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Halo 2 Website Puzzle Confounds
redune45 writes "The Halo 2 Theatrical trailer ends with the normal Xbox logo, but it also briefly replaces xbox.com with ilovebees.com.
Going to ilovebees.com it appears that the site has been 'hacked', adding to the mystery. The 'owner' of the site set up a separate blog with a post talking about the error. There is a huge thread on the Bungie.net forums on the same issue. The WHOIS information for this site shows that it was first registered on June 14, 2004. But no obvious clues other than that are available. What is going on here?" There's at least one Wiki set up to gather clues. We also mentioned this in an earlier Halo story.
A case of viral marketing? Move along....
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
It's guerilla marketing, plain and simple, just like Sci-Fi's recent attempt with M. Night Shyamalan's new movie. You're reading about it, so it's working.
You can also read a LOT of information on this website at the unfiction forum dedicated to it. Really interesting stuff.
does anyone remember the simpsons episode, where Lisa finds a skeleton of an angel with wings? It turns out that was just a marketing gimick to attract people to the grand opening. This ilovebees.com is just that.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
It is unlikely the server was hacked.
Must be a marketting gimmick.
Can't tell for sure though
The server runs Apache on Red hat.
From HTTP Header:
Server: Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.24_01
A very odd message is displayed, mentioning something about in 3 days network throttling will erode. Maybe this guy's also a virus (well, worm) writer announcing his plans. I doubt it though. Probably just another whacko the internet creates every day.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
The Subservient Chicken h4x0rz.
What is going on here?
Someone apparently doesn't love bees.
Doh!
I'm betting the owner of ilovebees.com is in on it, probably just an in-joke with some of the halo developers, maybe they know the guy or something.
According to the whois record ilovebees.com was created on 14-JUN-04, so the entire site might be fake like that Mini robot thing a while back
this advert-article reminds me of how much fileplanet sucks... And to think that when this community started years ago, it was so promising ! They are the RealPlayer equivalent of free downloads. A billion buttons for payed services, and a tiny hidden one somewhere for a free download. I really despise these guys !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
...All your buzz are belong to us.
According to Necraft's uptime survery, they switched from "pache/1.3.19 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.24_01" to "Microsoft-IIS/6.0" briefly, but without an uptime reset. I think someone may be sending out fake headers.
A new ARG perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_Gam e
OF COURSE it's a promotional stunt. That doesn't mean it can't be fun and engrossing to explore the site and try to figure out what's going on.
Here.
People have already been tracking all things Bungie for a long time. You don't need no stinking new fangled Wiki.
Ok, having just downloaded the trailer, and looking at the website, I think that the website is trying to portray some sort of "advanced signal" that the Covanent is supposed to have sent to bring down our defenses. Kind of like Jeff Goldblum's character in ID4 noticing the countdown. There is *NO* chance that the ad agency would let the ilovebees.com website "slip" into their finished ad. You have no idea how much scrutiny every single frame of advertising space goes under.
'Nuff Said,
Joe
Notice that the site is still up after two attempts at slashdotting. This is obviously a site that is hosted by someone with alot of money (probably bungie.)
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
You people are reading too much into this. Maybe the Halo 2 team (developers, marketers etc.) just happen to like bees and wanted to share this fact with us.
Yeah, probably not.
There's a black square overlaying the ilovebees main page, it says:
HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE
Control has been yielded to the SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX.
This medium is classified, and has a STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION.
In 3 days, network throttling will erode.
In 17 days this medium will metastasize.
COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL:
30:13:38:28:985
Make your decisions accordingly.
I'm using IE 6, I don't know if it'll show up on Firefox. Perhaps a preview of what we'll see in Halo 2? (Computer system on the fritz, etc?)
Failing miserably .. but trying anyway.
Forgot my sig had my own link in it and have had to wait SillyDot to let me post again (2 min).
Conclusion:
a) The server hosting a page about bees got fed up, spontaneously developed advanced intelligence and went nutty.
b) This marketing is cleverly drawing attention to the fact that Halo 2 will revisit the AI plotline from Bungie's Marathon series (http://marathon.bungie.org/story/).
Note also that similar tactics were used when Halo was early in the works (when it was going to be a Mac game), mysterious e-mails were sent from someone named Cortana, with an e-mail address that could be traced back to workstation 49 (7?) in the bungie offices.
