awesome. I was really into halo 2 and stuff, but i was too late for the ilovebees thing; by the time i had heard about it, it was already over. I love when game developers do these types of things! It basically guarantees that they will get everyone who goes to www.aperturescience.com and gets freaked out and interested to buy HL2 ep2, which might not be a bad thing. I personally can't wait for HL2 ep2 and Portal to come out, so good job valve, you're getting some of my money.

ANYWAY, on with what i was going to post about. The last person who posted in this thread got a link to an .flv file (I don't know if this has already been dealt with or not, if it has, forgive me, as i said, i just got in on this today). I personally downloaded it and investigated. For those who don't know, an .flv is a type of video file used by the program called Flash, which was used to make the whole aperture science website. An flv is an embedded video file. So, if you decompile a flash file (an swf) and there happens to be video in it, the video will be in .flv format if you export it. Flv's are used in flash video player websites, like google video and youtube, etc. This way if you try to steal the video off of the site, you will only have it in flv format, which, for most, is useless. And since the players that play the embedded videos on these video website are flash players, they use the extension .flv to play videos that were once in a normal video format. I happen to have Macromedia Flash MX, and if you import that specific .flv from that url that the previous person posted, you can view the video contained in that .flv file.

Sadly, at least the way I did it, the video is nothing more than about 15 seconds of just black. If anyone else does this, and can actually see something, please talk about it. I think this .flv is a dead end, but it would have been cool if it was a video with something in it. It might have just been used as a placeholder in the actual flash movie of the website, or possibly the security cam video feed, and for some reason it is black. Man i love a good adventure on the intarweb. Discuss.
 
markedwards17 said:
I just got in on this whole thing today, and I've read as much as i can so far, all i can say is, this is awesome. I was really into halo 2 and stuff, but i was too late for the ilovebees thing; by the time i had heard about it, it was already over. I love when game developers do these types of things! It basically guarantees that they will get everyone who goes to www.aperturescience.com and gets freaked out and interested to buy HL2 ep2, which might not be a bad thing. I personally can't wait for HL2 ep2 and Portal to come out, so good job valve, you're getting some of my money.

ANYWAY, on with what i was going to post about. The last person who posted in this thread got a link to an .flv file (I don't know if this has already been dealt with or not, if it has, forgive me, as i said, i just got in on this today). I personally downloaded it and investigated. For those who don't know, an .flv is a type of video file used by the program called Flash, which was used to make the whole aperture science website. An flv is an embedded video file. So, if you decompile a flash file (an swf) and there happens to be video in it, the video will be in .flv format if you export it. Flv's are used in flash video player websites, like google video and youtube, etc. This way if you try to steal the video off of the site, you will only have it in flv format, which, for most, is useless. And since the players that play the embedded videos on these video website are flash players, they use the extension .flv to play videos that were once in a normal video format. I happen to have Macromedia Flash MX, and if you import that specific .flv from that url that the previous person posted, you can view the video contained in that .flv file.

Sadly, at least the way I did it, the video is nothing more than about 15 seconds of just black. If anyone else does this, and can actually see something, please talk about it. I think this .flv is a dead end, but it would have been cool if it was a video with something in it. It might have just been used as a placeholder in the actual flash movie of the website, or possibly the security cam video feed, and for some reason it is black. Man i love a good adventure on the intarweb. Discuss.
Click to expand...

funnayty7.jpg


Please read this thread(yes, all of it) and then do all your "teh investigations".
 
Very very old news. security02.flv is indeed the video feed, nothing we haven't seen before. Don't know why you had trouble seeing it.
[quibble]
And by the way... FLV is used on video websites because Flash can play it without any external codecs, not because it's particularly secure - there are dozens of programs that convert .flv to .mov, .avi, and so on.
[/quibble]
 
I knew people had found the video actually, I just didn't know that what I found was the same thing, since I had no way to view it, and I didn't know that .flv meant it was a flash thingy.
 
I figured it was sort of old news...I did read most of the thread, and then at the time, one of the newest posts was about that external .flv the flash movie refers to, so i decided to check it out for myself and open it up in flash. Someone made a good point: flv's are used on video sites because they don't require other codecs to make them work, and all you need is the flash player. Anyway, I decompiled the swf from aperturescience.com (yes, i know, that has been done before) and spend a good few minutes looking at the actionscript code contained in the movie. It is quite a lot of text, and if you have no idea what actionscript is, then you probably won't want to take a look at it. For those people that do want to see how the whole site works, and haven't already decompiled it and taken a look at the actionscript, I'd be happy to send it or attach it or link to it on my website if anyone is interested. I have it in a .txt, so yeah, if you want to get your hands on the actionscript, gimmie a shout. I think its rather amazing how the whole thing works, and how they actually built a whole pseudo-DOS system. I don't think there is a whole lot more to be explored from the actual swf file, so I guess we will have to wait for ApertureScience18.swf to come out before we can see. I hope they add more later. The whole thing is a really good hype building scheme. I'm hyped.
 