The Cortana letters..
The Cortana letters preceeded Halo by several years, originating on Newsgroups and touching on some of the game lore of Marathon.
I think it's safe to say, that there probably is no resolution to this "mystery" beyond it being a marketing tactic, and if there is any resolution, it's surely contained in the game so you have to buy it to find out.
This site is part of a larger marketing hoax, check out the whois data, it was created about a month ago and best I can tell the address/suite stuff doesn't jive:
Registrant:
Margaret's House of Bees
Margaret's House of Bees
2370 Market Street #510
San Francisco, CA 94114-1575
US
Registrar: NAMESDIRECT
Domain Name: ILOVEBEES.COM
Created on: 14-JUN-04
Expires on: 14-JUN-09
Last Updated on: 15-JUL-04
Administrative, Technical Contact:
Efendi, Margaret ladybee777@hotmail.com
Margaret's House of Bees
Margaret's House of Bees
2370 Market Street #510
San Francisco, CA 94114-1575
US
415-248-2617
"good, install, reinstall,re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall"
so yes, it's a Mircosoft site.
When you can explain MAMMALS!
-- thinkyhead software and media
but dana's hot!
this is found on another page, half hidden:
net:
!attach
act | store recurse
system peril distributed reflex
!restore master-sector
recurse
and on another:
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!
What, must our mouths be cold?
Arachne hung herself, you know. Take a hint already.
META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping, hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium, messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game, survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated, thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall, re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees"
i did the bolding... it's got hoax written all over it, not to mention throttling as in the main page's black overlay.
This is a stealth marketing campaign by the Department of Homeland Security. In an attempt to recover from the color-coded threat level fiasco and in an attempt to plug in to a younger audience, DHS is renaming threat level "yellow" or elevated, to threat level "bee." In the coming months, additional threat levels will be renamed, to be more kid friendly and descriptive of actual conditions. Remember: We are currently at threat level "bee."
Was anyone here involved with The Game setup for the release of A.I.? Microsoft had a hand in that as well. It was a huge multisite puzzle/story that was written as the players progressed, giving it a very organic adaptable nature. It was wicked hard and the most fun I've ever had. -Mowztrout
It's not a hoax, you numbskull. It's a game.
I write in my journal
She took her own picture...why? ...but what really counts is what it says on her hat and _shirt_ - bit obvious, but hey, some dolts need help :)
Frog-Blast the Vent-Core!
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
Of course the crew won't come for me if they're all dead. If they're all dead and I alone am left to tell the tale.
I'm crying, and my tears are made of sand.
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
FIELD EXPEDIENT DIRECTION FINDING
"Find a straight stick about a meter long and stand it upright on fairly level upright ground. Mark the tip of the shadow cast by the stick: wait 15 minutes: mark the shadow again. Draw a line from the first mark through the second and some way beyond. Stand with your left foot on the first mark and your right on the end of the line. In the northern hemisphere, you will now be facing north, and can recall the other directions by their relationship to north. In the south, contrariwise."
Hm.
No stick.
No sun.
Seems like some kind of journal entry, no?
Rather neat idea, I think
there is stuff like that al through the site. Sometime refreshing a page will post different 'statements'
an AI crashed on Achernar maybe?
damn, I'm sucked in.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The site is being hosted on a RedHat Server running Apache. They are trying to imply that Linux/Apache servers are so easy to hack that some sort of new insect lifeform or something, with no knowledge of the internet can easily hack into it.
Nice try but we know where the real worms live :)
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I called the number in the WHOIS information. Get voicemail. It is full. I guess I am not the only one who thought about calling.
415-248-2617 - Sounds like a hot chick. =D
_________ Help me get a PSP!
When I was "the voice" of the online main character for the fox tv show Freakylinks we did tons of stuff like this. (the archived site is at http://www.haxan.com/portfolio/freakylinks/ if anyone cares) The Museum of Hoaxs calls this sort of stuff "the blairwitching" of advertising.
They used a pre tag for the page source. Who the hell would use pre if they're capiable of taking down an entire web server with ease? "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY Gap in the clouds: head suddenly much clearer. The spider is working on me."
Dollar Highway Financial News
We'll just slasdot the ilovebees.com server, and voila! mystery solved!
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
Slashdot running guerilla advertisements for MS endorsed products.
I can already imagine a MS marketing executive going to bed with a HUGE grin tonight.
Hate me!
So why is it they *have* to release a movie at all? I bet, if you took enough websites and clues, you could build an interesting story that had to be "teased out* without even producing a movie. Just intersperse real websites and products in the story, and you'd probably get enough "side promotion" to stay wealthy forever. Sort of a new medium of story telling, where the people reading the story have to tease out the details.
meh
Looks a bit like the world's most disturbing website, Superbad.
Sorta reminds me of Radiohead's equally strange website.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
On the page http://ilovebees.com/hives.html, this sound file is played. it sounds a bit weird to me. is this just some stock bee sound you can find online? it sounds like something might be hidden in it backwards or something.
Sure enough, the page has been wiped clean, except for that black box with that erorr message in it.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
According to this page (quoted below in italics), "Dana" is trying to remove the defacement.
/HTML tag, there is a FONT tag with the attribute "CLASS=dana_white", which applies to what is supposedly the "regular" site text.
/HTML tag which produces the black square overlay, there is a FONT tag with the attribute "CLASS=dana_big".
If you use WHOIS to look up the domain registration for ilovebees.com it has the following information:
Margaret Effendi (ladybee777@hotmail.com) 2370 Market Street #510 San Francisco CA 94114-1575 Phone: (415) 248-2617
Calling the phone gets you a voicemail "Hi, this is Dana, please leave a message." but the mailbox is full. From this I would assume the address also belongs to Dana.
--- The domain name ilovebees.com was registered on June 14, 2004, the same day as the first post in Dana's blog. The domain is registered until June 14, 2009.
However, the tags tell another story.
Before the closing
However, in the piece of HTML inserted after the final
Would a real defacement have taken the time to begin their class names with "dana_" as in the rest of the document?
Probably not.
This, combined with the domain registration taking place the same day as the first post in Dana's blog, leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing is a set-up.
However, the authors of this elaborate set-up (as in the movie The Game) have left those of us that are smart enough to figure out that this is bullshit a little easter egg:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping,
hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is
going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium,
messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game,
survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated,
thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall,
re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees">
I looked at the 'whois' database, and found the address. It would be interesting to check out this business unit, and see if it actually existed. Is it a business still active, a business that went bankrupt (and might have been squatted), or a business starting up?. Does the address even exist?
From a Google search of the address, there only seem to be two floors (if 1st floor is at street level, and they don't use the term ground floor).
Usually the first number of the unit number is the floor level, and the remaining numbers the unit number. I can only find register companies at floors 1 and 2, nothing at 3, 4 or even 5.
Looks like a hoax to me.
Oh yes, and wasn't 777 the codenumber relating to the movie "Antibody" where the good guys had to defuse the detonator by being shrunk down to microscopic size. Interesting the to note the person who replied to the hotmail account was "nxbomb".
Sounds like marketing hype to me.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I for one welcome our new bee overlo... man that joke has been over used.
Still this is kind of neat, I like it when companies do this kind of advertising. It shows that they care enough about the community to present to those who care enough to work for it little prizes.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Looks like someone (ie Bungie) is staging a rampancy. Rampacy is what happened to the AI's in the Marathon game. Ie they broke lose from the safeguards imposed on them and went wild. The new black box looks very very similar to the console info in the original Marathon games when Durandel went wild. Bungie has a highly evolved back story for their universe very similar to Larry Nivens known space universe. Niven also wrote the book Ringworld, in which more then a little bit of Halo cribs from. Halo = ringworld. If I remember correctly back from the original marathon back story we are right about the time the first AI went rampant, on earth. I think it was an accidentle ai not created by man but from the interconnectedness of computers. AI's have always featured prominantly in Bungie games as plot conveyers, and info distributers. Here is partial list of Marathon backstory, that also ties into Bungies first fps title "Pathways into Darkness"
AI history
It is imcomplete but does give some more info. Bungie has admitted that Halo fits in the Marathon/Pathways universe but until now has not tied it together. Many insignias and parts of the game are stolen from Marathon. A good discussion on Marathon/Halo connections
I have always been a Marathon fan as I have mention in previouse posts, as many game play feature predated many pc fps titles for a few years. Unreal Tourny did not invent king of the hill, tag, or kill the man with the ball. These had been around on Marathon for a few years. Bungie also allowed people to mod the games and gave tools out to make maps change graphics, and physics way before people started modding games on pc's. It is unfortunate that one of the most ground breaking FPS titles was on the MAC and gets so little recognition. I still lode up marathon games sometimes and reveal in the map design and story. I feel as well as most people that have played the marathon series that Half-life's story line and maps pale in comparison to what Bunigie did on 1995-1999.