I feel that, as you said we've reached the endpoint with what we can do. Although i'm always looking for the next stage along, Valve will continue without anyone knowing at some random point. Let just hope we spot it. I've got a few hunches, based on the previous tests valve did for Half-life 2.
 
This may be totally irrelevant, but...

Having read both the original aperturescience post as well as this one, I can't help but wonder why no one thought that "the cake is a lie" had something to do with the movie Office Space. It seems a little silly, but so does the seemingly impossible third test.

First of all, there is a scene in the movie where Milton, a stapler-obsessed, pathetic human being, is told that he will receive a piece of cake as long as everyone keeps passing the plates of cake around, rather than simply eating one as soon as the get one (the employees are all standing around a birthday cake and are trying to circulate cake to the outer edges via constant passing, with the assumption that there is enough cake for everyone). However, Milton does not receive a piece of cake, despite his compliance with the "Just pass" instruction; in that fashion, his cake is a lie. Secondly, there is a post on page 5 of the original thread that reads

Incidentally, the IP that added that link (the link to aperturescience.com) to Wikipedia has only ever made one other edit on Wikipedia, done 7 minutes earlier the same day as the Portal update: it editted the article "Marc Laidlaw" (Valve's fiction writer), updating who he currently shares an office with.

That IP is provided by the ISP Comcast, and traces back to Minneapolis, MN.

12:34:37 August 31, 2006 - The flash file was last modified
13:08:?? September 1, 2006 - Wikipedia was updated to have a link to that site
04:43:07 September 2, 2006 - Google crawled the site

So whoever put it on Wikipedia put it up fast and is close enough to Valve to know who shares Laidlaw's office. I wasn't able to find a reason for a Valve employee to be in Minneapolis.
Click to expand...

Does it really matter with whom Laidlaw shares an office? Probably not, unless someone at Valve is desparately bored or lonely (which they shouldn't be, considering how many people with love all of Valve once its copious amount of work is complete). Or perhaps they're subtly referencing his office in order to allude to Office Space. Maybe I'm just being stupid. Plus, I don't really see where this new information, even if correct, gets us.

Feedback would be appreciated.
 
I imported the website www.aperturescience.com onto my frontpage, and the whole website is just a .swf file. Im not sure if this has been posted already though.
This is what I found in the html code. Not sur if it's gonna help.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>ApertureScience</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#000000">
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" id="ApertureScience" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="refid=1">
<param name="movie" value="ApertureScience17.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><embed src="ApertureScience17.swf" FlashVars="refid=1" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" name="ApertureScience" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>


</body>
</html>
 
Ok let's update the requirements for posting here to "read the thread AND don't be a total idiot".
 
Basically, Robcwise, no offence, but at least 12 dozen more people have already done that, and the fruits of their labour are all at the beginning of this thread.
 
They lied about the cake...

Yellowcake is used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors, where it is processed into purified UO2 for use in fuel rods for PHWR and other systems using unenriched uranium. It may also be enriched, by being converted to uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6), by isotope separation though gaseous diffusion or in a gas centrifuge to produce enriched uranium suitable for use in weapons and reactors.

Half-life (as in isotopes), enrichment center, (yellow) cake...
 
Very interesting theory i must say, could well have a connection, after all we don't really know anything about how the portal gun works, the company, the main character - could fit in anywhere.
 
I don't think Robcwise's clumsiness was really that useless, because through reading that again, I took note of the ApertureScience17.swf filename again. I didn't notice anyone commenting on it earlier in anything prior, but to me that may point another finger at where Aperture Science labs are.

The 17 may well just be a 17th draft, or just consequential to the publishing of the page, or whatever, but maybe its whoever shoved it on the web giving another subtle hint.

17. Well duh, lemme think...? City 17 anyone? Or somewhere within the precinct? A thought I had just then could be the combine testing their newest local teleporting technology on some puny humans. Didn't Mossman say that the combine weren't working with the same entaglement system as they were? Quick local transport for the troops, I think that's a viable theory.

Lab 17 anyone? If nobody else was saying it, I guess I'll be the the dumbcluck to say it.

And XYC'06, you're a freakin genius!
 
I didn't play HL1, but I found these things in the Plot Summary (found on this site):

Chapter 14: ... Past the houndeyes and the beam-firing objects hanging from the ceiling, Gordon finds a cave that contains an alien teleportation device. Placing yellow crystals into three pedestals, Gordon powers up the machine and steps inside.

Chapter 16: ... Gordon arrives in broken portal inside a cave. Nihilanth’s voice is heard again: “Lie, you all lie, you all die.” This asteroid is in a new area of Xen. ...

OK both seem to happen at Xen.
The yellow crystals are they a result of enrichment? Needed for portals?
The Nihilanth talks about lying...

Off track?
 