Just my rant...
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
And it's a summary from TVTome, instead of the vastly-superior snpp.com.
That doesn't mean that it isn't fun to play along. It's strongly suspected that the designers of this latest "game" are the same folks who created "The Beast", which coincided with the release of A.I.. So, did it serve as a marketing tool for the movie? Probably. But for many people it was engaging and thought provoking in its own right.
And no, "The Beast" didn't culminate in a mass-email that said "Thanks for playing, now go see A.I!!". In fact, I don't think there were any direct references to the movie throught the course of the game (but the game arguably did take place in the A.I universe). I'm imagining the ilovebees thing will play out in the same way.
I know it's microsoft and as such we are required to hate it, but please try to keep an open mind.
How long until SCO claims the phrase "ilovebees" is (C) TSG (they bought it from Novell, altho' Novell doesn't know that), that the composition of honey is a Trade Secret(TM) even though it has been in the wild for millions of years, and that the Halo gamemakers are really just IBM employees.
Oh, and they'll probably announce soon that they're suing EV1, because EV1 has some servers that ran Linux prior to the license agreement...
Oh wait thats right: nothing... But remember, you can buy Halo 2 when it comes out in stores!
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Any medium sized site will be completely torn to pieces when it gets slashdotted (well not really torn, but at least taken offline), and even popular news sites get taken offline by the slashdot effect. However, major sites, such as BUNGIE's! ahem, would not go offline, since they are backed by quite powerful servers. This site seems to be surviving the slashdot effect a little TOO well if you ask me, so I will come to the conclusion that it is owned by bungie and has been used as a marketing tool for halo. let's check back in the "3" and then "17" days the popup indicates...
By the way, the META tags indicate a little more than a hoaxy thing
"honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping,
hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is
going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium,
messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game,
survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated,
thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall,
re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees"
When the Blair Witch Project came out, they had a website set up and designed to look so realistic that many, many people actually believed it. IMHO, that is exactly what we have happening here.
My thoughts as to why...
1. If your gonna hack somebody's web page, why do something like this and why do something as simple as imbed a bit of Java into the html code? Wouldn't you want to make a little more of an effort seeing you went through all of the trouble to hack it in the first place?
2. If somebody hijacked your hotmail account, any message you send to yourself would still appear. If they hijacked it, they had to have taken control of more then that one email.
Bah.. if this makes no sense to you, I am sorry. I have too much time on my hands and am in the process of trying to get my mind off some real life issues. But other then that, it is a great idea to get attention.
I looked through a bunch of the pictures with a hex editor, and looked at a bunch of the random messages on the pages. It also seems some of the pictures have multiple "corrupted" versions of them, with different messages in them. Here's a (long) list of the messages I made while looking through the page. Ones with quotes around them are from pictures, the stuff after them is near where I found them with the hex editor. I don't know if I got them all or not, though. "When her Queen" 1c8 margaret.jpg ----- "it lay many broken blocks from the ruined" DA8 danadress.jpg ----- "peeled skin from the" 428 bee2_margaretphoto.jpg ---- "MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY black beach, nothing but sand and darkness. Sometimes, in the distance, dry lightning: in the flash I see pieces of the wreck around me, the spars and rigging of my brain -hold on. hold on. Steady up. Get a grip, girl. You have to fight through this. Take a deep breath. Survival Key #3: How Badly Are You Hurt? I keep slipping in and out of consciousness. links.html ---- net: !attach act | drop !attach act | drop !attach act | drop !route proc attach proc net !route proc attach proc grope !route proc attach proc surg net: !attach act | drop !attach act | drop !attach act | drop !packet analysis chatter protocol ancestor !parse packet analysis complete !route proc attach proc store net: !attach act | drop recurse !extern proc 0 log accessed honey.html ---- MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY black beach, nothing but sand and darkness. Sometimes, in the distance, dry lightning: in the flash I see pieces of the wreck around me, the spars and rigging of my brain -hold on. hold on. Steady up. Get a grip, girl. You have to fight through this. Take a deep breath. Survival Key #3: How Badly Are You Hurt I keep slipping in and out of consciousness. Physically, subject is paralyzed but moving. Okay. What the hell does THAT mean? Held down: yes. As if strapped to a table. Could I be in traction in some sick bay, some hospital ward? Not necessarily one of ours. But at the same time, parts of me being moved around, emptied out. As if under general anaesthetic, dimly conscious, half-aware as the surgeon cuts off my feet and sews them onto my shoulders. She opens my head with a medical hammer and sand spills out. I WANT TO DIE I WANT TO- -no. never that. survive evade reveal escape. That is all you know, or need to know. links.html ---- net: !attach act | drop !attach act | drop !attach act | drop grope: !probe master sector fail surg: !invntry primary sector proc proc invntry 343 working 0 dmg 38 dmg unk 2 broken 102 abs 201 !invntry primary sector mem mem invntry 678223072849 clear 0.0007 dmg 0.0014 frgm 1.41 abs 98.5879 hives.html ---- "the" 0 "way" 26 "was" 98 "open" E4 BUTHONEY.GIF ---- "She cut her a" 0 "new mouth and" E4 "fed her" 10A ALSO "Queen's" 0 "heart" 0 "began" BE "to beat" 1EE ALSO "sand" 0 "dand" 26 "last" 72 "the" 72 BUT_FUN.gif ---- "lremnants of" 0 "the Castle's outer" 98 "NETSCAPE2" BE "GifBuilder 0.5 by Yves Piguet" BE "wall, but the" DA8 CUTEBEE.GIF ---- "Animated by JO GRAHAM 1998" 2F8 "NETSCAPE2" 31E BEEWITHH.GIF ---- MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY Getting muddled here. Sick, obviously. Broken inside. Not thinking straight. Got to go back to first principles. Survive evade reveal escape. Survive-well, I'm not dead yet. Evade-don't want to evade. I want to be FOUND. ...unless... ...of course, if I am behind enemy lines, then constantly shouting for help wouldn't be the smartest play in the
world, would it?
got to run silent. got to run deep.
hide and go seek
links.html
----
I keep slipping in and out of consciousness.
Physically, subject is paralyzed but moving.
Okay.
What the hell does THAT mean?
Held down: yes. As if strapped to a table. Could I be in traction in some sick bay, some hospital ward?
Not necessarily one of ours.
But at the same time, parts of me being moved around, emptied out. As if under general anaesthetic, dimly
cons
It sounds like the sounds the probe made for the whales in Star Trek IV!
Call me and my voicemail! 914-713-6795. (wow, I have the balls to post my voip number on
we all know its a game put out for marketing reasons.
WE KNOW.
Please stop acting like you solved a complex problem by telling us that.
We Know
We f'n Know
Jeez, some of us like to have a little fun.
I didn't play Halo, I won't play Halo2, but I like to see where this goes.
Bunch of armchair assholes.
b..zzz...zzz
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... They forgot to put the ending quote marks after that quote oh the post. We are all going to die by someone that likes to hack accounts and forgets ending quote marks so that the beginning of the next quote actually signifies the ending of the previous quote thus making the first quote extremely long and putting the second quote into personal writing... that's plagiarism!
redvsblue.com
::BANG!::
Sarge: Did you just shoot yourself in the foot?
Simmons: Yeah I do that sometimes now..
Ok, maybe my sight isn't that good. What does it say on her hat and shirt. I blew up the image but I still don't recognize it.
You can't take the sky from me
On this page, there is a paragraph of text. After a little digging, I found it came from Gulliver's Travels. Another piece?
Option-Shift-K.
According to Greek mythology there was once a girl named Arachne, who had great talent as a spinner and weaver. But she was arrogant about her talent and challenged the gods to a contest. During the contest she proved to be better at the loom than the goddess Athena, who became jealous and angry. She attacked Arachne and destroyed her work. In humiliation, Arachne hung herself. The goddess took pity on her and used a magic potion to change her into a small creature with many legs. The rope with which she hung herself was turned into a silken thread. It was with this thread that she was permitted to continue her spinning and weaving. Thus the spider was created. It is from Arachne's name that we get the word arachnid. If you have six legs you're an insect, but if you have eight legs you're an arachnid. Spiders, scorpions and ticks all belong to the class Arachnid. So do mites.