Heh this is all very conspiracy nut, although i have to admit there are connections between the cake is a lie and those things, i'm unsure if such a distant link is anywhere near the solution. I kind of feel portal will totally separate from the HL universe to begin with, us just knowing the world and character and we won't find the merging of the stories till later. I'm not sure if they will entwine with HL2 or HL1 (more likely i suppose with the portals). Very interesting speculation though.
 
Wasn't the Yellowcake theory posted elsewhere on the site and dismissed by other members?
 
XYC2006 said:
I didn't play HL1, but I found these things in the Plot Summary (found on this site):

Chapter 14: ... Past the houndeyes and the beam-firing objects hanging from the ceiling, Gordon finds a cave that contains an alien teleportation device. Placing yellow crystals into three pedestals, Gordon powers up the machine and steps inside.

Chapter 16: ... Gordon arrives in broken portal inside a cave. Nihilanth’s voice is heard again: “Lie, you all lie, you all die.” This asteroid is in a new area of Xen. ...

OK both seem to happen at Xen.
The yellow crystals are they a result of enrichment? Needed for portals?
The Nihilanth talks about lying...

Off track?
Click to expand...
No, yellow crystals are natural part of Xen geology, this crystals maybe contains uranium or another radioactive element in their structure (hence Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal in Gordons thesis) but yellowcake is not not crystallic material, it's only concentrate concentrate of uranium oxides and other solutions.
 
586FAC75 said:
Wasn't the Yellowcake theory posted elsewhere on the site and dismissed by other members?
Click to expand...

Possibly. Nevertheless, I've been browsing through most of the pages related to Portal and I haven't seen anything about it.

Like most of you I'm quite intrigued by this Portal stuff (and of course HL2). I saw the Portal video on Steam a couple of days ago and have been trying find out what exactly it is (OK it's just a game, huh ...).
 
Rennmniscant said:
I don't think Robcwise's clumsiness was really that useless, because through reading that again, I took note of the ApertureScience17.swf filename again. I didn't notice anyone commenting on it earlier in anything prior, but to me that may point another finger at where Aperture Science labs are.
Click to expand...
It was only commented on 20 times in the original thread, and it's mentioned in the 3rd post on this thread, so I can see how you missed that :rolleyes:

The cake connection is interesting, but it's far more subtle than anything Valve have ever done with their little games...
 
I don't think the filename has anything to do with the location of the labs. The 17 refers to the version of the GLaDOS, namely 1.07. Not? (wasn't this mentioned earlier?)

Could perhaps somebody from Valve tell us whether we are close or not? I guess if we were too close they could just add some more stuff to keep us off the solution for a while yet...
 
just to point something out to you guys...ive only noticed this in the last day [havent checked in a while]

site said:
Warning: mysql_fetch_object(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /valve/www/www.aperturescience.com/index.php on line 30
Click to expand...

now i remember seeing that the 1st time i did the test when it sent you to the camera right away...updating the file or just a random error?

and also, is the website "http://aperturelaboratories.com/" going to the same SWF file as aperturescience.com?
 
A preview-article type thing someone posted a while back mentioned the "computerized voice" that "...tells me that both cake and grievance counseling will be available."
Just a random theory here – the Aperture Science folk don't know much about humans. They took, perhaps, some bureaucratic procedures – the "orientation videos," for one – and a cheap motivator, the kind someone asked on the street might suggest – cake – and started up their test program with that information and little more. This would also explain the bizarre application questions – how would they know what would be relevant to employment and what wouldn't? – and the hints of ominous, exaggerated bureaucracy – 'obtain authorization to not discontinue filling out the form,' 'wait to be collected,' and so on. Whoever's running Aperture just doesn't get how we work – they're trying to imitate the way human [businesses? labs? whatever] work, for some reason, and getting it wrong. This conflict might also explain why, as mentioned in the same article as well as a few others, the AI-or-whatever running the tests starts going crazy; it can't deal with this new way of doing things.
 
thety have since fixed the error that i posted just before, or the problem with the server has fixed itself
 
Mahalis said:
A preview-article type thing someone posted a while back mentioned the "computerized voice" that "...tells me that both cake and grievance counseling will be available."
Just a random theory here – the Aperture Science folk don't know much about humans. They took, perhaps, some bureaucratic procedures – the "orientation videos," for one – and a cheap motivator, the kind someone asked on the street might suggest – cake – and started up their test program with that information and little more. This would also explain the bizarre application questions – how would they know what would be relevant to employment and what wouldn't? – and the hints of ominous, exaggerated bureaucracy – 'obtain authorization to not discontinue filling out the form,' 'wait to be collected,' and so on. Whoever's running Aperture just doesn't get how we work – they're trying to imitate the way human [businesses? labs? whatever] work, for some reason, and getting it wrong. This conflict might also explain why, as mentioned in the same article as well as a few others, the AI-or-whatever running the tests starts going crazy; it can't deal with this new way of doing things.
Click to expand...

That sounds good. Like a really exaggerated version of... whatsit called? Being foreign?
 
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