Hello Kettle,
You, my friend are as black as pitch.
With love, Pot.
This is an insanely well crafted marketing stretegy. It is low cost because websites like this one distribute hype about the game for free, two or three writers/planners can easily keep this going, and the costs of running the website(s) are nil compared to other advertising/promotion costs to the publisher.
Perhaps the best part about this type of marketing is that fans feel respected because it is fans who will get into this type of marketing the most. It gives them something to do while awaiting the product and they are no longer just an after-thought in a promotion scheme where publishers try to get new customers on board rather than giving the people who are already hooked some attention (ie: a screenshot or two a week). Hopefully this marketing style will keep spreading, it certainly is interesting.
Period...end of discussion. Call it over the top if you want, but the fact that every single computer geek who knows who Bill Gates is and can spell HALO is talking about this and the greatest part of it all is you couldn't buy a spot on a local radio station for what it cost them. Brilliant.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Microsoft's been involved with other promotional games in the past, particularly (as noted earlier in the comments) the AI (the movie) interactive game. There's been some hope that Microsoft and the "puppetmasters" of the AI game might return in the future with another game, especially after the overwhelming success of the AI game. With any luck, this is another similar game and should be just as challenging if they kept the same people on board.
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
This is an obvious silly marketerring ploy. You'd only not pick that up after the first two sentences if you were mentally deficient. For me, the (brief) site visit went "Loads... Oh look, those silly new HTML layer things... hmmm, marketeers have been at this site. Bastards. Nothing to see here, move along. Closed site, and clicked off to something else in another tab". No mystery about it!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
It might be worth noting that even when this article was the first item on the Slashdot homepage, the page loaded very quickly. Now, it's pretty obvious that this is guerilla marketing, but it seems to me that this fact just makes it more glaringly obvious that ilovebees.com is not some poor innocent site that got hacked.
HEAD www.ilovebees.com
200 OK
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 00:18:41 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.24_01
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Last-Modified: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 00:18:40 GMT
Client-Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 00:18:29 GMT
Client-Peer: 69.20.126.147:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Client-Transfer-Encoding: chunked
path=/
If it's a microsoft marketing trick, you think they would at least fund a microsoft server to do it. The blog also claims to have a virus, but it's hosted on a linux machine.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
BURN
Insane, it drops most of the frames when playing the huge version on windows media player. I have a 1 GHz G4 powerbook... I find it insane that it can't even play it properly.. that is just insulting! And it doesn't seem to want to play correctly on MPlayer or VLC... Anybody have a suggestion as to why? I get 1 FPS.. 1!!!!!
someone should hack the site and fix all that stuff for that lady ;)
That damned Master Chief is too damned cocky for his own good.
Clearly it's just some crappy marketing scam. This sort of thing was interesting when it was first done in like 1998...but now it's just for marketing companies that have run out of ideas and are trying to be "original". Move along.
Damn, how did you figure out that the site is functioning as someone intends? You mean, there really isn't some intelligence taking over the site inadvertently? Golly, you post has been a life changing event for me. You mean, works of fiction didn't really happen? Slow down, I can't absorb this all at once. So, instead of reading and enjoying books, I could just dismiss it because it isn't real and just a story?
I'll think I'll enjoy this free game as long as it interests me rather than by a cynical asshole this time. You sure were smart to figure out that it wasn't really happening and some human set it up that way. Wow.
I just wanted to chip in about a similar "mystery". Starting October 1st, metacortechs.com (Metacortex was the company Neo worked for in the first movie) unveiled a series of ever-increasing fan-made (this was confirmed at a later point) plots which other fans discovered by using the clues scattered around the sites or even making use of good, old-fashioned brute force hacking.
Check out this guide; there's a pretty massive amount of information regarding this and it was great fun to see its development.
Sailors. Oh man!
In case every single source of the said trailer is slashdotted, i grabbed some shots of the oddities i could find in the trailer. http://gozips.uakron.edu/~js58/ukt.PNG - "You Killed Truth" appears in corner http://gozips.uakron.edu/~js58/reg.PNG - player name is "Regret" http://gozips.uakron.edu/~js58/ilt.PNG - a shot of the ilovebees.com appearing at the end of the trailer http://gozips.uakron.edu/~js58/disdain.PNG - a blurry shot of the player name "Disdain" please be nice to the server ;)
-K
try opening up the images that look corupted in notepad, they have bits of strange text in them like(originally without the quotes): "WShe cut her a" some are samller like this one: "and !" the weirdest one is "cutebee.gif" from teh main page: "wall was low and" there is much more if you have the time, it just seems like a hack that someone did as a joke. i think that maybe the Halo 2 video may have been edited also
When some newbie visits the site, when he starts running around and flailing his arms because he thinks he's gotten a computer virus.
Best Buy/CompUSA are gonna love that.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 01:47:28 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.49 (Unix) mod_python/3.1.3 Python/2.3.3 Last-Modified: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 04:52:20 GMT
Earlier when I checked it said redhat.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Sounds like they are doing a good job of create an Fetish Footage Forum for Halo. I am glad someone has found something to keep people busy while waiting for it to come out.
Has anyone looked at the source of the page in question? I did, and look what the keywords are:
honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping, hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium, messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game, survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated, thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall, re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees
For anyone with dislexia or ADHD severe enough for them not to read it, one of the keywords is hoax.
I went through it with the Marathon series. Then with the original Halo.
For me, the thrill is knowing that Bungie still cares about dropping cryptic, inscrutable clues into the mix, and giving us something with meaning to tease apart, not just a game. I'm too tired these days to follow it, myself. When they did this back in the old days, it was to a core of Mac fans. But now everybody can get a taste. I find that exciting.
Ditto, wonder what's wrong...loads for a sec and then crashes hard.
I compressed the video, its now watchable on my modest pc. Quality is relative among the three. You can find it here:
Halo 2 Trailer High Quality [8.28 MB]
Halo 2 Trailer Medium Quality [3.87 MB]
Halo 2 Trailer Low Quality [1.24 MB]
You can see the ilovebees thingy quite clearly in the medium and high quality ones. Not so in the low quality one.
PS: Sorry if this is already posted in this topic, didnt see any.
English is easier said than done.
it's the embeded wav files ... dunno why but they crash mozilla, firefox, and opera (haven't tried konq, epiphany, or others ... links2 and w3m work though :)
I have seen anything past Season 1 of Red Vs. Blue, but weren't they working on a theme that involved AI?
Mike Scanlon
Supposedly the headers are faked and Netcraft reports its a Win2K machine.
:)
Whether thats true or not, they probably chose Apache on Linux because they KNOW thats the de-facto standard
(and it gives them a chance to sling some mud at Apache and Linux supposedly being 'hacked')
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
...guerilla marketing...
gorilla marketing produces high returns on marketing investment through unconventional activities. Gorilla marketing can be used to employ original marketing strategies of a non-traditional nature.
Natural-Selection Be
Anyone who has ever played a Bungie game will immediately recognize the black box text on ilovebees. The text itself is new but the style is not. Bungie has been writing things from insane computers since day one. Marathon, anyone?
irb(main):001:0>
The website's gone rampant!
</obscure_marathon_joke>
Found some honey recipes in the "Fun Stuff" category. I'm thinking of making the Saffron Honey Ice Cream. Seems like an awful lot of saffron to me, but otherwise it sounds about right. The process for making the custard is spot on. They don't say to add the saffron-honey mixture to the custard base, but you should, probably after you start turning the ice cream.
Okay, so I looked at the source and it says "countdowntochina.js" as the source javascript on the site for that countdown. Is there anything going on at the indicated time in the future relating to China that anyone knows about?
-Vendal Thornheart
Come on, people! Head made of sand!
--------- "If I had a dollar for every time I said that, I'd be making money in a weird way."
Gabbo is coming!
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
Auntie M.?
Has anyone seen The Wizard of Oz?
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
its obvious isnt it?
the game, is going ot be setup with a queen bee (ai?) a whole bunch of drones, and you trying to save the world?
its pretty cool actually, i like that sort of stuff
dms0
You should feel guilty if your just watching - ATR
Those of us who have been with Bungie since the old days when they were a Mac only shop will recognize this as the classic strange humor of the Bungie team. Anyone who has played the Marathon trillogy will recognize the ramblings of a rampant AI which fills the site in several places.
So this isn't a truely hacked site, but one they have made up to look that way.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
http://www.cafeshops.com/ilovebees.12518390?zoom=y es#zoom
funny....
The slashdot crowd stepped in and really hijacked the site and took the storyline in another direction? You know, an Open Source ARG?
Isn't turn-around fair play?
P.
~~~~~~~~~~
"That's exactly what I said, only different."
That is such an obvious ad. Why does slashdot post this? I mean a site about bees apearing in a halo movie??? A flash hack that can't be taken down, but a FAQ about the hack neatly placed right below the flash??? Come on! Michael (poster of the story) is either extremly gullible, a marketing druid or a crazy halo fan.
Wikipedia entry on it.
the page says this:"Seek the truth
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth
That is the law and the whole of the law
Seek the truth
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth" over and over again in white at the end of the page
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
after looking at links once I clicked the link to the page again this hovered up:
"
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
black beach, nothing but sand and darkness. Sometimes, in the distance, dry lightning: in the flash I see pieces of the wreck around me, the spars and rigging of my brain
-hold on. hold on. Steady up. Get a grip, girl. You have to fight through this.
Take a deep breath.
Survival Key #3: How Badly Are You Hurt?
Mentally, subject is confused and disoriented.
I keep slipping in and out of consciousness.
Physically, subject is paralyzed but moving.
Okay.
What the hell does THAT mean?
Held down: yes. As if strapped to a table. Could I be in traction in some sick bay, some hospital ward?
Not necessarily one of ours.
But at the same time, parts of me being moved around, emptied out. As if under general anaesthetic, dimly conscious, half-aware as the surgeon cuts off my feet and sews them onto my shoulders. She opens my head with a medical hammer and sand spills out.
I WANT TO DIE I WANT TO-
-no.
never that.
survive evade reveal escape. That is all you know, or need to know.
"
It was the same page but the Apache server mst be set up to serve sever side on html files. Oh and i could only copy it when i turned off css
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
The phone number (posted in another thread) is 415 (also SF).
Cheers,
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Is it's ilovebees. Bees do what? Produce buzz. That, IMO, is exceptionally clever.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I saw the ilovebees site mentioned as an alternate reality game a few days ago at the cloudmakers Yahoo! group. Also see ARGN.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
The blog page has this text on it at the top: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug." A few searches reveals this to be from this page, which is a review of a play called The Metamorphosis.
Does the whole ARG movement seem too scary to anybody else? When suspension of disbelief in trade for deep alternate realities gets crossed with careful plot and planning by media marketing departments, I can't help but think of it as mind control at it's finest.
How far do these things have to go before your "game" calls you at night and players are no longer able to stop playing? As if Evercrack wan't bad enough. People lost jobs and friends over "The Beast" http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/intro/ and it's ilk. The whole idea is fascinating to any escapist mind (a large demographic on this site I'm sure), yet it is deeply troubling. I get a creepy "Total Recall" feeling when I think about actually stepping into one of these games. How easy would it be to hide criminal intent behind the thick veil of these "games"?
When we open our minds to these things we are leaving room for any corporation who cares to set them up (Microsoft having the most notable track record!) to lead us down whatever paths they choose, and we'll believe it because it's invaded our information flow. We'll get emails, faxes, phone calls; all exist only in the game world.
Anyway, there's some more interesting reading about these ideas in this paper. I hope I never see these mind traps on my news sites again, frankly.
evolution IS god.
I don't see why ARG people who were not otherwise interested in Halo2 would decide to play Halo2 due to this kind of "marketing".
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Seek the truth
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth
That is the law and the whole of the law
http://www.foxplazaapts.com/
But luckily I live 2 blocks away from 2370 Market, and need to get some stuff at the grocery store so I'll walk by and report back.
Gosh, that's desparate. I mean, even for Slashdot!
http://www.capitallism.org/
Go look at the very bottom, a link to ilovebees.com!!
Perhaps the riddle gets deeper?
after being puzzled for a while, they realized this: The next issue of OXM ships in aug 24. this issue will include "Info" about halo 2.
"Net users" (subscribers) will receive it in 15 days. (Too much of a coincidence.)
Ok So whats so important about OXM coming out ? well... Ninja Gaiden got a "surprise" demo in the issue dated one month before its release. If that is the same case for Halo 2 to be shipped in november 9, that would be:...
The augusth issue (holliday preview) (shipping in August 24th)
If you have an xbox.. you may begin your smiling, now.
Oh yeah, and start banging on the door of your friend who has a subscription.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here